On Sunday, at the memorial for Charlie Kirk — murdered by a leftist because of his political views — President Donald Trump declared “that violence comes mainly from the left.” And, on Friday, a leftist fired shots at the ABC station in Sacramento, California, in anger over Jimmy Kimmel’s temporary suspension. 

Not everyone agrees. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) countered with its latest annual report, claiming, “This is the third year in a row that right-wing extremists have been connected to all identified extremist-related killings.” According to the ADL, between 2022 and 2024, so-called “right-wing extremists” committed 34 extremist murders, with 23 of them (68 percent) carried out by white supremacists. They say those attacks took 61 lives.

Claiming all the extremist murders are by “right-wingers” sounds dramatic, and the ADL report got extensive uncritical news coverage in media outlets including CNN, The Economist, and PBS.

Of course, those 61 deaths make up only a tiny fraction of the 58,781 murders the FBI recorded over the same three years. Still, as Trump noted, a political murder is “an attack on our entire nation.” Yet, none of the cases listed by the ADL involve a right-winger murdering a political target.

Are these Murderers Really Right-Wing?

But serious questions remain about how the ADL defines “right-wing extremists.” Are all white supremacists really “right-wing?” Does every mass murderer who targets a gay bar automatically count as a “right-winger?” If you work at the ADL, the answer is apparently always “yes.”

Take Payton Gendron, the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooter who murdered ten black shoppers. The ADL labeled him a right-wing extremist because he was racist. But his own writings complicate that story. Gendron hated black people because he thought they had too many children, which he believed harmed the environment. In his manifesto, he called himself an “eco-fascist national socialist” and even described himself as a member of the “mild-moderate authoritarian left.”

He raged against capitalists for “destroying the environment.” He blamed overpopulation, especially by blacks, for harming the environment: “The invaders are the ones overpopulating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.”

That’s not language most people associate with the political right.

The same problem appears with Anderson Lee Aldrich, who murdered five people at Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs, in 2022. The ADL classified him as a right-wing extremist because he targeted LGBT people. Yet Aldrich identified as nonbinary and used they/them pronouns — facts the ADL left out of its framing. Those identifiers are hardly the hallmarks of right-wing ideology, especially when the ADL itself emphasizes the “LGBTQ+” nature of the venue.

Excluding Left-Leaning Murderers

Meanwhile, the ADL conveniently leaves other mass shooters off its list entirely.

• In 2022, transgender shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale attacked the Nashville Covenant Catholic School in Tennessee and murdered six people. In her writings, she raged against “white privilege,” vowed she wanted to “kill all you little crackers,” and resented the wealth of the students at the school. The Nashville Police report also noted her support for gun control.
• Robert Crimo murdered seven people in Highland Park, Illinois, in 2022. He made no secret of his hostility toward Trump.
• In 2023, Connor Sturgeon murdered five people in Louisville, Kentucky. He had previously praised the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and posted sharp criticism of police violence and Donald Trump.
• That same year, Kimbrady Carriker murdered five people in Philadelphia. Carriker supported Black Lives Matter, wore women’s clothes, and called for defunding the police.

These murderers committed a total of 38 murders. Yet the ADL claims that people on the left committed none.

In fact, from 2022 to 2024, one-third of the 18 mass public shooting cases came from the political left. Eleven of the mass murderers during that period held no political views; they were suicidal individuals seeking media attention. One murderer — the Allen, Texas shooter in 2023 — identified as a neo-Nazi, and the ADL classifies this “national socialist” as a right-winger.

Not Political Murders

The ADL makes other questionable assumptions. Take the Aryan Brotherhood. The group is racist, but it has no political ideology beyond racism and making money through racketeering, drug trafficking, and murder. None of the Aryan Brotherhood murders the ADL cites were politically motivated. Most involved disputes with other gang members, or in one case, the killing of a two-year-old girl the perpetrator had sexually assaulted, and in another, the murder of an 11-year-old girl living on the same property. Removing these cases cuts six murders from the ADL’s tally.

Three of the murderers were neo-Nazis, who murdered one person each. They are again classified as right-wingers based on them being racist even though they are “national socialists.” But again, none of these murders have anything to do with anyone’s political views, with one murdering his aunt.

Other cases are listed as right-wing because the perpetrators held antisemitic views. But given the recent anti-Israel riots, it isn’t clear why those views automatically count as right-wing. One of the killers, tied to QAnon and anti-vaccine beliefs, murdered his wife. Another case involved a man who beat his five-year-old to death. Why do any of these killings qualify as a political murder?

If we exclude the Payton Gendron and Anderson Lee Aldrich shootings, as well as the Aryan Brotherhood murders, but keep the neo-Nazis and other debatable cases, the numbers show about as many “left-wing” murderers as “right-wing” ones. The only reason the media treats the ADL’s selective definitions and exclusions seriously is that they drive a political narrative unrelated to the truth.