When the ‘Good Side’ Starts Shooting: The Re-Emergence of Left-Wing Terrorism

For the past two decades, discussions of political violence in mainstream media and academia have operated within a settled set of expectations. The threats considered most serious were understood to emanate from two principal directions: 1) jihadist movements animated by religious absolutism and 2) various strands of nationalist or ‘far Right‘ extremism. Those categories came to dominate security briefings, policy frameworks, academic research agendas, Prevent referrals and general media coverage.

There were obvious reasons for this orientation. Radical Islamist terrorism inflicted repeated atrocities on Western cities. Right-wing extremists carried out mass-casualty attacks in Norway, Germany, New Zealand and the United States.

What has registered more slowly is that coercive political violence associated with Left-wing or progressive causes has begun to reappear in ways that sit uneasily within this inherited security paradigm. Leftist inspired violence does not resemble the coordinated underground organisations of the 1970s, nor has it yet approached the scale and intensity of jihadist campaigns. It has instead emerged through a widening repertoire: targeted assaults, sabotage, intimidation and, in a small but growing number of cases, assassination and mass-shootings.

Such forms of violence or disruption are often interpreted as isolated disturbances or as something other than terrorism. Yet taken together, they are more than coincidence.

In July 2024, an assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania came within a hair’s breadth of succeeding. On December 4th 2024, Brian Thompson, Chief Executive of UnitedHealthcare, was shot dead in Manhattan by Luigi Mangioni who was hailed in parts of the progressive ecosystem as a “folk hero”, his murderous act celebrated as retaliation against corporate excess. On September 10th 2025, the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University. Online reaction in some ideological spaces was, again, openly triumphant.

The Climate of Justification

This pattern possesses other dimensions. In February 2026, eight people were killed in the Tumbler Ridge shooting in British Columbia. Police confirmed that the perpetrator identified as a transgender ‘woman’. The March 2023 Nashville school shooting was carried out by Audrey Hale, who also identified as transgender. Although a progressive Left-wing cause might be read into these attacks, they were not formally classified as terrorism. The motives of both perpetrators, who perished in the attacks, remain opaque. What matters here is the speed with which acts of this kind are absorbed into a moralised political and media discourse in which grievance narratives compete with security analysis.

Across the Atlantic, also in February 2026, Quentin Deranque, a 23 year-old mathematics student, died in Lyon after being beaten by members of the distinctly Maoist sounding Jeune Garde (Young Guard) while protecting a demonstration by the Rightist feminist group Collectif Némésis. So-called anti-fascist militancy in France has long hovered at the margins of formal politics but, in the case of the Jeune Garde, has enjoyed close links to the mainstream Leftist La France Insoumise led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Deranque’s death marked a moment when that militancy crossed into lethal consequence.

Even more recently, on February 22nd, an armed man breached the perimeter of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and was shot dead by Secret Service agents in order to “neutralise” what they clearly perceived as a serious security threat. This amounts to the third attempt on Trump’s life in barely two years.

Whether successful, thwarted or intercepted, such acts underscore a political climate in which personalised, and sometimes deadly, targeting by Left-wing motivated individuals or factions has become disturbingly frequent.

These incidents differ in organisation, motive and context. While they may not constitute a unified ideological chain, what connects them is not central coordination but a shared political grammar. In each case, violence was contextualised or partially rationalised within idioms of resistance: against fascism, against systemic injustice, against corporate exploitation. The language of moral necessity positioned the act and conditioned its reception.

Britain possesses its own variation of this pattern. The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol in 2020 was widely celebrated in progressive circles as morally justified. Just Stop Oil’s escalating campaign of disruption – blocking motorways, targeting cultural events like the Proms, vandalising protected artworks or ancient monuments like Stonehenge – is defended as a proportionate response to environmental emergency. University speakers categorised as ‘reactionary’ have been physically obstructed or threatened under anti-fascist banners. Jewish student societies have demanded additional security in response to increasing bullying, which have included calls to “put the Zios in the ground”. Gender-critical feminists regularly face organised intimidation campaigns.

Taken individually, such developments can be described as protest politics intensified by moral conviction. Viewed cumulatively, they reveal a widening tolerance within Leftist activist milieus for coercive tactics deployed in the name of justice.

