Cato Institute: Politically Motivated Violence Data

[MajorRewrite]

The libertarian Cato Institute provides context about politically motivated violence in the US. Their conclusion is that it’s rare.

Only 81 happened since 2020, accounting for 0.07 percent of all murders during that time, or 7 out of 10,000.

Any violence is too much, but we live in a nation with lots of ammosexuals who want their 15 minutes of fame for killing somebody.

Here’s their breakdown of all the politically motivated murders in the last 50 years:

 

[whiskeytangofoxtrot]

They should take a look at project 2025 and the heritage foundation

 

[MajorRewrite]

The DOJ doesn’t like the data that shows right wing people commit more politically motivated murders than left wing people, so the data was removed. Typical MAGA sheep action.

DOJ quietly removes study showing right wing attacks ‘outpace’ those by left

The 2024 study, in which several criminal justice researchers reviewed National Institute of Justice data, found far more instances of deaths credited to right-wing groups.

The removal of the study was first reported Tuesday by 404 Media, which credited Daniel Malmer, a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who is studying extremism, with first noticing the removal of the study Sept. 13.

The Justice Department did not respond to request for comment on the removal of the study, but the page now says the department is “reviewing its websites … in accordance with recent Executive Orders.”

It’s not clear which executive orders would require such action.

 

[Hel_Books]

Who's inciting violence?

On January 6, 2021, a defeated and desperate Donald J. Trump told his fanatical followers, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” A MAGA mob marched to the Capitol and attempted to lynch Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and other leaders. It was the worst act of violence against the pillars of American democracy since the Civil War. In his second term, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists convicted for their violent actions that day.

Trump has encouraged his supporters to assault journalists, and even made comments that could at least be interpreted as suggesting that he wouldn’t mind seeing members of the media killed. He has repeatedly urged police and other law enforcement agents to inflict violence on suspects, and in 2017, made the extraordinary announcement that there were “some very fine people” among the rioters who terrorized the university town of Charlottesville, Virginia.

He has advocated using the military against domestic protesters. In 2020, amid the George Floyd uprising, Trump approvingly quoted a Southern police chief from the 1960s who said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” This year, he actually sent the National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, DC, to intimidate residents resisting his authoritarian administration.

He renamed the Defense Department the Department of War, and then posted on social media that Chicago was about to find out why it had been renamed.

Trump has said that a number of his political opponents should be prosecuted for treason (a capital offense). He has suggested that “Second Amendment people” might have to intervene against Hillary Clinton. He has publicly stated that Gen. Mark Milley, ex-head of the joint chiefs of staff, should be killed. He has withdrawn the security details from former vice president Kamala Harris and many other opponents against whom his followers have repeatedly threatened violence.

 

[SkyBubble]

Invalid study. Bad methodology.

https://dailycaller.com/2025/09/19/...nstitute-right-left-wing-violence-statistics/

"
“Right-wing terrorist killers”

