Federal law enforcement stopped a nightmare scenario from unfolding in Southern California this New Year’s Eve—but if you were relying on ABC’s World News Tonight for the story, you might have thought it was just a vague, unspecified “incident.” No motive. No suspects. Just a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to a “plot” involving backpacks and bombs, delivered with all the urgency of a weather update.
Here’s what ABC anchor David Muir reported on December 15: “The Justice Department says it has foiled an alarming New Year’s Eve terror plot… four suspects were planning to fill backpacks with pipe bombs and detonate them at midnight… in five locations across Southern California.” End scene. No further detail. No mention of the ideological motivation behind the attack. No identification of the suspects or the organization they belonged to. It was journalism reduced to ambient noise.
And yet, ABC News’ own website had the full story: Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed that the four arrested were radical members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF)—a far-left, anti-capitalist, anti-government group with open ties to pro-Palestinian activism.
Their plan? Coordinated bombings across Los Angeles and Orange County, specifically targeting U.S. companies, ICE agents, and federal vehicles. The FBI called it “massive and horrific.” Bondi described it as a plot of “surgical timing” and “domestic ideological warfare.”
ANTI-NEWS: ABC’s World News Tonight practically Disneyfies its report on the SoCal NYE terror plot, reducing the far-left terrorists to “suspects” pic.twitter.com/wuGZznDtme
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) December 16, 2025
The suspects weren’t mysterious lone wolves. They were part of a named, documented, and ideologically motivated domestic terror group. And the group’s worldview was neither vague nor unknowable. It was plastered all over their communications: anti-capitalist, anti-American, pro-Palestine, and aggressively anti-law enforcement.
So why did none of that make it into ABC’s evening broadcast?
The answer isn’t negligence—it’s editorial choice. When the ideology behind a terror plot contradicts the preferred narrative, it gets stripped out. “Homegrown extremism” only makes it to the big screen when it can be tied—real or imagined—to right-wing causes. But violent leftist extremism, even when it nearly kills civilians on a national holiday, gets airbrushed into neutrality.
This wasn’t a scoop ABC News didn’t have. They published it. They simply chose not to say it out loud on national television. And when a national news network selectively reports details about a terrorist plot because the suspects don’t fit the right profile, that’s not journalism—it’s political filtering.
The public doesn’t get the facts. It gets a sanitized version designed to avoid the uncomfortable truth that leftist political violence is not just theoretical—it’s organized, it’s real, and in this case, it nearly turned New Year’s Eve into a mass casualty event.