The difficulty lies not in acknowledging that such tactics exist, but in sustaining analytical consistency when they are deployed under different moral banners. Violence aligned with nationalist rhetoric is readily classified as extremism or terrorism. When comparable methods are presented in the language of climate emergency, anti-capitalism or anti-fascism, description often changes in tone. Grievance occupies the foreground; coercion, aggression and violence are treated as an incidental, and sometimes largely unremarkable, detail.

That difference in emphasis influences what is counted, what is researched and what is treated as structurally significant by official policy. Before examining why that asymmetry persists, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by Left-wing violence and why distinguishing ideology from method remains analytically essential.

What Is Meant by Left-Wing Violence?

If the claim is that Left-wing violence has reasserted itself, the term must be used with care. It cannot simply refer to any criminal act committed by someone who votes Left or describes him- or herself as progressive.

Left-wing political violence has historically been defined by its orientation toward structural targets. Its declared enemies are systems: capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, ‘the state’, fascism, corporate power, ecological destruction. Its justification rests on the belief that these systems are so deeply unjust that conventional political processes cannot remedy them. Moral compulsion becomes the bridge between grievance and coercion.

That structure distinguishes Left-wing violence analytically from most Right-wing violence, which tends more frequently to centre on ethno-nationalist identity, demographic anxiety or cultural replacement theories. The targets differ; the moral language differs; the self-understanding differs. The mechanism, however, does not.

In both cases, violence operates as a means of communication. It seeks to dramatise the cause, punish perceived enemies or compel change by imposing fear or disruption beyond the immediate victim. The victim becomes a symbol; the real audience is the wider public and the institutions being pressured.

The point matters because contemporary debate often conflates ideological content with method. When violence is committed in the name of, say, anti-migration sentiment, it is immediately treated as extremism. This was most notable, of course, when Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the Southport riots as a product of “far Right thuggery”. Yet, when violence is justified in the name of climate collapse or anti-fascism, it is often explained away as protest gone too far rather than extremism in its own right. The difference in characterisation can obscure the similarity in strategic logic.

When Protest Turns into Violence

The history of violent Leftist organisations makes this easier to see. The Red Army Faction in the 1970s did not regard itself as a terrorist organisation in the pejorative sense. It saw itself as resisting the authoritarian capitalist order in West Germany. The Red Brigades in Italy, likewise, saw their campaign of kidnappings and assassinations as strikes against imperialism and bourgeois democracy. In the United States, the Weather Underground bombed government buildings while issuing communiqués explaining that conventional politics had failed to confront systemic injustice.

In their own accounts, these were not acts of aggression but acts of resistance. Each movement understood itself to be responding to entrenched structural violence embedded in the existing order. The resort to violence was conceived as reluctant necessity. Each attracted a degree of intellectual sympathy in parts of the academy and media.

The contemporary landscape possesses similarities with Leftist revolutionary violence of yesteryear. Militant climate activists argue that political structures have failed to respond adequately to existential environmental threats. Sabotage and disruption are therefore defended as morally proportionate. Militant anti-fascist networks describe their opponents as precursors to Nazism and architects of evil and harm. Violent confrontation therefore becomes pre-emptive resistance and is seen as delivering symbolic justice.

In other respects, however, the character of contemporary Left-wing violence differs from the revolutionary organisations of the 1970s. What has emerged instead is a pattern of decentralised escalation. Activists now operate through loose networks, often mobilised via digital platforms. Formal ideological structures are less rigid; moral framing is more fluid. Yet the movement from protest to coercion still follows a recognisable progression.

Escalation in the Shadows

Escalation typically begins with the conviction that ordinary politics has failed. Institutional processes are depicted as captured, corrupted or paralysed by inertia. Moral insistence intensifies and disruption comes to be justified as necessary leverage. When disruption fails to deliver the desired change, more direct forms of intimidation begin to appear feasible.

The toppling of statues shifts from symbolic gesture to strategic act. Blocking roads becomes normal. Vandalising property is rationalised as legitimate protest. Targeting individuals enters the realm of the permissible. Each step is defended as proportionate to a purported existential danger. The language of emergency cushions the transition.

In these respects, left-wing violence frequently presents itself as reluctant, adopting a tone of regretful necessity or else a reflex against systemic oppression. This rhetorical posture can complicate external judgement. An actor who claims to be defending vulnerable groups or averting planetary collapse can come to be seen, especially by liberal commentators, as occupying a different moral realm from one advancing an explicitly ethno-nationalist project. That difference in tone impacts how the act itself is perceived.

But that difference should not obscure the common element: the use of coercion to influence political outcomes.

