There’s a significant distinction between political protest and political terrorism.

It’s not just violence.

Political protest is meant to register and rally opposition. Political terrorism is designed to threaten, intimidate and harass.

Protest seeks to build a consensus against a policy. Terrorism wants to intimidate people into abandoning it.

The latest round of lefty harassment, targeting individuals, whether it’s Trump administration members threatened, harassed and doxxed by, among others, Univision’s Splinter, or ICE personnel being doxxed by the left, is political terrorism.

It generally hasn’t turned as violent as the James Hodgkinson shootings. But that’s the trajectory. And anyone who denies that is kidding themselves.

The phony outrage is being mobilized to overturn political norms. The next stage after direct harassment is violence. That violence may begin with fake bomb threats, then real bombs accompanied by warnings, as the gradual stages before full on terrorism. But if the left remains on the course it’s on, we are headed there. And that’s why some Democrat leaders are panicking.

The split between those on the left who want to gain power politically through the system and those who want to violently attack in in a direct fashion is out in the open.

The political terrorism against administration personnel is a gateway drug. Just as the early #resistance riots were a gateway drug, the furious celebrity tweets, the petitions, the daily doses of fury fed by everyone from Brock to the Washington Post.

Some on the left don’t see where this is going. But some do.

Break down the norms of civility, scream that we’re in an emergency and that there’s no time to talk about manners (the latest hateful Michelle Goldberg screed at the New York Times) when children are being caged and Muslims are being murdered, and you can advocate any form of violence and get away with it.

The left has been prying open its own Overton Window. And it’s preparing to go full 70s again.

Its media talking heads will keep insisting that it’s all political protest right up until the bombs start going off. But it’s not.

Terrorizing individuals is not a protest. It’s terrorism.

It’s political terrorism whether it’s practiced on campus or on Capitol Hill.

The left has always had an affinity for terrorism. It just needed an excuse to radicalize its base enough to see it as acceptable. Now it has that excuse. The rest is history.