1. Dylann Roof — properly categorized
2. John Russell “Rusty” Houser — Houser was described as having right-wing political positions, but there is no conclusive evidence that they were a motivation in his decision to shoot up a Lafayette movie theater. As CNN reports, Houser had severe mental health problems in the years leading up to the shooting and “Why Houser chose the city or what he was doing there remains a mystery.” Former Columbus mayor Bobby Peters said of Houser, “If you look at the whole pattern he had all these dreams and they kept falling apart and it comes to a situation like this.” There is speculation that he targeted a movie by Amy Schumer because of his misogynistic views, but police never confirmed this.
3. Robert Lewis Dear — properly categorized
4. James Harris Jackson — This one is a bit complicated. Jackson, who stabbed a black man to death with a sword, reportedly hated black people from a young age despite growing up in a liberal family that supported integration. Nonetheless, he voted for Barack Obama in 2012 because he did not like Sarah Palin. Because he later started getting involved in far-right YouTube and message boards and liked Donald Trump ahead of the killing, I’m calling this one properly categorized.
5. Jeremy Joseph Christian — properly categorized
6. James Alex Fields, Jr. — properly categorized
7. Matthew Edward Riehl — Riehl, who served as a combat medic in the Iraq War, was reported to be suffering from PTSD and psychotic episodes. He had stopped taking his medication before the shooting. Riehl livestreamed the shooting to Periscope, during which he said he “would not hurt anyone except to defend himself.” Online posts he made before the shooting were described as “rambling” and “nonsensical.” He made several online posts complaining about local law enforcement officials before his rampage.
8. Samuel Woodward — Woodward was raised Catholic and was struggling with his sexuality. He had expressed anti-gay sentiments but then decided to meet up with a gay man he met online. When the gay man kissed him, Woodward became enraged and killed him. Homophobic, sure. Right-wing political violence? No.
9. Gregory A. Bush — Bush was motivated by a hatred of black people in killing two black shoppers at a Kroger in Kentucky. There is no public evidence that he was politically motivated. He did not like Obama, but because he was black — not because he was a Democrat. The case was classified as a hate crime. Bush also had a history of schizophrenia.
10. Robert D. Bowers — properly categorized
11. Scott Paul Beierle — properly categorized
12. Anthony Comello — Anthony’s attorney presented a pretty fantastical defense at trial, claiming he was radicalized by QAnon and therefore should not be held accountable for killing a prominent mob boss. Comello played into the bit by writing pro-Trump messages on his hands in the courtroom. He was supposedly trying to take down the “elite cabal.” However, police said that Comello didn’t kill the mob boss over his online radicalization — rather, he was upset that the mob boss didn’t want Comello to date his niece. There were other versions of what Comello said happened when confessing to police, including that he had been blackmailed to carry out the hit by people who said they would reveal that he had HIV. There are too many competing theories to say this was politically motivated and court records related to his sentencing were not made available to the public due to concerns over the mob threatening Comello.
13. John T. Earnest — properly categorized
14. William Santino Legan — properly categorized
15. Patrick Crusius — properly categorized
16. Steven Carrillo — properly categorized
17. Robert Justus — properly categorized
18. Roy Den Hollander — properly categorized
19. Robert Aaron Long — Long went on a shooting spree at Asian “massage parlors,” because he was angry over his sex addiction and how it conflicted with his religious beliefs.
20. Nathan Allen — Allen stole a box truck, crashed, and then targeted two black people, killing them. He had written anti-black and pro-white screeds. He was not publicly reported to be involved in any white supremacist groups and there is no other public evidence of his political beliefs. This is better classified as a hate crime.
21. Payton S. Gendron — properly categorized
22. Benjamin Jeffrey Smith — properly categorized
23. Anderson Lee Aldrich — properly categorized
24. Mauricio Martinez Garcia — properly categorized
25. Ryan Christopher Palmeter — properly categorized
26. Solomon Sahmad Charlie Henderson — properly categorized
27. Vance Boelter — Boelter was reportedly a registered Republican and held pro-life views, but was previously a longtime Democrat and a state government appointee of Gov. Tim Walz. His writings indicated he believed he was carrying out the assassination of state Democratic lawmakers on behalf of Walz to clear his path to becoming a Democratic nominee for senator.

If we’re being generous, that puts the final tally at 21 right-wing terrorist killers to 17 terrorist killers as opposed to 27:17. If we’re being less generous, it’s closer to 19:17. A pretty negligible difference.

But then we have to also consider that Nowrasteh left some left-wing terrorist killers off his list.

1. The Waukesha killer in 2021 who drove his truck through a Christmas parade had a litany of anti-white social media posts, supported Black Lives Matter, and rapped against Donald Trump. A local BLM chapter raised money for his bail.
2. Jessica Doty-Whitaker was shot and killed by BLM protesters after she or someone she was with declared “all lives matter.” Her case remains unsolved.
3. An anti-natalist bombed an IVF clinic in 2025, killing one person

That would nudge the left-wing category over the right-wing category.

Of course, the other issue with Nowratseh’s list is that it only counts killings, so we miss highly notable political violence like the two assassination attempts on Trump, the 2017 Republican baseball shooting, the attempted stabbing of Lee Zeldin, a neighbor attacking Sen. Rand Paul, the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a bomb planted under a Fox News van that failed to detonate, and others."

 

[MajorRewrite]

Invalid study. Bad methodology.

https://dailycaller.com/2025/09/19/...nstitute-right-left-wing-violence-statistics/

"
“Right-wing terrorist killers”