Once this distinction between ideology and method is held clearly in mind, the more puzzling question comes into focus. Why has contemporary discourse found it easier to treat Right-wing violence as a structural threat, while Left-wing coercion is so often contextualised as anger, activism or overreach?

Answering that requires examining the intellectual and institutional habits that shape our interpretive reflexes.

Threats Seen Through the Moral Filter

The persistence of analytical lopsidedness is best understood as the cumulative result of history, institutional memory and liberal moral alignment.

Britain’s contemporary counter-terrorism regime was created largely in response to very specific shocks. The jihadist bombings on London’s Transport system, which killed 56 people in July 2005, reorganised the security state. Intelligence priorities, legal provisions, policing doctrines and funding streams coalesced around radical Islamist networks as the dominant threat.

The expansion of the Prevent programme to counter extremism and related initiatives reflected that priority. A decade later, as policymakers increasingly treated Right-wing extremism as a growing threat, particularly following the murder of Jo Cox MP and the growing visibility of online ethno-nationalist movements, the security apparatus widened to incorporate a second axis of concern.

In both cases, the threats were overtly ideological and explicitly hostile to the liberal democratic order, positioning themselves in direct opposition to mainstream institutional culture. Yet the scale and persistence of these dangers were markedly different. While lethal violence associated with the far Right has been episodic, radical Islamist assaults have been far more common, accounting for well over 90% of terrorist related deaths over the past 25 years.

Despite this disparity, security institutions have frequently treated Right-wing extremism as comparably dangerous, reflecting pressure to demonstrate political neutrality to counter accusations of ‘Islamophobia‘. Indeed in February 2023, the Independent Review of Prevent concluded that the programme had lost its way and had left the public at risk by focusing far too much on non-violent Right-wing ideology to the detriment of where extant threats actually resided.

Left-wing militancy, by contrast, escaped similar scrutiny. After the retreat of Left-wing terror in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Leftist violence rarely announced itself through spectacular mass-casualty attacks. Instead, it often appeared through public disorder, vandalism or targeted intimidation embedded within larger protest movements. The relative absence of headline-dominating attacks meant that it seldom featured highly on the security agenda in the same way.

Once entrenched, institutional reflexes are slow to adjust. Prevent referral data over recent years illustrate the problem. Radical Islamist and some Right-wing cases have dominated the statistical landscape. Far Left or militant environmental referrals remain comparatively limited. That distribution may reflect the assessed severity of threats. But it also reflects how behaviour is categorised at the outset.

The Normative Proximity Problem

Institutional habits also co-exist with normative proximity. Climate mitigation, anti-racism, equality and anti-fascism are not fringe doctrines within contemporary British life. They are woven into Government policies, corporate mission statements, university charters, civil service guidance and diversity bureaucracies. When activists mobilise under those banners, they draw on language that already circulates within official discourse.

While a shared vocabulary does not entail endorsement of violence, it bends towards a language of legitimacy and sympathy. Actions undertaken in the name of planetary survival or racial justice are more readily situated within claims of moral urgency than are Right wing causes. The cause becomes part of the discursive lens through which the tactic is understood.

This dynamic was clearly observable during the BLM protests of 2020. Incidents of property damage were contextualised within a larger reckoning over racial history. The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, although plainly unlawful, was widely justified as an act of historical redress – an act of “historical poetry”, in the words of the then mayor of Bristol. Debate focused less on the coercive dimension of direct action than on the legitimacy of grievance. By contrast, when disorder emerges from nationalist mobilisation, as in the Southport disturbances , the frame narrows quickly around security and extremism. The pattern is neither uniform nor absolute, but it is discernible.

The elasticity of ‘anti-fascism’ complicates matters further. ‘Fascism‘ is invoked well beyond its historical meaning to tar political opponents, who are cast as existential threats warranting pre-emptive confrontation. Organised obstruction, doxxing or physical intimidation can be defended as vigilance rather than aggression. This has been demonstrated most recently in the United States with the anti-ICE protests in places like Minnesota, where anti-deportation activists have inserted themselves into live operations on the basis that they are resisting the imposition of fascism in the United States.

When coercive acts are characterised consistently as grievance rather than examined for what they actually do they are less likely to be recognised as part of a pattern. The result is uneven scrutiny, and over time that determines what is researched, what is funded and where institutions focus their attention.

