The Myth Of The Violent Left And The Peaceful Right
A prevalent Trump and Republican talking point is that the Democrats and the left are violent and that the right is peaceful. This allegation is dividing the country and inflaming Trump’s most unhinged supporters. Trump and his followers are using the lamentable assassination of Charlie Kirk and the attack on the Dallas ICE facility as an excuse to crack down on dissent and knee cap the opposition.
The evildoer in the Charlie Kirk situation was a radical leftist but he was no Democrat — he was a registered non-partisan. The evidence is that there was no vast conspiracy behind his heinous crime. The shooter in the Dallas incident was non-political, a registered non-partisan and acted alone. In both cases it was a situation where a troubled young man was able to legally obtain a gun and commit heinous crimes.
The reality is that the majority of political violence comes from the radical right. That was the finding of the conservative Cato Institute, Professor Arthur J. Jipson, the Anti-Defamation League and The Center For Strategic and International Studies. The so-called “evidence” from the GOP that the left is responsible for most political violence comes from the likes of Donald Trump and Fox “News.” Both of these sources have a long history of disinformation.
The most infamous example of right wing violence is the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 by Trump’s most unhinged supporters. These thugs were incited by Trump and they caused the deaths of four police officers and wounded 140 other officers. Trump told these traitors that they were “very special” and then he pardoned them shortly after he took power in January 2025.
The four studies that found a majority of political violence is caused by the radical right are as follows.
The Cato Institute:
“In the last five years, 81 people have been killed by political violence in the United States. Right-wing terrorists account for over half of those murders, some 54%, a libertarian think tank. Islamists account for 21%, and left-wingers for 22%.
The same study looked at data as far back as 1975 and found that terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology account for some 87% of all deaths from political violence, due to the mass casualties of the 9/11 attacks.
Excluding the 9/11 attacks, over the same period, terrorists inspired by right-wing ideology are responsible for 63% of deaths from political violence during that time, compared to 10% for left-wing attacks. Since 1975, there have been 391 deaths caused by right-wing terror attacks in the United States, and 65 deaths from left-wing terror attacks.”
Professor Arthur J. Jipson:
“Based on government and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL):
“Right-wing ideologies have been the source of over 70% of extremist attacks and domestic terrorism plots in the U.S. since 2002. The ADL monitors extremist trends across the ideological spectrum and uses this data to identify and counter threats.”
The Center For Strategic and International Studies:
“Our analysis of terrorism trends in the United States shows that, indeed, left-wing violence has risen in the last 10 years, although it has risen from very low levels and remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.…The left-wing movement as a whole has not returned to its violent heights of the 1960s and 1970s, but the number of terrorist incidents involving left-wing extremists so far this year puts 2025 on pace to be the left’s most violent year in more than three decades. Moreover, 2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing attacks outnumber those from the far right.”
The Republicans like to ask what about the riots in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd? Good question but the actual results don’t fit the right wing narrative. Data from the Crowd Counting Consortium found that most BLM and Floyd protests were peaceful: “In CCC data collected from May 2020 to June 2021, 94% of protests involved no participant arrests, 97.9% involved no participant injuries, 98.6% involved no injuries to police, and 96.7% involved no property damage.”
Now let’s step back and look at the big picture. Politically motivated murders are rare in the US compared to overall crime. Moreover, support for political violence in America is virtually non-existent. A recent You Gov poll found that 1% of Americans support political murder.
The reality is that most Americans are peaceful and responsible. Politicians like Trump and Vance who falsely allege that support for political violence on the left is widespread are misleading the people, dividing the country and inflaming their own volatile supporters. This propaganda needs to stop. It’s well past time for elected Republican officials and the legacy media to tell these demagogues to knock it off. They are hurting the country.
Senator Robert F. Kennedy said it best in his immortal speech on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968:
“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King yeah, it’s true but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past, but we and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
Thank you very much.”
Sources consulted: