Even before Charlie Kirk had been pronounced dead, the narrative apparatus of the Left was in full gear trying to blame the assassination on the Right. Once it became clear that the shooter was a standard-issue leftist, the narrative shifted to “this is a both-sides problem.” But before Kirk had been laid the rest, the experts and researchers had been mobilized to assert that the original claims, if not accurate, were consistent with a pattern in which political violence in America is largely a right-wing problem. Having spent my career in academia sopping up such unctuous claims, let me assure you that this is complete nonsense. Political violence in America is mostly a problem of the Left.
Begin with some bright, shining facts. There were two assassination attempts against President Trump in the recent election and none against his opponents. The California gunman arrested outside Brett Kavanaugh’s home in 2022 planned to assassinate three conservative Supreme Court justices, not any liberal ones. Attempts on the lives of members of Congress this century have resulted in one Republican (Steve Scalise) and one Democrat (Gabby Giffords) suffering serious injuries.
The most recent violence against elected politicians — the murder of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the serious injuring of State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife in June — was committed by a deranged loner with no political motives, despite efforts by the Left to portray it as a political act of the Right.
As for violent political assaults on government operations, there have been three main occurrences in recent years. One was the left-wing Women’s March assaults during the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018 on both the Capitol (227 arrests) and then the Supreme Court (164 arrests); the second was the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots against police, courthouses, and local government and business across the country, resulting in over 10,000 local arrests and over 300 federal charges brought, in addition to dozens of assaults on police (including the killing of Bothel, Washington officer Jonathan Shoop in 2020, five Dallas police officers in 2016, and two New York cops in their squad car in Brooklyn in 2014) by BLM activists. There was also one targeted killing of a BLM counter-protester in my hometown of Portland. The third was the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol (1,575 arrests) in which one police officer and one protester (who was a Trump supporter) died. It was the BLM riots, not the Jan. 6 insurrection, that came first, normalizing political violence in the U.S.
Let’s add an even brighter fact to the mix. The overwhelmingly greatest source of political murder in the United States (80 to 90 percent of deaths depending on how you measure) is committed by Islamic radicals, motivated by some toxic mixture of hatred of the United States, hatred of Israel and the Jews, and support for the fiction called Palestine.
Take your pick of Islamic horrors over the last decade — 14 people killed at an office holiday party in San Bernardino, 49 killed in an Orlando nightclub, 14 dead on Bourbon Street — to highlight this overt threat. While the Left does not openly align itself with Islamic radicalism, its elected members like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib play down the Islamic threat and excuse atrocities against Israel. President Biden’s declaration in 2023 that “white supremacy” rather than Islamic radicalism was the main terrorist threat in the United States was borderline treason. The murder of two Israeli diplomats in DC this year by a left-wing activist from Chicago was a predictable result. Attempts to portray Islamic violence as “non-partisan” fail the laugh test. I have never seen a Hamas flag or heard “Death to America” at a conservative gathering.
When Violence is a Feature, Not a Flaw
More generally, the culture of political violence is overwhelmingly a culture of the Left. The belief that “justice” requires the forceful dismantling of “the system,” whether through “revolution” or through “civil disobedience,” is as central to the DNA of the Left as is the countervailing belief in the preservation of ordered rule on the Right.
Today’s ongoing assaults on ICE agents (including the attack in Dallas on Sept. 25 that killed two detainees with bullets inscribed “Anti-ICE”) show that violence is a feature, not a flaw of left-wing politics in America, just as the violent groups the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers were in the 1960s.
This taps into a more general romanticization of political violence by canonical figures of left-wing thought like Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara, central figures whose writings are forced onto our young people by professors even today. President Obama invited a black rapper to the White House, whose album featured a dead white judge on the cover that resembled Ronald Reagan. Luigi Mangione is a folk hero on the left for his politically motivated murder of a health care executive in New York City. The currently running movie One Battle After Another features actor Leonardo DiCaprio as a superannuated revolutionary who regains his mojo by taking up arms against nefarious forces in government that ring like sad attempts to reflect the Trump administration.
