In the aftermath of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, some Democrats are citing questionable studies to lend credence to their claims that right-wing violence is more commonly occurring in the United States than violent crime committed by far-left ideologues.
These studies, which are rife with dubious data points, cherry-pick cases of political violence, misrepresent motives, and exclude key events — in effect, fudging the numbers and underplaying the prevalence of radical-left extremism in America.
Cato Institute study
For instance, Time magazine pounced on findings from a recent Cato Institute study, particularly a data table breaking down, by ideology, politically motivated murders between January 1975 and September 2025.
According to the dataset, right-aligned actors are responsible for six times the total number of deaths compared to perpetrators on the political Left.
The figures, however, leave out thousands of fatalities from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which claimed 2,977 lives that day, treating the mass casualties as an outlier because they “dominate the data” and “obscure other trends.”
But another large-scale terrorist attack is counted by the Cato Institute. The statistics tellingly include the death toll in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, a white supremacist plot that killed 168 people.
If factoring in 9/11, the think tank acknowledged that Islamist-inspired terrorism accounts for an overwhelming majority of the murders, 87%, while ignoring 9/11 slashes Islamism’s lethal tally to a much smaller share, 23%.
Doing so also significantly inflates the radical Right’s murder record from 11%, when 9/11 is taken into account, to 63%.
Contributing to this overinflation are broadly labeled cases that Cato grouped together as right-driven violence.
Moreover, the study’s methodology crams certain ideologies under one umbrella that otherwise would not fit neatly into a political classification. The research’s ideological definitions of what constitutes right- or left-wing radicalism place “involuntary celibacy,” an online subculture primarily sharing misogynistic views, on the right side of the political spectrum.
Lumping in so-called “incels” with the right wing paints with a red-tinted brush the incel movement’s political affiliations, which vary but marginally lean leftward, according to several surveys.
In a 2022 University of Texas poll of incel-identifying participants inquiring about their political orientation, 44.7% considered themselves left-leaning, 38.9% right-inclined, and 17.5% centrist. Last year, a separate UT survey likewise found that incels, on average, are positioned “slightly” left of center. Both samples found incels to be ethnically diverse as well, despite misconceptions portraying them in the media as white right-wingers.
Conversely, the categorization system behind the Cato Institute’s study disregards the complexities of some cases that have multiple motivations to consider, including an adherence to incel ideology.
The study’s list of killers categorizes Antioch High School shooter Solomon Sahmad Henderson as right-wing. Henderson, a black 17-year-old student, identified as incel and expressed antisemitic, nihilistic, and occult beliefs, according to the Anti-Defamation League. So too was Robert Aaron Long listed as right-wing; Long, who shot up two spas and a massage parlor in Atlanta, which were fronts for prostitution, because he was ashamed of his sex addiction.
SORRY, MEDIA, AARON LONG ISN’T THE WHITE SUPREMACIST YOU WERE HOPING FOR
Notably missing from the list is convicted killer Darrell E. Brooks, who deliberately drove into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Brooks posted anti-white and anti-police content on social media, comparing police officers to Ku Klux Klan members and advocating violence against white people. All six of his victims, including an 8-year-old boy, were white.
The data analysis also ignores injuries and property destruction in non-fatal attacks as measures of political violence. Though murder is the most severe metric, the deaths-only data approach entirely excludes acts of arson, assault, and vandalism, all typical tactics of leftist antifascist militants used to intimidate political opponents and pave the way for a revolution. These intimidation tactics were heavily deployed during different waves of racial justice riots throughout American history, such as the uprisings over Rodney King’s beating in 1991 and George Floyd’s death in 2020.
(AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)
Coordinated abortion-rights attacks on pregnancy resource centers and Christian churches across the country following the overturning of Roe v. Wade were not counted either.
Among other oversights, the study’s statistical time frame fails to capture a holistic view of political violence in America. The data dates back to 1975, omitting earlier eras of far-left militancy, such as a series of bombings carried out by the Weather Underground, an anti-capitalist Marxist militant organization that targeted corporations and government buildings, including the U.S. Capitol in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972, and ITT Inc. in 1973.
The author of the study, Cato Institute social policy scholar Alex Nowrasteh, told Time that Kirk’s assassination, allegedly at the hands of a shooter with left-wing fringe affiliations, is “not evidence of a massive society-wide problem or trend.”
“I just don’t want to blow this out of proportion to give the government an excuse to crack down in a way that would be detrimental to all of our liberties,” Nowrasteh said.
Nowrasteh was accused of undercounting in previous research and had his prior work on welfare dependency and immigration debunked by conservative critics.
Anti-Defamation League data
A widely circulated Anti-Defamation League report on extremism suffers from the same issues.
On Monday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) posted an ADL pie chart from the February 2024 report purportedly proving that right-wing radicals perpetrate the vast majority of politically motivated murders.
