We can’t be the only Americans fed up with seeing video after video of antifa-types interfering with federal law enforcement, of mobs forming around ICE officers making arrests, of “protesters” confronting men and women who are just doing their jobs. The Democrats could rein them in, but they won’t, and that makes them co-conspirators in a slow-motion rebellion that is picking up speed.

Of the many acts of violence against federal officers, the worst so far is the incident in Chicago in which “officers were rammed by vehicles and boxed in by 10 cars.” It was clearly planned, maybe not another Harper’s Ferry, but it was meant to strike fear and set off a cascade of similar attacks.

Or maybe it was the second worst. There’s been so much violence from the left that we almost forgot that a man reportedly gunning for federal agents shot and killed two detainees and wounded another last month in an ambush at a Dallas ICE facility.

Two were arrested in connection with the Chicago incident – Marimar Martinez, 30, and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz, 21 – and charged “with forcibly assaulting, impeding, and interfering with a federal law enforcement officer, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Illinois.”

This should be a modest start, followed up with mass arrests of the tantrum-ites who try to block vehicles, the thugs and drama queens who have forced federal agents to abandon buildings, and the rabble who interfere with lawful arrests.

This is what we’re seeing with our own eyes. But it’s even uglier beneath the surface.

“Our intelligence indicates that these people are organized, they’re getting more and more people on their team, as far as attacking officers and they’re making plans to ambush them and to kill them,” says Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. “We have specific officers and agents that have bounties that have been put out on their heads. It’s about $2,000 to kidnap them, $10,000 to kill them.”

What we are living through is neither legitimate protest nor rational behavior. It is a dark night not wholly unlike the early 1970s – when there were 2,500 domestic terrorist bombings in the U.S. within an 18-month period, almost five per day on average – and the longer the lawlessness goes unpunished, the more of it we’re going to have.

The restraint federal agents are showing in the face of what is so obviously creeping terrorism is remarkable. It’s reasonable to fear that someone just might snap after taking so much abuse and then the left will have its martyrs. The officers are only human, after all.

And we haven’t even mentioned Charlie Kirk’s assassination; multiple attempts on the president’s life; one twisted California man’s plan to kill three Supreme Court Justices for ideological reasons, or in other words to tilt the Court’s majority toward leftism; and a Democrat running for a statewide office who apparently would like to shoot a Republican politician, presumably only after he and his wife had to watch their “fascist” children die.

What we are seeing should sicken all Americans. It should make every one of us angry. But it doesn’t. For too many on the Democratic side, and we include most of the media here, the violence is politically useful.

No, the Democrats wouldn’t be able to stop all the violence, but they could shut down most of it – if they wished to. They don’t. They like it because it’s a tool for them to fool voters into thinking that the arrests and deportations are unpopular, as well as an intimidation tactic aimed at those not in compliance with the Democrats’ narrative – the message is “conform or else.”

The violence also provides a thrill, if we may borrow the brilliant words of Martin Gurri, for those who hate “orderly lives, neighborliness, civility, and the spontaneous adherence to the law of the vast majority of Americans,” and “wish to infect all social relations with the chaos and anger agitating their minds.”

This is today’s Democratic Party, where the elders and the next generation have become a raging mob of insurrection.

Issues and Insights, Editorial Board