On the same day this week that a leftist sniper unleashed a deadly attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Dallas, fliers were spotted on the campus of Georgetown University for something called the John Brown Club. The fliers quoted a phrase that Charlie Kirk’s assassin, Tyler Robinson, inscribed on one of the bullets recovered from his rifle: “Hey, Fascist! Catch!” Under this, the flier read, “The only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.”
The flier includes a QR code linking to a signup page that says, “We’re building a community that’s done with ceremonial resistance and strongly worded letters. If you want to make a real change in your community, let us know below.”
In the context of the ongoing wave of left-wing political terrorism in America, this flier for the John Brown Club should be understood as a direct call to violence. A tide of left-wing terrorism is rising in America, thanks largely to incessant incitement by Democrat politicians and aggressive propaganda from the corporate press. The foot soldiers of the left are drawing on — and actually resurrecting — the bloody legacy of John Brown, the abolitionist who unleashed a reign of terror in the years preceding the Civil War.
It’s time to take the left’s repeated invocations of Brown seriously, because they obviously do.
Consider what happened in Dallas on Wednesday. The suspected sniper, 29-year-old Joshua Jahn, fired from a nearby rooftop at an unmarked ICE van transporting detained migrants. He killed a detainee and seriously injured two others before taking his own life as police closed in. A rifle cartridge recovered from the scene was inscribed “ANTI ICE.”
As of this writing, details were still emerging about Jahn, but he apparently comes from a left-leaning family in suburban Dallas and himself was a Democrat voter whose now-deleted Facebook page included Antifa and communist imagery. Like Robinson, who also inscribed left-wing slogans on his rifle cartridges, it seems Jahn used an older bolt-action rifle to carry out his attack on the ICE facility.
Two months ago, a major Antifa plot to ambush and kill ICE agents in Alvarado, Texas, was foiled, but only after a police officer was shot in the neck. Eleven left-wing extremists, members of a North Texas Antifa cell, were arrested on federal charges of terrorism and attempted murder. They were heavily armed with rifles, pistols, and body armor.
One of the suspects in that case is a man named Benjamin Song, a longtime Antifa agitator who was a member of something called the John Brown Gun Club, which has chapters all over the country.
In 2019, a man named Willem van Spronsen, who was a member of a John Brown Gun Club chapter near Seattle, was killed by authorities when he tried to blow up an ICE facility in Tacoma. Van Spronsen, 69, was an avowed anarchist and member of Antifa. He sent a manifesto to friends the day before the assault on the ICE facility in which he wrote “I am Antifa.” And he was later lionized by members of the group as a “martyr” in a Facebook post.
“Throughout history we idolize figures like John Brown for their courage to take the ultimate stand against oppression, and today we stand strong in our support for yet another martyr in the struggle against fascism,” the post read. “May his death serve as a call to protest and direct action.”
These recurring historical references to John Brown should be a wake-up call to the Trump administration and federal law enforcement agencies. Simply put, to invoke Brown is to justify — and threaten — political violence and terrorism.
Recall that Brown fervently believed that violence — cold-blooded execution, in fact — was totally justified in the fight against slavery. It was Brown who led the infamous Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856 in the Kansas Territory. The massacre was the most notable of the many violent episodes during these years that would come to be known as “Bleeding Kansas.”
On the night of May 24, 1856, Brown led a band of armed men, including his adult sons, to three different private houses known to belong to members of the pro-slavery party. They forced their way in, dragged the men of these houses out and butchered them with broadswords. In all, five unarmed men were killed in cold blood that night.
Three years later, Brown launched his failed raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry. Ironically, that raid began with the killing of a free black man named Heyward Shepherd, a husband and father of five who worked as a baggage handler at Harper’s Ferry on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. As Brown’s raiders crossed the bridge over the Potomac River they encountered Shepherd and ordered him to stop. He didn’t, and they fired, fatally wounding him.
That’s the legacy that the American left is resurrecting and making their own. Like Brown, they’re ideologues who see themselves as above the law and anyone who opposes them or gets in their way as deserving of death, or at least as expendable.
And like Brown, they won’t stop their reign of terror unless the duly constituted authorities stop them by force.