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Terror As Politics
By J.R. Dunn
Nov. 29, 2025
This is an abridged version of an essay that ran in the weekly subscribers-only American Thinker newsletter. Subscribers not only get unique, original content from the AT editors, but they also have an ad-free experience and the ability to leave comments. Subscribe here.
The Dems have always been adept at playing dirty. There is scarcely a single epoch of American politics since 1828 that doesn’t feature a titanically corrupt Democrat capable of vast crimes committed in order to remain in power and make a profit doing so. But old-time Dems knew there were limits. You didn’t try to steal a presidential election. You didn’t undermine the foundations of the system itself. You didn’t try to annihilate the opposition. You gave lip service to the verities and generally tried to project a front of high-minded virtue, giving lip service to established values even as you defied them.
In recent decades, though, Democrats have dumped all ethical pretenses in favor of utilizing any tactic, any strategy, to gain and maintain power, and to squeeze out every last dime and every last privilege, no matter what the cost to anybody else.
The entry of ideology into everyday politics has rotted everything it touched. A system infected by it is ruined and is best destroyed, in hopes of protecting everything else. It could be any ideology—right, left, center—the effect is the same. But America has suffered the grave misfortune of contracting possibly the worst form: leftism, that is, socialism based on the Marxist dialectic.
As is true of all previous cases—the USSR, Red China, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Cuba, Nicaragua—the key element is the control of everything, whether it’s political in the accepted sense or not (“the personal is the political” is one of the root concepts here). Everything outside of the ideological structure is a target, against which any tactic can be justified.
Richard Daley knew where to stop. Zohran Mamdani does not.
There’s no question that the Dems will eventually go over the edge. It’s going to happen. It’s baked into the very process of adapting leftism. The only questions are “when” and “what do we do about it?”
Those questions were lent particular urgency this past week by two breaking events: Mark Kelly, the Kosmik Kid, advising the rank-and-file military to consider mutiny, and Minnesota judge Sarah West throwing out a jury verdict in favor of allowing the criminals to walk, all because they were Somalis, and thus not subject to the white man’s laws.
Kelly’s action was a perfect example of an own goal. Astro Man was looking back at Mark Milley’s treachery while chairman of the Joint Chiefs, when, in the last days of Trump’s first term, he informed the Chinese that he personally would stand like Horatius to prevent Trump from attacking them.
What Space Boy learned from Milley is that it’s all theater, and that you can say or do anything at all and then shrug and walk off afterward, just as Milley did. Kelley didn’t care about the position in which this put on-duty troops and America itself.
Troops are now trapped between suspicion from the civilian administration that they serve, and mistrust for their own commanders, who, like Milley and Kelly, could sell them out for cheap political purposes at the drop of a Ranger beret. In this world of confrontation and tension, our kids in uniform do not deserve this. But that’s one of the things that Kelly doesn’t care about. (This is not even to mention the glee that our adversaries must feel at seeing the morale of our troops gutted.)
As for Minnesota, what’s involved here is a legal case concerning Promise Health, a bogus health care outfit (there are apparently dozens of these in Minnesota) run by a Somali immigrant, Abdifatah Yusuf, and his wife. Promise had received $7.2 million in federal funding that was supposed to go to members of the Somali community, but which Yusuf and his wife blew on frivolities. (Which is relatively harmless. In some other cases, money went to Islamist terror groups.) The case was so open and shut that the Minnesota jury spent only four hours deliberating before finding Yusuf guilty.
Which is when Judge West stepped in to flip the verdict and cut Yusuf loose. No legal reasoning, no serious explanation. (She did admit that she was “troubled” by the theft, though.) It’s obvious that this is simply the latest example of a plethora of cases based on the proposition that illegals are not subject to American law and can do pretty much whatever they damn well please.
You’ll recall the 2015 case of Kate Steinle, a young San Francisco woman shot to death before her father’s eyes by an out-of-control illegal. It, too, was an open-and-shut case—nobody denied that he fired the shots. But in 2017, the jury freed him anyway, in a verdict explicitly intended to send a message to Donald Trump. More recently, we have Judge Hannah Dugan, who aided an illegal to flee from ICE agents waiting to arrest him outside her courtroom.
There is a concept called “stochastic terrorism,” in which overheated, extreme rhetoric or actions by establishment figures in politics, media, or the law creates a climate in which unbalanced members of the public—the mentally ill, the obsessive, the fanatical—are encouraged to carry out atrocious acts that might never have occurred otherwise. It’s a form of terrorism that seems to arise spontaneously and mysteriously out of nowhere, but in fact is the direct result of demagoguery by supposedly uninvolved public figures.
It’ll come as no surprise that most of the stochastic terrorists on record have emerged from the Left. James Hodgkinson, Stephen Paddock, Thomas Crook, Luigi Mangione, and Tyler Robinson can serve as examples. Note that many of these cases involve lots of head-scratching in the media—and even in law enforcement—as to the “motives” of the shooter. Note also that many of them are brushed off the headlines in short order, becoming back-page items, and sometimes not even that.
Both the Kelly and West cases represent stochastic terrorism. I contend that Kelly, West, Slotkin, Goodlander, and the rest are effectively acting as terrorists in their rhetoric and activities. I contend that their total irresponsibility, recklessness, arrogance, and narcissism are endangering the country over the long term and threatening unsuspecting individuals with injury and death, all in the pursuit of goals utterly alien to the people they claim to serve.
Where will all this lead? Where can it lead? In the historical record, one can find several incidents known under the rubric of “great fear,” when universal social panic drove entire societies into actions they would later regret. One of these occurred in France in 1789, another in the American South in 1861. None has gotten the study that all unquestionably deserve, but there exists little doubt that the wild rhetoric of the revolutionaries in France and the slaveholding aristocracy in the South played serious roles in triggering these frenzies.
This is the worst-case scenario. More likely is a continuing state of rising tension, with growing animosity, more frequent violent outbreaks, and attempted or even successful assassinations. Consider the two National Guardsmen shot by a crazed Afghan this week, only days after Kelly’s statement. It could be a coincidence, but it could easily be an indirect product of Kelly’s reckless blather. We don’t know, and we can’t know. That’s one of the more ominous aspects of stochastic terror—it’s the butterfly effect of political violence, in which cause and effect are lost amid the chaos of real life.
It’s good to see Kelly being spanked in the public sphere and being investigated by the Pentagon. Judge Dugan was suspended and is currently facing trial. The same treatment should be given to Judge West.
Pam Bondi and her team have been doing yeoman's work in dismantling the judge’s revolt against the administration, but she needs to shift from defensive to offensive to nip all this in the bud. Pols and judges actively and blatantly breaking the law is not the kind of thing that can continue. By its very nature, it’s a problem that will eventually solve itself, but not in a way that will be pleasant to witness.
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