The study in question, which asserts that right-wing radicalism is responsible for 76% of “extremist-related” murders while only 4% can be attributed to the political Left, distorts 2024 data by including cases involving custody battles, jail breaks, robberies, carjackings, and sex crimes.
One of the shooting deaths included in ADL’s data involved the suspect robbing a fast-food restaurant and then stealing a getaway vehicle. Two more murders stemmed from a family dispute over custody rights. Other cases of “right-wing extremism” revolved around a prison escape plot and a pedophile murdering an 11-year-old girl.
ADL’S SURVEY ON POLITICAL VIOLENCE IS CRIMINALLY MISLEADING
ADL nevertheless attached a political motive to these seemingly apolitical cases, regardless of whether the crimes were committed in furtherance of a cause, simply because the subjects are suspected white supremacists.
In one of the incidents, the motive is not clear. ADL acknowledged that police have not found a motive for the homicide of a Montana camper, but counted the case anyway because of the alleged killer’s white supremacist tattoos and self-described “skinhead” identity. The victim was white.
“[W]hite supremacists, who often display many racist and white supremacist tattoos or may be documented as white supremacists by gang investigators or corrections officials, are frequently easily identifiable,” reads ADL’s report.
ADL, however, stopped short of labeling Luigi Mangione, who became a left-wing icon for allegedly assassinating UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, as ascribing to left- or right-aligned beliefs.
Mangione’s social media posts and statement “did not reflect any one clear ideology or belief system,” ADL said.
“Because hostility towards the healthcare system or health insurance companies is not in itself an ideology and because a good portion of the anger on Mangione’s part may have stemmed from purely personal reasons—though it does not appear that he utilized UnitedHealthcare himself—the [ADL] Center on Extremism has not categorized the murder of Thompson as an extremist-related murder, though that designation may change if more information or clarity emerges in the future,” the think tank said.
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In the case of the transgender, Covenant School shooter Audrey “Aiden” Hale, who killed three elementary-aged students and three staffers at a private Christian academy in Nashville, Tennessee, was not analyzed at all in ADL’s 2023 extremism report. Hale had reportedly written in her manifesto about wanting to “kill all the white kids,” whom she referred to as “crackers.”
On why the ADL did not mention the school shooting in its annual report, a spokesperson told the Daily Signal that Hale’s case lacked “clear evidence of extremism.”
“Three pages of a document were later leaked that contained hateful epithets directed at white and LGBTQ+ people, which did not provide evidence of any particular extremist ideology, but rather primarily resentment and grievance at students from the shooter’s former school perceived to be better off than the shooter was,” the ADL spokesperson said.
National Institute of Justice report
Similar problems plague Biden-era U.S. Justice Department data on domestic terrorism.
In a now-deleted June 2024 National Institute of Justice report, researchers pinned the bulk of ideologically motivated homicides in the U.S. on right-wing extremists, claiming such killings “continue to outpace all other types of terrorism” domestically.
Although the DOJ document acknowledges Islamist extremism, it is treated largely as an international threat. Major jihadist attacks on U.S. soil, such as the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, are not given proportional emphasis, and the role of foreign terrorist groups in inciting violence is glossed over.
The study’s authors also rely on research defining right-wing extremists, in part, as those “suspicious of centralized federal and state authority,” an anti-authoritarian sentiment that is not distinctly right-wing but overlaps with the worldview of anarchists.
Timeline-wise, the data starts in 1990, skipping over decades of far-left revolutionary violence from the 1960s and 1970s, when the Black Panther Party and other black power groups, such as the Black Liberation Army, sought to overthrow the government through guerilla-like warfare and assassinations of police officers.
The Economist articles
Data journalist Owen Winter of The Economist recently featured research from Michael Loadenthal, founder of the Prosecution Project, in two articles concluding that there is little left-wing violence relative to violent crime on the Right.
A quick skim of the underlying data shows that the Prosecution Project counts peaceful protests at abortion clinics, resulting in the arrests of elderly evangelists for trespassing, as “Rightist.”
Loadenthal, an admitted antifa-affiliated militant, is a violent far-left extremist.
During the 2016 Inauguration Day riots, Loadenthal was arrested while wearing black bloc, the uniform of antifa, tweeting at the time, “This is the slooooowest mass arrest I’ve ever been a part of. Not bragging but I’ve been through a few.”
At a 2021 “White Nationalism Workshop,” Loadenthal introduced himself as openly antifascist and taught doxing techniques. When asked how to help his work, Loadenthal said, “We have defense funds because we get into trouble. A lot of the things we’re doing are illegal … a lot of it involves breaking the law.”
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In a 2018 interview with CrimethInc, a leftist propaganda site, Loadenthal urged for more antifascist militancy, seeing it as effective in achieving the movement’s far-left aims. “We can see some success…recently in the more mainstream acknowledgment of the effectiveness of militant antifascism,” Loadenthal said.