From a fairway at West Palm Beach last summer to a burning Tesla dealer lot in Oregon in January, domestic terrorism is making its biggest comeback since 1970, when three members of Weather Underground managed to blow themselves up instead of their target.

Most of the recent spate of attacks have been driven by either religion or lefty ideology, with only a few outliers. The New Year’s Eve death-by-car attack in New Orleans by Muslim radical Shamsud-Din Jabbar was particularly awful, leaving at least 14 dead and injuring nearly 60 others. The Biden-era FBI played its bit until the bitter end of that administration, saying on January 14 that they would “continue to work around the clock to determine what motivated” Jabbar.

Maybe check into his ISIS membership and his promise to deliver “war between the believers and the disbelievers,” big guy. 

Then there are the lone crazies like Thomas Matthew Crooks, who put a bullet through Donald Trump’s ear and murdered Corey Comperatore in June, but who might have helped inspire Ryan Wesley Routh to make his own attempt on Trump’s life two months later. Routh seems to have been motivated by rage — rage that was surely fed by years of “Literally Hitler” attacks on Trump. 

If Crooks had shot Biden in the ear, we’d have endured a mandatory national kumbaya lockdown in which conservatives would have been made to repent for our sins. Routh seems to have been completely unpersoned out of existence. 

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This next item is a bit of an aside, but it goes to the heart of what we’re up against with the big media/big digital players and the radicals willing to use violence to undo the results of the last election. 

I asked ChatGPT to put together timelines of both assassination attempts, but it insisted that the second one never happened. When I repeated the question, ChatGPT practically scolded me, claiming, “There is no evidence or documentation of an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a Florida golf course in 2024.”

On the third attempt, I had to feed ChatGPT material that rival Grok produced to force it to admit the Routh attempt even happened. 

Having been born the spring after the Summer of Love, I’m certainly too young to remember anything from the ’60s, but I am a student of history, and the current wave of domestic terrorism has a different feel to it. Fewer organized groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground and more sole practitioners were called to action on social media. 

The good news is that with Pam Bondi heading up the Attorney General’s office, we have a chief law enforcement officer who is serious about this stuff. It didn’t take Bondi long to declare that “The swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism,” and to announce that the Department of Justice had already charged several individuals. Perhaps more importantly, Bodni promised an investigation into those “operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.”

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