The Dallas shooting reminds us: Those on the left tried to accuse the right of what they most feared and already suspected would emerge among their own tribe.

America’s civic disintegration continues apace as terrible news comes out of Dallas: This morning an ICE facility was attacked by a gunman — identified by authorities as Joshua Jahn, age 29 — who unloaded a rifle into a van carrying detainees, then took his own life. The shooter, by the markings on the shell casings he left, declared his motive quite literally as being “ANTI-ICE,” but all of his victims — shot while still in their seats, from a distance — were in fact detainees being transported to the facility for processing. Two have died.

It is yet another atrocity in what has now begun to feel like an unceasing rush of them, and I am in no mood for jokes. People are dead. I understand the temptation to zero in on the obscenely grim irony that a psychopath tried to kill ICE agents and instead killed detainees, but what then? Those people are still dead. They have had their lives stolen away from them, and from their families. It is more than a mere tragedy, it is a baleful sign of our times.

And, although the media has predictably downplayed the issue, this isn’t even the first time ICE has been attacked in Texas. Although most of the immigration headlines this summer were stolen by Trump’s June deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles (in the face of rampant and disruptive anti-ICE protests), Texas immigration and border officials were the target of far worse than just street theater in July: In Alvarado, ICE officers faced a full-on ambush (one was shot in the neck), while later that month another shooter targeted Border Patrol in McAllen.

Now this. The gaslighting has already begun, incidentally. The denizens of Bluesky, America’s self-imposed social media leper colony, are currently going through the exact same cycle of denial and conspiratorial thinking that they did with Charlie Kirk, except this time they’ve had practice so they’re speedrunning it like Twitch streamers. “Nobody writes ANTI-ICE on a bullet, do you really trust a liar like Kash Patel?” “Maybe he was trying to kill the detainees!” “It’s too early to speculate about motive!”

No, it’s not too early, not in our blighted new era where assassins cordially signal their intent right on the shell-casings of their bullets (easily the worst youth fashion trend since frosted tips in the late ’90s). Kash Patel did not plant those bullets, my dear deluded friends. The truth is, we owe it to the men and women of ICE and Border Patrol to recognize just how dangerous their jobs have suddenly become, for reasons beyond their control. They are already doing important and perilous work, and now they have every reason to fear random snipers. That is an unconscionable situation — and yet I see no way it will change any time soon.

As a final word, I cannot help but turn to the mainstream media, once upon a time during the Biden era so eager to talk up the threat of right-wing violence, and ask them, with a snarl: Where is your stochastic terrorism now?

You remember the term, right? “Stochastic terrorism” was once the theory du jour on the chin-scratching left, their argument during the Biden years for why political speech from the MAGA right needed to be subjected to public censorship. Apparently, voluble right-wing speakers like Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk were threatening to work their audiences up with apocalyptic rhetoric and inspire them to go out there and murder progressives.

As I wrote back in May — only four months ago — in response to the shootings of two Israeli Embassy employees, one Israeli and one American, by a pro-Palestinian college student, this was always an act of projection on the part of the left. They were accusing the right of what they most feared and already suspected would emerge among their own tribe:

Much like “fascism” has forever threatened to descend upon America but somehow always and only lands in Europe, so too does the stochastic terrorism predicted by the left seem to really affect only themselves. Luigi Mangione, despite himself having access to the finest health care in the world, was radicalized into assassinating a health care CEO through nothing more than his internet and YouTube reading list. Elias Rodriguez, who profiled as little more than your standard keffiyeh-clad college activist, similarly received his primary education online.

And don’t kid yourself: The left is swimming in this sort of deranged content in ways that the right is barely aware of. Present media coverage focuses almost exclusively on the influence of the right-leaning podcasting ecosystem. (Its obvious role in the 2024 campaign provides ample justification for this.) But my guess is that the left-wing universe will breed further killers in years to come.

I have never been more depressed to be proven correct.