1. Dylann Roof — properly categorized
2. John Russell “Rusty” Houser — Houser was described as having right-wing political positions, but there is no conclusive evidence that they were a motivation in his decision to shoot up a Lafayette movie theater. As CNN reports, Houser had severe mental health problems in the years leading up to the shooting and “Why Houser chose the city or what he was doing there remains a mystery.” Former Columbus mayor Bobby Peters said of Houser, “If you look at the whole pattern he had all these dreams and they kept falling apart and it comes to a situation like this.” There is speculation that he targeted a movie by Amy Schumer because of his misogynistic views, but police never confirmed this.
3. Robert Lewis Dear — properly categorized
4. James Harris Jackson — This one is a bit complicated. Jackson, who stabbed a black man to death with a sword, reportedly hated black people from a young age despite growing up in a liberal family that supported integration. Nonetheless, he voted for Barack Obama in 2012 because he did not like Sarah Palin. Because he later started getting involved in far-right YouTube and message boards and liked Donald Trump ahead of the killing, I’m calling this one properly categorized.
5. Jeremy Joseph Christian — properly categorized
6. James Alex Fields, Jr. — properly categorized
7. Matthew Edward Riehl — Riehl, who served as a combat medic in the Iraq War, was reported to be suffering from PTSD and psychotic episodes. He had stopped taking his medication before the shooting. Riehl livestreamed the shooting to Periscope, during which he said he “would not hurt anyone except to defend himself.” Online posts he made before the shooting were described as “rambling” and “nonsensical.” He made several online posts complaining about local law enforcement officials before his rampage.
8. Samuel Woodward — Woodward was raised Catholic and was struggling with his sexuality. He had expressed anti-gay sentiments but then decided to meet up with a gay man he met online. When the gay man kissed him, Woodward became enraged and killed him. Homophobic, sure. Right-wing political violence? No.
9. Gregory A. Bush — Bush was motivated by a hatred of black people in killing two black shoppers at a Kroger in Kentucky. There is no public evidence that he was politically motivated. He did not like Obama, but because he was black — not because he was a Democrat. The case was classified as a hate crime. Bush also had a history of schizophrenia.
10. Robert D. Bowers — properly categorized
11. Scott Paul Beierle — properly categorized
12. Anthony Comello — Anthony’s attorney presented a pretty fantastical defense at trial, claiming he was radicalized by QAnon and therefore should not be held accountable for killing a prominent mob boss. Comello played into the bit by writing pro-Trump messages on his hands in the courtroom. He was supposedly trying to take down the “elite cabal.” However, police said that Comello didn’t kill the mob boss over his online radicalization — rather, he was upset that the mob boss didn’t want Comello to date his niece. There were other versions of what Comello said happened when confessing to police, including that he had been blackmailed to carry out the hit by people who said they would reveal that he had HIV. There are too many competing theories to say this was politically motivated and court records related to his sentencing were not made available to the public due to concerns over the mob threatening Comello.
13. John T. Earnest — properly categorized
14. William Santino Legan — properly categorized
15. Patrick Crusius — properly categorized
16. Steven Carrillo — properly categorized
17. Robert Justus — properly categorized
18. Roy Den Hollander — properly categorized
19. Robert Aaron Long — Long went on a shooting spree at Asian “massage parlors,” because he was angry over his sex addiction and how it conflicted with his religious beliefs.
20. Nathan Allen — Allen stole a box truck, crashed, and then targeted two black people, killing them. He had written anti-black and pro-white screeds. He was not publicly reported to be involved in any white supremacist groups and there is no other public evidence of his political beliefs. This is better classified as a hate crime.
21. Payton S. Gendron — properly categorized
22. Benjamin Jeffrey Smith — properly categorized
23. Anderson Lee Aldrich — properly categorized
24. Mauricio Martinez Garcia — properly categorized
25. Ryan Christopher Palmeter — properly categorized
26. Solomon Sahmad Charlie Henderson — properly categorized
27. Vance Boelter — Boelter was reportedly a registered Republican and held pro-life views, but was previously a longtime Democrat and a state government appointee of Gov. Tim Walz. His writings indicated he believed he was carrying out the assassination of state Democratic lawmakers on behalf of Walz to clear his path to becoming a Democratic nominee for senator.

If we’re being generous, that puts the final tally at 21 right-wing terrorist killers to 17 terrorist killers as opposed to 27:17. If we’re being less generous, it’s closer to 19:17. A pretty negligible difference.

But then we have to also consider that Nowrasteh left some left-wing terrorist killers off his list.

1. The Waukesha killer in 2021 who drove his truck through a Christmas parade had a litany of anti-white social media posts, supported Black Lives Matter, and rapped against Donald Trump. A local BLM chapter raised money for his bail.
2. Jessica Doty-Whitaker was shot and killed by BLM protesters after she or someone she was with declared “all lives matter.” Her case remains unsolved.
3. An anti-natalist bombed an IVF clinic in 2025, killing one person

That would nudge the left-wing category over the right-wing category.

Of course, the other issue with Nowratseh’s list is that it only counts killings, so we miss highly notable political violence like the two assassination attempts on Trump, the 2017 Republican baseball shooting, the attempted stabbing of Lee Zeldin, a neighbor attacking Sen. Rand Paul, the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a bomb planted under a Fox News van that failed to detonate, and others."

