In the wake of another assassination attempt against President Donald Trump, Democrats and the media are citing a study with questionable sourcing that exaggerates the threat of right-wing extremism while downplaying political violence on the Left.
That study, published last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in response to conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, analyzes instances of ideologically driven attacks in the United States from 1994 to 2025.
The heavily skewed data analysis, attributing each incident’s motive to either the Left or the Right based on the perpetrator’s presumed political orientation, is receiving renewed attention among opponents of Trump in the aftermath of a third attempt on the president’s life.
Two days after the alleged assassin, believed to be a left-wing activist, was handcuffed at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the Wall Street Journal created a graph visualizing the CSIS study’s findings.
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The graph, which has since been widely circulated on social media by liberals claiming that it is proof of right-wing violence’s prevalence in the U.S., purportedly shows that “far-right” radicals were responsible for the vast majority of domestic terrorism attacks over the past three decades.
Upon closer inspection, there are several eyebrow-raising components to the CSIS study that call into question its credibility.
Study cites SPLC as a data source
In the study’s methodology section, the authors of the initial CSIS report mentioned that they drew their conclusions from a variety of data sources, including the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Map.
Less than a week before the shooting that targeted Trump and his top officials, the SPLC was indicted on federal fraud charges for allegedly manufacturing hysteria around radical-right “hate groups” by making them appear to have more influence and on-the-ground activities than they did in actuality.
Authorities say that the SPLC even paid one operative to help coordinate the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a neo-Nazi drove into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one victim and injuring dozens of others.
Notably, the CSIS study counted the 2017 Charlottesville car attack as an act of terrorism.
Left-wing insurgency was intentionally left out
Other forms of escalation at demonstrations, such as antifa militants throwing Molotov cocktails toward law enforcement during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, were generally excluded from the CSIS study because they “lacked lethal force” or evidence that the agitators wanted to “psychologically impact” the masses or achieve political goals through violent means.
Charlottesville met the criteria for the CSIS study’s terrorism designation since the convicted killer made statements suggesting “a desire to spread fear.”
It appears the study simultaneously left out the 2021 Waukesha parade massacre in which a black motorist, who posted content comparing police to the Ku Klux Klan and called for violence against white people, mowed down a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. All six victims, including an 8-year-old child, were white.
Riots, though they may involve violence that threatens to kill or harm political targets, often police officers, were omitted as “spontaneous” outliers driven by “opportunistic criminal activity that does not target human beings.”
By these parameters, the study accordingly seemed to disregard the well-organized racial justice uprisings of 2020, as well as the highly sophisticated activist resistance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2025 that expressly intended to impede deportation operations. Most of the anti-ICE confrontations, which involved rapid response networks hunting down ICE agents in the streets, “did not reach a level of violence that satisfied this study’s definition of terrorism.” But the 2021 storming of the Capitol building by Trump supporters made the list.
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“In many cases, rioters lack the strategic intent to achieve broader political objectives,” says background information on the CSIS study’s data selection process. “However, some riots, such as the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, are included in the CSIS dataset if they involved actors who clearly premeditated their violence and had clear political objectives.”
The study also intentionally omitted a string of incendiary attacks across the country on Tesla vehicles and dealerships in early 2025, labeling them as “acts of economic vandalism.” At the time, the wave of firebombings meant to financially harm Elon Musk, then the Trump administration’s head of the Department of Government Efficiency.
However, the study conceded that economic sabotage, attacks against infrastructure, is sometimes considered “economic terrorism.” In some cases brought against the anti-Musk activists, prosecutors sought terrorism enhancements in their charging decisions.
Antisemitism reclassified
According to the study’s codebook explaining how the CSIS researchers categorized motivations by perceived political alignment, pro-Palestinian violence was labeled “ethnonationalist” rather than left-leaning.
This was despite the CSIS research team acknowledging that opposition to Israel is “a political position traditionally (though not always) associated with left-wing politics in the United States.”
“[The study] literally created an entirely new category so that they could absolve the Left of antisemitism,” Jewish journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon remarked on Real America’s Voice. “Attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions, if they are done in the name of Palestinian freedom, become ethnonationalist.”
The study’s authors failed to acknowledge that two of the most recent anti-Israel attacks on U.S. soil, which they coded as “ethnonationalist,” instead of revolutionary-left, were allegedly carried out by self-proclaimed socialists.
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The arsonist convicted of setting fire to Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA)’s residence in support of Palestinians shared anarchist material on social media and joked about being “a registered socialist.” The suspected gunman accused of murdering two Jewish staffers at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., was previously affiliated with a chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Moreover, the CSIS study classified violent antisemitism as inherently “right-wing,” although the Israeli embassy shooting and the arson attack against Shapiro, a practicing Jew, were seen as antisemitic violence.
“Of course there are antisemites on the Right,” Ungar-Sargon said. “But the Right is fighting them tooth and nail, whereas on the Left, antisemitism is being totally mainstreamed.”