There is no parallel on the Right — no t-shirts celebrating the legacy of Timothy McVeigh, no movies that romanticize the Klan. The fact is that the Left has a political violence problem; the Right does not.
Pushing Phony Data
It is at this point that the experts are called upon to declaim upon “the data”, the last refuge of scoundrels. “The data since 9/11 shows that lethal left-wing violence has been a much smaller problem than right-wing terrorism,” The Wall Street Journal quoted Peter Bergen, an expert at the left-leaning New America, as saying in an article that ran even before Kirk had been laid to rest.
Other voices trotted out in recent weeks to assert that “the data” shows political violence is mainly a problem of the Right include University of Dayton professor Art Jipson, a “white supremacy” researcher, and the University of Chicago’s Robert Pape whose research is obsessively centered on Jan. 6 and who, in a New York Times podcast, retreated into sociological generalities to explain Luigi Mangione, refusing to identify his beliefs and motives as left-wing.
Another widely cited set of reports is by The Prosecution Project which is headed by University of Cincinnati professor Michael Loadenthal who, among other lunatic ideas, argues that “violence as a response to colonialism is expected” and calls himself a “vegan activist” who is “committed to defending animal liberation by whatever means necessary.” His database labels as “right-wing violence” the case of three people who staged a peaceful sit-in at a Planned Parenthood office in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 2021 and four black men who robbed Mexicans. One online fact-checker found that more than half of his project’s classifications of “right-wing” violence were patently wrong.
Without putting too fine a point on it, scholars whose work begins with the premise of overwhelming threats from the Right are not in a position to make balanced arguments about the sources of political violence.
But “the data does not lie,” they will say. “There is no credible, widespread evidence to suggest that claims of right-wing political violence are being fabricated,” you will be told by Google’s AI search engine if you dare to ask. Actually, there is, a lot.
Take the list compiled by the CATO Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh, once known as a libertarian organization but now situated squarely within the left-liberal world. Nowrasteh counts 12 lethal political incidents since 2020 from the Right but only nine from the Left. His list of the Right mistakenly includes at least four cases: the Melissa Hortman killing mentioned above, a confused black teenager who killed one student at Antioch High School in Tennessee this year (laughably called a “white supremacist” by the media), a Hispanic man also labelled a “white supremacist” who shot up a shopping mall in Texas in 2023, and a man who became addicted to prostitutes and shot up a brothel in 2021 (again, laughably called a political crime because the sex-workers were Asians).
This “racially-motivated” killings loophole turns out to be the main way that left-wing scholars smuggle in claims that “right-wing extremism” is the source of the majority of political killings in the U.S. Interestingly, the Asian woman pushed to her death on a New York subway train by a black immigrant from Haiti in 2022 never makes it into their lists as “left-wing extremism.”
On the Left side, the problem with the data, including that of Nowrasteh, is how to deal with widespread killing and violence in the black community that is politically motivated. In addition to ignoring all the hit-jobs on police by BLM activists, for instance, his database excludes the stabbing of two teenage tourists from Paraguay at Grand Central Terminal in New York in 2023 by a black man uttering anti-white slurs as well as the recent knife murder of a Ukrainian refugee in Charlotte by a black man who boasted that “I got that white girl.” It also excludes the six whites killed (and 60 injured) by the virulent black supremacist who ploughed his car into a Christmas parade in Wisconsin in 2021.
Other alleged “data” sources are no better. A study by Gary LaFree of U Maryland for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, College Park using its Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) from 1948 to 2022 begins with the claim that “in comparison to left-wing supporters, right-wing individuals are more often characterized by closed-mindedness and dogmatism and a heightened need for order, structure, and cognitive closure.”
By contrast, “left-wing individuals score higher on openness to new experiences, cognitive complexity, and tolerance of uncertainty.” It defines “ideologically-motivated crime” in a way that makes most left-wing causes — like the killing of a health care executive — non-ideological while treating a range of non-ideological causes (like being an “involuntary celibate”) as right-wing. For good measure, it anonymizes all data records so outsiders cannot evaluate the coding decisions. No surprise then that his database lists 1200 far-right but only 225 far-left violent offender individuals.