You’re attempting to use the DailyCaller to refute the Cato Institute?

Why would the libertarian Cato Institute want to fabricate any bad data about the right wing, which they are part of?

Stable genius.

 

[SkyBubble]

Typical. Don't actually read the article and comment on the facts it provides, just attack the source.

 

[MajorRewrite]

Typical. Don't actually read the article and comment on the facts it provides, just attack the source.

You didn’t answer. Why would the libertarian Cato Institute want to fabricate any bad data about the right wing, which they are part of?

 

[SkyBubble]

https://thefederalist.com/2025/09/2...out-right-wing-violence-is-full-of-fake-data/
fter Charlie Kirk was assassinated last week, conservatives noted that most political violence comes from the left. The left bristles at this fact and has responded by dramatically padding the numbers to pretend the reverse is true.

Consider a Sept. 12 piece from The Economist claiming, “extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”
Right up front, the piece admits it used data “largely compiled by researchers whom sceptical (sic) conservatives would probably dismiss as biased.” The disclaimer is meant to inoculate The Economist’s audience to its sloppy reporting, as if challenges from conservatives will somehow prove The Economist’s accuracy.

Yes, readers should be beyond skeptical of the source in that piece, The Prosecution Project. Its website claims to “track[] and provid[e] analysis of felony criminal cases involving illegal political violence, terrorism, and extremism occurring in the United States since 1990.”

The founder and executive director of the Prosecution Project is Michael Loadenthal, although the links naming the website’s leadership were broken Friday, meaning no names were visible. Google had not yet scrubbed Loadenthal’s name from searches.

https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/ANTIFA--1024x535.png

Image CreditScreen Shot/Beth Brelje
Loadenthal is an “openly anarchist Antifa-affiliated … researcher at the University of Cincinnati who, by his own admission, is a far-left violent extremist,” The Federalist reported in 2023.
So we have an Antifa-connected researcher with rabid bias against the right, held out as an expert on deciding who is extreme. It is like using a vegetarian to define which meat eaters are the most humane — none of them, says the vegetarian.

The Prosecution Project lists January 2024 charges against John Reardon of Massachusetts, who made antisemitic threats against synagogues and the Israeli Consulate. It notes, “Influenced by events in Gaza, he also said, ‘you do realize that by supporting genocide that means it’s ok for people to commit genocide against you.’” The Department of Justice never identified Reardon’s political affiliation, but The Prosecution Project’s own account seems to indicate he was a pro-Palestine fanatic, a cause typically associated with Democrats. Yet The Prosecution Project identifies Reardon’s crimes as “rightist” because they’re “identity-focused.”

The group also lists 2022 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act charges against Edmee Chavannes — even though “Chavannes was found not guilty.”

The Prosecution Project even includes the posting of racist stickers in its tracker, as if that’s comparable to terrorism or violence. One wonders if the group will treat Democrats’ desecration of Charlie Kirk memorials with the same seriousness.
Most crimes involving race or abortion businesses are blamed on the right in the data, with nothing to back up those claims. Yet these issues and others often cross over to the left. The Federalist has reported on the progressive anti-abortion movement, for example, and the left’s Marxist oppressor-versus-oppressed framework is manifestly racist.

Comb through the ridiculous data on The Prosecution Project’s website, and you will soon conclude it is worthless to everyone except leftist propagandists trying to downplay Charlie Kirk’s murder and flip the blame for violence in the U.S. to the right.

Similarly, a biased “study” by Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute was debunked this week by Amber Duke at The Daily Caller.

Nowrasteh claims politically motivated violence is rare in the U.S., but that when it happens, “right-wing terrorists” are more often to blame than the left — that is, when you exclude the terrorists who killed 2,977 victims on Sept. 11, 2001, and exclude injuries, property damage, and people who were not killed. Thus, his criteria exclude the two assassination attempts on President Donald Trump, for example. Additionally, Duke found that some of the crimes Nowrasteh blamed on the right were at best questionable and at worst downright wrong.

Duke pointed to another lopsided study by the Anti-Defamation League, which also claims the right is to blame for increased political violence. Ryan James Girdusky unpacked those magic numbers and noted glaring omissions. For example, the ADL left the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson out of its study.

“The motivated reader can slice and dice these numbers in different ways, count marginal hate crimes as politically motivated terrorist attacks, assign different ideological motivations to the individual attacker, and must still conclude that the threat to human life from these types of attacks is relatively small,” Nowrasteh writes.

He is so wrong. Every crime sends ripples of consequences into the victims’ communities. At least half the nation feels victimized by the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and we are not counted in these studies.

