How to Make a Terrorist Movement

Over the last 5 years, leftists have attacked local stores, statues, art museums, pro-life pregnancy centers, Tesla dealerships and synagogues.

What do they all have in common? Nothing. Nothing except being targets.

David Horowitz emphasized the leftist aphorism that, “the issue isn’t the issue, the issue is the revolution.” The individual cause, saving the whales, saving black people from safe neighborhoods, saving the planet from gas-powered cars, then saving the country from electric cars because of the owner’s politics, saving pregnant women from getting prenatal care or saving Hamas doesn’t matter and can be swapped out when it suits the political moment.

The causes are disposable. They rotate in and out. On the 5th anniversary of George Floyd’s drug overdose death, the BLM movement, which at times seemed to run the country, is a faint memory. The movement had been a phantom. Its leaders were never more than junior activists whose power was a media invention. The moment the public lost interest, the plug was pulled.

Now, leftist activists set themselves on fire, attack synagogues and kill people for Gaza when last year they couldn’t have found Gaza on a map. Tomorrow they may do it for some other cause. The Left does not actually care about black communities, beyond using them to undermine America, or Gaza, beyond using it to destroy Israel. It’s the violence that it wants.

Another way of breaking down “the issue isn’t the issue, the issue is the revolution” is that violence is not a response to the cause, the cause is just a tool for generating the violence.

The purpose of every cause is mobilization. And the purpose of mobilization is to seize power by either political or violent means. These are however just different means with the same end.

A cause goes through three stages…

1. Advocacy and awareness
2. Street protests and confrontation
3. Terrorism or political power

A cause that fails to go to the third stage and secure either political power or create a terrorist movement is eventually abandoned. A cause that gives them political power is valued by liberals. Top examples include the civil rights movement and the environmental movement. A violent cause that stays fringe, is a valued asset to leftists. But a cause that’s fringe and doesn’t lead to sustained street activism and violence gets dropped. Just ask the transgenders.

Unlike most past movements, including leftist ones, the Western Left has a huge rotating portfolio of causes that it auditions. The Old Left would have focused almost exclusively on workers, peasants and perhaps opposing a war. The New Left does a little of everything.

Identity politics alone covers everything from illegal migration to pro-crime riots to drag queens to abortion to Islamists. Plug in environmentalism and you have a dozen causes like banning cars, oil companies, logging and zero population growth. Then pile on foreign policy and protests for Cuba, Hamas, Yemen, Iran and North Korea. Add some old-fashioned class warfare, and the unions, gun bans and you only begin to get a handle on a few of the causes.

And the violence. One arm vandalizes art museums and copies of the Constitution to ‘save the planet.’ Another arm goes after Tesla dealerships. A third arm targets pro-life centers. A fourth goes after animal testing clinics. A fifth sabotages logging equipment. These various movements often have centralized funding from some of the same foundations. They’re also used to recruit street activists with varying interests who may want to throw soup at a classical masterpiece, but not assault a synagogue, or assault a synagogue but not vandalize art.

The leftist cause network is like a sprawling college campus with lots of different horrifying and useless classes.to take. And it’s structured like this because the New Left increasingly saw its future in a diverse coalition, a big terrorist tent that could draw on and mobilize as many as possible, not just based on class or race, but on an intersectional movement applying ideology and creating dissatisfaction, outrage and a will to power and violence in every area of life.

More cynically, Alinsky warned that, “a tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Americans especially get tired of causes. A few years of protesting a war or chanting the same slogan is more than enough. People get bored and change the channel to see what else is on. And leftist networks always have something on. One movement gets rotated out, another gets slotted in. Few movements are killed outright, they’re just moved to the back burner with less financing, to keep the die-hards engaged until they’re ready for a prime time orgy of violence all over again.

To do this, the Left had to learn how to rapidly make causes and take them through the three stages to violence or political power before the public (and the campus useful idiots it recruits as foot soldiers) stops paying attention. Take the recent murders at a D.C. Jewish museum event.

Elias Rodriguez, who comes from an SEIU family, was inspired by Aaron Bushnell who set himself on fire last year for Hamas. He reportedly told police that “Bushnell was a martyr.” Rodriguez decided he also wanted to be a martyr, but he would rather kill other people than burn to death. This follows the traditional progression of causes and terrorist movements.

First, awareness is spread about an “outrage”. Second, a movement is built to protest against it. The movement deliberately escalates into violence creating the initial heroic myth of activists and even martyrs who are hurt in confrontations with police. If the movement makes no political headway, activists are told that they will have to escalate to more serious violence. And Rodriguez’s manifesto was titled “Escalate for Gaza, Bring the War Home” using the exact language of pro-Hamas rallies. After murdering two people, shooting a woman in the back again and again as she tried to crawl to safety, he chanted another protest slogan, “Intifada, revolution, there is only one solution.” Both of the slogans are reworked versions of the Vietnam era anti-war protest movement intended not to stop the war, but stage a revolution in the U.S.

The movement had successfully programmed its first American domestic terrorist to murder two people while thinking and talking entirely in movement slogans. This cult-like behavior is a big part of the purpose of leftist movements. Participants are heavily indoctrinated into abandoning individual thought, replacing individuality with collective slogans and acting in response to slogans rather than any kind of individuality. At the advanced level, they are able to kill.

And that’s how you make a terrorist movement.

The same formula that rapidly manufactured an American domestic terrorist can and has been used to make terrorists who engage in violence for any leftist cause.

But it’s rarely about the cause, it’s about the terrorism.

Once you can get a man to kill for you, you can get more men and women to kill for you. And once you can get them to kill for one cause, you can get them to kill for the leadership of the cause. And then the civil war is on.