Redefining ‘Right-Wing’ Violence
The New America database finds found 137 political murders caused by the far-right since 9/11, but only three (the Portland counter-protestor and the two Israeli diplomats) by the far-left. When was this hitherto unknown wave of far-right terrorism? Like the ADL and other projects, it classifies domestic disputes in which one party is right-wing as “right-wing violence,” such as the 17-year-old who killed his parents in Wisconsin this year. By that standard, about 80 percent of the thousands of murders in the black community should be classified as “left-wing violence.”
It also classifies the black shooter in Nashville in 2025 as a “white supremacist.” It includes as right-wing the two killed in a botched robbery in 2019 by two U.S. mercenaries planning to join the anti-government movement in Venezuela (which is like attributing as “far left” terrorism every black street kid with a BLM shirt who kills a store owner during a hold-up).
Going back to 2015, it classifies as “right-wing” a theater shooting in Lafayette, Louisiana, where no known motives were discovered. Meanwhile, killings where the perpetrator was clearly associated with left-wing causes, like the Duluth man who killed four family members in 2024 and was a vocal online critic of all things Trump and Republican, are strangely absent from the database.
Similar flaws abound in a widely cited CSIS study which also uses the “involuntary celibate” label to describe many killings by men against women as “right-wing.” The loner who shot up Umpqua Community College in Oregon in 2015, killing nine, is classified in their study as “right-wing” because he complained of having “no friends, no job, no girlfriend, a virgin.” It ignores the fact that he ascertained that people were Christians before shooting them, which, if anything, would tilt the description towards being left-wing.
The rot in the data gets worse when you dig deeper. One widely-cited study of political murders between 1990 and 2020 counted 227 from the Right but only 42 from the Left. The study did not make its data available, so one can only guess about how it arrived at the numbers. Of course, 168 of those came from the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which skews the total (and raises the question of why not throw Islamic terrorist attacks into the left-wing bin). Strip that out and you are left with 59 versus 42. But the project defines, for instance, the killing of a homeless person as a “right-wing” attack on the grounds that homeless people are “marginalized” and conservatives have it out for all of the marginalized, and killings of women by sexually frustrated men as also right-wing political murders on the grounds that all conservative men have it out for women as well.
The project also coded “political crimes” as right-wing, including instances of controversial police killings of blacks, such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The author is a left-wing activist at SUNY Oswego, Celinet Duran-Jimenez, who tells her students not to trust police and claims that black incarceration is modern slavery. I challenge anyone to read her interview with an academic newsletter and still be willing to trust her data.
More recently, a report produced by the Department of Justice under the Biden administration simply repeats the errors in the Duran-Jimenez study by using it as its basis. As I always tell my students, whenever someone makes a claim and then substantiates with a citation without explaining the source, there is a good chance the evidence of flimsy.
Finally, the most egregious abuse of data claims comes from the Anti-Defamation League. As Timothy Carney points out, the ADL tracks murders “by people associated with a variety of domestic extremist movements,” which means that if a Montana militiaman kills his brother in a feud over beer, it is classified as “right-wing violence.” A man who joins a white gang in prison and commits a murder after release is also classified as “right-wing violence.”
The ADL also included as “right-wing” the killing of a policeman and the wounding of two others in Dallas in 2024 by a black man who identified as a Muslim by claiming he had “ties to the sovereign citizen movement.” And it outright just ignores cases like the 2023 Covenant School killing of six students and staff by a virulently anti-Christian bigot and gender activist.
Despite his overt anti-ICE messaging and communist regalia on his social media, last week’s Dallas ICE shooter will no doubt be classified as “right-wing” by the experts because he was a gun owner, or because he was a lonely young man, or because he killed immigrants (even if my mistake). That’s what “the experts” have come to on this question.
The distortion of the truth about political violence in America is dangerous because it misdirects law enforcement attention to the wrong threats and reinforces public skepticism about expert research. The way to end political violence in America is to first get serious about the facts.