Too many have seen or will see the video of that senseless moment when Kirk was silenced, and they will be changed by what they see. If you measure by ripple effect — if you measure by how many members of Congress refuse to condemn the assassination — the left is killing it at killing us.

 

[SkyBubble]

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2...on-political-violence-is-hot-garbage-n4943939

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has unleashed a predictable wave of left-wing gaslighting that would make any reasonable person’s head spin. Within hours of this horrific crime, the same left-wing voices who spent years justifying and downplaying actual violence from their own side were rushing to condemn political violence and trying to flip the script by claiming that political violence is predominantly a right-wing phenomenon.
To perpetuate this narrative, they’ve weaponized a deeply flawed study to rewrite history and cast conservatives as the real villains in America’s political violence problem. The go-to talking point making rounds among Democrats and their media allies centers on a study from the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh, which purports to show that right-wing extremists commit the majority of politically motivated killings in America.

The left has parroted this convenient narrative everywhere to deflect attention from the fact that a radicalized leftist just murdered one of conservatism’s most prominent young voices in broad daylight.

When I saw a graph from the study showing murders in politically motivated terrorist attacks (excluding 9/11), two things immediately jumped out at me.

The first is the big spike in 1995. While obviously because of the Oklahoma City bombing, the question I had was how Nowrasteh categorized it. As I suspected, he categorized Timothy McVeigh's ideology as “right-wing,” but this classification is debatable. McVeigh was an anti-government extremist whose rage stemmed from anger over the 1993 Waco siege and the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, not from conservative ideology. McVeigh rejected both political parties, described himself as agnostic, supported abortion rights, and drew inspiration from militia and anarchist movements rather than conservatism.
The second red flag is even more damning. Notice how the data conveniently shows a dip in 2020, the same year America witnessed the most destructive riots in its history. The George Floyd riots not only caused billions in property damage nationwide, but at least nineteen known deaths. Yet somehow, none of these deaths made it into Nowrasteh’s tally of political violence. How convenient.


Others have found problems with the study as well.

The Daily Caller’s Amber Duke dug into Nowrasteh’s methodology and exposed it as sloppy and biased. His list misclassifies several killers as “right-wing,” often stretching the label to absurdity. Duke highlighted many of these flaws, but even she missed a few glaring examples. Take the 2022 Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs: Nowrasteh called it “right-wing” despite the shooter, Anderson Lee Aldrich, identifying as “non-binary” and suffering from severe mental illness. He killed five people. Likewise, Peyton Gendron, who murdered ten people in a Buffalo supermarket, was branded “right-wing” even though his manifesto explicitly described himself as an “eco-fascist national socialist.” The same goes for Patrick Crusius, the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooter who killed 20 people. Nowrasteh slapped a “right-wing” label on him as well, even though his own writings revealed an eco-fascist worldview nearly identical to Gendron’s.
Duke also discovered that Nowrasteh omitted genuine left-wing killers from his list entirely, including the Waukesha Christmas parade attacker who drove his truck through a crowd in 2021, killing six people.

One could easily see that a more thorough examination of the data would turn up more errors and omissions.

The broader pattern here reveals the left’s desperate need to control the narrative around political violence. When their side commits horrific acts, they immediately pivot to studies, statistics, and academic papers designed to muddy the waters and shift blame elsewhere. Meanwhile, they conveniently ignore their own side’s long history of excusing and encouraging violence.

ICYMI: Does This Prove Hunter Biden Orchestrated His Own Pardon?

The truth about political violence in America can’t be hidden behind manipulated data and selective methodology. While the CATO study tries to paint conservatives as the primary threat, real Americans remember which side spent the summer of 2020 burning down neighborhoods and which side has been calling for more civility in political discourse. They remember which politicians refused to condemn the rioting and which media outlets described burning buildings as “mostly peaceful protests.” Most importantly, they can see through the transparent attempt to use Charlie Kirk’s assassination as an opportunity to smear the very movement he died defending.

The left’s coordinated response to Kirk’s murder reveals their true priorities: not preventing future violence or promoting genuine unity, but in covering up their culpability in political violence.

The left’s rush to rewrite political violence after Charlie Kirk’s assassination is classic gaslighting. They weaponize flawed studies to paint conservatives as the villains while ignoring their own side’s riots and terror.

 

[Lazaran]

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2...on-political-violence-is-hot-garbage-n4943939

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has unleashed a predictable wave of left-wing gaslighting that would make any reasonable person’s head spin. Within hours of this horrific crime, the same left-wing voices who spent years justifying and downplaying actual violence from their own side were rushing to condemn political violence and trying to flip the script by claiming that political violence is predominantly a right-wing phenomenon.
To perpetuate this narrative, they’ve weaponized a deeply flawed study to rewrite history and cast conservatives as the real villains in America’s political violence problem. The go-to talking point making rounds among Democrats and their media allies centers on a study from the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh, which purports to show that right-wing extremists commit the majority of politically motivated killings in America.

