A Texas ICE facility got hit with an armed ANTIFA cell numbering in the dozens on the Fourth of July, the latest instance in a wave of Left-wing violence that includes the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO and Charlie Kirk, whose assassin engraved his bullet casings with ANTIFA slogans.
The Left’s premiere non-Wordle newspaper doesn’t care about that. This week, three Washington Post reporters spent hundreds of words arguing that nobody can quite figure out what “left-wing terrorism” even means, calling it “difficult to categorize.”
The piece — ostensibly about Secretary of State Marco Rubio inviting representatives from 60 nations to discuss the “resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism” — is petulant drivel. Rubio isn’t overreaching. He’s the first secretary of state in a generation willing to say the quiet part out loud.
That’s not politicization, that’s catching up.
This makes the Post’s framing all the more absurd. The piece leans hard on the idea that quantifying Left-wing violence is some unsolvable epistemological puzzle — going so far as to platform “analysts” who wonder aloud whether gunning down an insurance executive on the street even counts as a “‘left-wing’ act.”
The same paper that spent 2020 calling arson and Molotov cocktails “mostly peaceful” now wants us to believe that a coordinated cell of nine defendants — convicted on federal terrorism, explosives, and attempted murder charges for storming an ICE facility with over 50 firearms between them — is too nebulous a phenomenon to name.
Left-wing violence isn’t hard to quantify; it’s just hard for the Post to admit. It’s so hard, in fact, that the authors attempt to pretend ANTIFA doesn’t exist while simultaneously citing the group’s operations in Europe.
One European diplomat is quoted as insisting, with a straight face, “We don’t have ANTIFA.” Some anonymous ally, off to protect their diplomatic backside, tells the Post their country has no earthly reason to show up to Rubio’s summit. Then, further down the article, written by the very same three bylines, the Post casually mentions that the State Department designated ANTIFA OST, a militant group in Germany (along with two more cells in Greece and one in Italy), as a foreign terrorist organization back in November.
So, which is it? Does Europe have ANTIFA or doesn’t it? The Post can’t even keep its own reporting straight for six paragraphs, and they want us to trust their skepticism about the threat’s existence.
As for all this European “consternation,” I’d humbly suggest the diplomats waving off Rubio’s invitation aren’t worried about being lectured on domestic politics. I think several of them are worried about something considerably less comfortable: what happens when American intelligence-sharing starts asking pointed questions about who’s actually funding and organizing these “loosely knit” networks in their own countries — and how many of those funding trails lead back to Beijing’s Belt and Road partners and CCP-linked NGOs quietly propping up far-Left instability across Europe and Latin America?
Must we again reference Beijing’s Neville Roy Singham and the groups he funds to foment illegal blockade running in the Caribbean? No administration wants to be the government that has to explain why their “spontaneous” anarchist movement keeps showing up with professional-grade logistics and foreign wire transfers. We’ve already watched what happens once voters get a look under that hood — ask Javier Milei’s Argentina, Bukele’s El Salvador, or Colombia’s electorate this year. The hard-Left establishment gets tossed out the window once the receipts come out. That’s the real fear rattling around these foreign ministries, and it has nothing to do with Rubio’s invitation list being too “vague.”
None of this is to say every element of the administration’s approach is airtight — designating a movement with no central command as a foreign terrorist organization is a genuine legal stretch, and reasonable conservatives can debate the mechanics. But the Post didn’t publish a piece raising careful legal questions. It published 2,000 words insisting the entire premise is manufactured, while a decentralized movement racks up a body count that includes a Fortune 500 CEO, an ICE detainee, and the most prominent conservative activist of his generation.
If the Washington Post can’t see the pattern, it isn’t because the pattern is invisible. It’s because that would mean admitting that six years of “mostly peaceful” was always a lie.
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Tony Kinnett is the host of The Tony Kinnett Cast at The Daily Signal. Connect with him on X: @TheTonus.