If analytical categories begin to tilt toward moral proximity, classification starts to reflect instinctive alignment as much as observable structure. The shift is subtle, but its consequences accumulate.

The Cost of Asymmetry

If coercive tactics are returning in incremental, decentralised ways, and if media  and academic framing remains uneven, the issue is not immediate crisis but the loss of institutional credibility.

Security policy operates on pattern recognition. When violence is dependably described as a serious and organised threat, as Right-wing violence routinely is, it becomes a standing priority. When similar behaviour is regarded as legitimate activism “gone too far” or as “mostly peaceful” protest it is regarded as incidental, even if it recurs. That difference in treatment influences more than funding lines. It defines public trust and leads to accusations of the two-tier application of justice.

Citizens are not blind to rhetorical variation. They observe when one form of coercion is described in the language of extremism and another in the language of grievance. They see when property destruction in one context is sanitised, even excused, as symbolic justice while protest, be it violent or non-violent, in another is condemned. They notice motivated reasoning. The cumulative effect generates suspicion that moral sympathy is manipulating classification.

Suspicion, in turn, corrodes confidence in official institutions tasked with maintaining neutrality and the impartial application of the law. The danger is not simply misallocation of resources. It is the erosion of perceived fairness.

A further strategic risk lies in the subtle exoneration of coercive tactics rather than in their analysis for structural implications. When this occurs, escalation can proceed by degrees. The move from disruption to sabotage, from intimidation to targeted violence, rarely declares itself. It emerges through creeping desensitisation. Each episode is explained through its cause; the pattern remains underdeveloped, but, bit by bit, we proceed from statue toppling to political assassination.

Patterns of Escalation

The same sequence has unfolded before. In the 1970s, militant Left organisations, from the Red Army Faction to the Red Brigades, evolved from disruptive radical student protest in the late 1960s, before burgeoning into systematic campaigns of violence.

Western states may not yet face threats on that scale. Yet lethal violence associated with Left-wing causes has already surfaced in the United States and parts of Europe, often justified in the language of moral imperatives. The question is not whether we stand on the brink of a 1970s-style insurgency. It is whether incremental tolerance lowers the threshold at which physical force becomes regularised.

The digital environment adds further complexity. Networked activism allows rhetoric and tactics to travel across borders with remarkable speed. Moral narratives that justify a disruptive action in one country can be replicated elsewhere within hours. Decentralisation complicates prevention. Without a single hierarchical organisation to monitor, prevention depends on identifying patterns of behaviour and tracing the networks through which they spread.

Such an approach requires acknowledging that violence committed in the name of Leftist virtue remains violence in both method and effect. The issue is not how widely the label ‘extremism’ is applied, but whether methods are assessed independently of the motives invoked to justify them.

Liberal democracy rests as much on shared procedural rules as on outcomes — on the assumption that political change is negotiated through persuasion, representation and law rather than intimidation. When coercive tactics are tolerated within any society, those procedural norms are compromised, not through formal declaration but through accretion and normalisation.

Blocked roads become familiar. Obstructed debates become routine. Targeted harassment becomes a background risk. Each development can be justified by their proponents in isolation. Taken together, they change the conditions under which politics is conducted – and not for the better.

The reassertion of Left-wing violence should therefore be understood neither as a trivial irritation nor as an over-exuberant extension of legitimate protest. It represents an expansion of tactics within a wider climate of heightened political intensity.

If the language of extremism is reserved exclusively for ‘unprogressive’ Right-wing causes, it ceases to function as an analytical category and becomes a moral signal. When categories become signals, they lose their descriptive force. When precision is lost, policy follows rhetoric rather than evidence. Enforcement begins to reflect preference rather than principle.

One Rule, One Law, One Standard

The challenge, then, is neither to exaggerate nor to minimise, but to see clearly.

Left-wing violence does not disappear because it is described as protest. It does not become structurally insignificant because its rhetoric aligns with institutional values. Nor does acknowledging its presence diminish the reality of other threats.

Political violence is not redeemed by virtue claimed in advance. It is defined by the substitution of coercion for persuasion, whatever the cause. That is the procedural standard by which a liberal democracy governs itself and sustains its own legitimacy.

If it is not applied consistently, it is not a standard at all.

Michael Rainsborough and Andrew T. H. Tan are Professors at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security in Canberra. This essay is adapted from their article, ‘Virtue and Violence: The Strategic Logic Behind the Re-emergence of Left-Wing Terrorism’ from the February 4th issue of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.