The left has parroted this convenient narrative everywhere to deflect attention from the fact that a radicalized leftist just murdered one of conservatism’s most prominent young voices in broad daylight.

When I saw a graph from the study showing murders in politically motivated terrorist attacks (excluding 9/11), two things immediately jumped out at me.

The first is the big spike in 1995. While obviously because of the Oklahoma City bombing, the question I had was how Nowrasteh categorized it. As I suspected, he categorized Timothy McVeigh's ideology as “right-wing,” but this classification is debatable. McVeigh was an anti-government extremist whose rage stemmed from anger over the 1993 Waco siege and the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, not from conservative ideology. McVeigh rejected both political parties, described himself as agnostic, supported abortion rights, and drew inspiration from militia and anarchist movements rather than conservatism.
The second red flag is even more damning. Notice how the data conveniently shows a dip in 2020, the same year America witnessed the most destructive riots in its history. The George Floyd riots not only caused billions in property damage nationwide, but at least nineteen known deaths. Yet somehow, none of these deaths made it into Nowrasteh’s tally of political violence. How convenient.


Others have found problems with the study as well.

The Daily Caller’s Amber Duke dug into Nowrasteh’s methodology and exposed it as sloppy and biased. His list misclassifies several killers as “right-wing,” often stretching the label to absurdity. Duke highlighted many of these flaws, but even she missed a few glaring examples. Take the 2022 Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs: Nowrasteh called it “right-wing” despite the shooter, Anderson Lee Aldrich, identifying as “non-binary” and suffering from severe mental illness. He killed five people. Likewise, Peyton Gendron, who murdered ten people in a Buffalo supermarket, was branded “right-wing” even though his manifesto explicitly described himself as an “eco-fascist national socialist.” The same goes for Patrick Crusius, the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooter who killed 20 people. Nowrasteh slapped a “right-wing” label on him as well, even though his own writings revealed an eco-fascist worldview nearly identical to Gendron’s.
Duke also discovered that Nowrasteh omitted genuine left-wing killers from his list entirely, including the Waukesha Christmas parade attacker who drove his truck through a crowd in 2021, killing six people.

One could easily see that a more thorough examination of the data would turn up more errors and omissions.

The broader pattern here reveals the left’s desperate need to control the narrative around political violence. When their side commits horrific acts, they immediately pivot to studies, statistics, and academic papers designed to muddy the waters and shift blame elsewhere. Meanwhile, they conveniently ignore their own side’s long history of excusing and encouraging violence.

ICYMI: Does This Prove Hunter Biden Orchestrated His Own Pardon?

The truth about political violence in America can’t be hidden behind manipulated data and selective methodology. While the CATO study tries to paint conservatives as the primary threat, real Americans remember which side spent the summer of 2020 burning down neighborhoods and which side has been calling for more civility in political discourse. They remember which politicians refused to condemn the rioting and which media outlets described burning buildings as “mostly peaceful protests.” Most importantly, they can see through the transparent attempt to use Charlie Kirk’s assassination as an opportunity to smear the very movement he died defending.

The left’s coordinated response to Kirk’s murder reveals their true priorities: not preventing future violence or promoting genuine unity, but in covering up their culpability in political violence.

The left’s rush to rewrite political violence after Charlie Kirk’s assassination is classic gaslighting. They weaponize flawed studies to paint conservatives as the villains while ignoring their own side’s riots and terror.

tl;dr and STILL gave that a

Here’s a few more.



We. Told. Them. So.

 

[SkyBubble]

https://amac.us/newsline/politics/l...o-blame-conservatives-for-political-violence/

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week, liberals have been scrambling for talking points to shift the national conversation away from the escalating and now undeniable trend of left-wing political violence. They seem to have found a new favorite talking point in a supposed “statistical analysis” from a libertarian think tank that purports to show that most political violence in the United States comes from the right. However, it doesn’t take much digging to unearth serious questions about the accuracy and legitimacy of that claim.

The rapid proliferation of this dubious data point throughout the liberal echo chamber and corporate media ecosystem provides a case study in how the left legitimizes unreliable, biased, or downright false statistics to assert authority on certain topics. As such, it’s worth examining in detail – both for the purposes of debunking this specific accusation and for exposing the left’s common refrain that the “experts” agree with them.

