CNN and MSNBC Completely Ignore Left-Wing Domestic Terror Attack on ICE Agents

(AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

On the Fourth of July, 11 left-wing activists mounted a domestic terror attack on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention facility in Alvarado, Texas.

“The defendants, dressed in black military-style clothing, began shooting fireworks at the facility, as part of an organized attack,” alleged the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas in a press release on Tuesday. “After approximately 10 minutes of convening, one or two individuals broke off from the main group and began to spray graffiti on vehicles and a guard structure in the parking lot at the facility. An Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911 to report suspicious activity. When the Alvarado police officer arrived, one alleged defendant positioned in nearby woods shot the officer in the neck area. Another alleged assailant across the street fired 20 to 30 rounds at unarmed correctional officers who had stepped outside the facility.”

The graffiti read “ICE pig” and “F*ck you pigs.”

If you hadn’t heard about it yet, you might just be a CNN or MSNBC viewer; neither network has devoted a single minute of airtime to covering the attack, though CNN managed to devote a sentence to it in an online story about another attack on immigration authorities.

Should that not strike you as unusual, imagine this scenario: 11 members of a right-wing militia group open fire on an FBI field office on a major holiday, and a responding police officer is shot in the neck.

You think that would have a cold chance in hell of escaping the attention of the likes of Joe Scarborough, Wolf Blitzer, Jen Psaki, Brian Stelter, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Dana Bash?

This glaring omission is particularly notable given the two news organizations’ relentlessly critical coverage of ICE and persistent warnings about right-wing extremism and violence.

Searches for mentions of ICE on air may not turn up any coverage at all of the attempted murder of innocent law enforcement officers, but they do yield plenty of segments about other protests of the organization, MSNBC’s Catherine Rampell ranting about its employees “potentially like beating people, and committing violence,” and a CNN interview of a Latino man lamenting that his “own people” were being “arrested and harassed by the ICE agents.”

Nothing about bullets flying by heads, though.

In a rightfully maligned episode of his MisinfoNation series earlier this year, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan asserted that “While America’s roots are soaked in bloodshed, violence in the country today is mostly from right-wing extremism. From Oklahoma City to Charlottesville to January 6th, there is simply no equivalent on the left.”

It was a galling statement at the time — given the numerous examples of left-wing violence he could have rattled off, from the congressional baseball shooting, to the 2020 riots, to the attempts on the lives of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump — that looks that much worse in light of the Alvarado attack and the staggering failure of two major cable news networks to cover it.

If O’Sullivan and his peers don’t think left-wing extremism is a threat comparable in scale to its right-wing cousin, that’s because they’ve so shamelessly ignored it.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.