On September 11, just hours after Kirk’s death, Alex Nowrasteh authored a blog post which declared that “politically motivated violence is rare in the United States.” Nowrasteh is the Vice President for Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that has been particularly critical of the new direction of the Republican Party under President Donald Trump.

While not an expressly left-wing organization, Cato has found itself increasingly siding with Democrats on one issue after another in recent years. The organization has, for instance, routinely provided a platform to self-described “Never-Trumpers,” opposed Trump’s tariffs, opposed efforts to restrict abortion, and criticized Trump’s executive actions like the dissolution of the U.S. Agency for International Development – despite claiming to support the cause of shrinking the federal government.

Nowrasteh has himself been even more explicitly hostile toward conservatives. On his X account, he has variously referred to Vice President JD Vance as the “Scoldy Schoolmarm in Chief,” reshared a post suggesting that a Kamala Harris administration would have been better for free speech, and opposed Trump’s decision to use the military to eliminate a drug cartel boat off the coast of Venezuela.

All of this provides important context, as Cato and Nowrasteh want us to believe that they are providing us with unbiased data showing that the right is really responsible for most political violence in the United States. But Nowrasteh has vociferously opposed President Trump’s strong denunciation of left-wing political violence, leaving plenty of reason to be skeptical that his analysis of what counts as “left-wing” vs. “right-wing” violence is unbiased.

In his September 11 piece, Nowrasteh asserts that “A total of 3,599 people have been murdered in politically motivated terrorist attacks in the United States from January 1, 1975, through September 10, 2025.” Excluding the 9/11 attacks – 83 percent of that total – leaves 620 deaths associated with politically motivated terrorism. Of that number, Nowrasteh ascribes the following body counts to these ideologies: separatism (4); unknown/other (9); foreign nationalism (8); left-wing (65); Islamism (143); and finally right-wing (391).

Predictably, the corporate media seized on this statistic as “proof” that conservatives are the real political violence threat in the United States. On September 16, Time Magazine repackaged the data in a nifty pie chart, proclaiming that “terrorists inspired by right-wing ideology are responsible for 63 percent of deaths from political violence during that time [1975-2025], compared to 10 percent for left-wing attacks.”

That talking point has since been shared countless times online and by the corporate media, along with being parroted by elected Democrats. The Atlantic, PBS NewsHour, The Economist, and The Independent were just a few of the other major news outlets who covered the study.

But those same liberal voices smugly reporting that left-wing ideology only accounts for 10 percent of all politically motivated murders have shown a stunning lack of curiosity in where that data actually comes from, or whether we can trust it.

Returning to Nowrasteh’s blog, we see that none of his tables or charts have links to any actual data. When a user clicks on “get the data” below each chart, it just redirects to a downloadable Excel document of the same chart.

Another link, which Nowrasteh says contains his “methodology and sources,” takes readers to a much longer statistical study published in March of this year. But that article specifically focuses on “50 Years of Foreign-Born Terrorism on US Soil.”

What about politically motivated killers born in the United States? Why does Nowrasteh tell us that 63 percent of all deaths from political violence come from the right and then link to a study that only talks about deaths from foreign-born terrorists? Better yet, why did no one in the corporate media bother to check whether his numbers were reliable? Or did they, and then decide to publish his claims anyway?

 

[SkyBubble]

After some digging, I finally came across a Substack piece from Nowrasteh in which he provides a full breakdown of the names and body counts of all politically motivated terrorists included in his data. Immediately, suspicions about Nowrasteh’s methodology proved justified.

Once you actually examine the 391 so-called “right-wing” murders in Nowrasteh’s dataset, a striking pattern emerges. The overwhelming majority are not committed by conservatives, Republicans, or even self-identified “right-wing” activists in any recognizable sense of the term. They are carried out by neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other fringe extremists who openly reject the very principles conservatives stand for.

Lumping these deranged killers in with everyday Republicans or Trump supporters is not just sloppy – it is intentionally misleading. The narrative that “the right” is responsible for political violence only works if you pretend that neo-Nazis and mainstream conservatives belong to the same movement. They don’t.

In fact, they are as diametrically opposed to conservative principles as the far left is. Conservatives believe in equal justice under the law, ordered liberty, and the dignity of the individual. White supremacists believe in tearing those values down and replacing them with racial tribalism and authoritarianism – just like the far left. That ideology is not “conserving” anything. It is destroying every traditional American value that conservatives strive to protect.

This is why no serious conservative figure tolerates neo-Nazis or white supremacists. They are universally denounced and driven out of the movement whenever they try to co-opt the conservative label. Charlie Kirk himself went out of his way to confront anyone at his events who tried to spout racist rhetoric, telling them they had no place in conservatism.

By contrast, the radical left fringe, from Antifa to BLM extremists and militant LGBTQ activists, is not shunned by the Democratic Party. It is embraced, legitimized, or at the very least tolerated. That is the crucial distinction.

It is profoundly dishonest to equate the assassination of Kirk with the violence of a lone neo-Nazi acting on a worldview that no mainstream figure endorses. While details are still emerging, it now seems evident that Tyler Robinson was motivated by his hatred of Kirk’s statements on LGBTQ ideology. Unlike actual conservatives, who share no ideological bonds to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, Robinson’s position on LGBTQ issues that drove him to assassinate Charlie Kirk is the same as the one advanced by the Democrat Party.

It is the corporate media and the Democrat Party establishment that has sought to associate conservatives with neo-Nazis and other fringe groups incorrectly labeled as “far right.” In reality, these groups do not fit on any logically coherent political spectrum because they reject the very foundations of American civic life and government.

But the same cannot be said for far-left ideologies and their close association with the Democrat Party. While conservatives constantly disassociate themselves with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, Democrats add fuel to the fire of far-left individuals by labeling individuals like Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump “fascist” and a “threat to democracy.”

This sort of data manipulation through redefinition of terms is hardly an isolated tactic from the left. It is the same trick liberals and the press use in countless other contexts: claim crime is down in Washington, D.C., while ignoring that residents remain far more likely to be victimized there than in most of the country; claim illegal immigration is down only after redefining hundreds of thousands of illegal crossers as “asylum seekers.” When you look under the hood, the numbers don’t hold up – but the headlines serve their political purpose.

That’s the game. The statistics are not meant to inform. They are meant to smear, to delegitimize, and to distract from the real and growing problem that the left would rather we all ignore.

 

[MajorRewrite]

The overwhelming majority are not committed by conservatives, Republicans, or even self-identified “right-wing” activists in any recognizable sense of the term. They are carried out by neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other fringe extremists who openly reject the very principles conservatives stand for.

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are right wing. Conservatives aren’t the only people in the right wing. The MAGA flock of sheep is full of authoritarians, Neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Right wing politically motivated murders are 6x higher than left wing. 6x. As detailed in my original post.

 

[LilKitKat]

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are right wing. Conservatives aren’t the only people in the right wing. The MAGA flock of sheep is full of authoritarians, Neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Right wing politically motivated murders are 6x higher than left wing. 6x. As detailed in my original post.

and I love how all of his sources are right-wing websites

 

[latecomer91364]

Oh, looky! The leftards have a 'paid for' survey! I guess that's all she wrote, isn't it?
LOL

 

[MajorRewrite]

Oh, looky! The leftards have a 'paid for' survey! I guess that's all she wrote, isn't it?
LOL

Oh, looky! A stable genius who doesn’t know the libertarian Cato Institute is a leading right wing think tank. And it’s not a survey.
LOL

 

[SkyBubble]

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are right wing.

Untrue. They are collectivists. They support a government-controlled economy and a collectively controlled state and society. Taht is not right-wing in any way.

 

[SkyBubble]

and I love how all of his sources are right-wing websites

And once again, attack the sources rather than reading the actual articles and finding out what's wrong with the study.

You might try addressing the specific points if you can.

 

[LilKitKat]

And once again, attack the sources rather than reading the actual articles and finding out what's wrong with the study.

You might try addressing the specific points if you can.

because when you are using informatiohn to back up your claims with sources that dont use facts and only have an agenda and complete bias, it is pointless

 

[MajorRewrite]

Untrue. They are collectivists. They support a government-controlled economy and a collectively controlled state and society. Taht is not right-wing in any way.

Haha. No.

You’re ashamed of the company you keep in the right wing.

 

[SkyBubble]

because when you are using informatiohn to back up your claims with sources that dont use facts and only have an agenda and complete bias, it is pointless

Thank you for proving you couldn't be bothered to read the articles. There are plenty of facts in them, but they're facts your side dislikes, so you just dismiss the source.

 

[SkyBubble]

Haha. No.

You’re ashamed of the company you keep in the right wing.

You're wrong again, as usual.

 

[LilKitKat]

Thank you for proving you couldn't be bothered to read the articles. There are plenty of facts in them, but they're facts your side dislikes, so you just dismiss the source.

You are full of shit!
Source: me

just because you dont dislike the facts, you just dismiss the source

 

[SkyBubble]

You are full of shit!

Once again, no sources, no rational argument. You just know I must be wrong because you say so.

Never mind actually making an effort to address the FACTS in the articles.