It turns out that if you count the Jan. 6 riots but not the Black Lives Matter riots, then the Right is infinitely more violent than the Left. If you don’t count racist black men mowing down a bunch of white people as a left-wing racist murder, but you do count a suicidal kid with President Donald Trump on his “hit list” killing two white strangers as a right-wing racist murder, then you can get results that appeal to the liberal media.

After a nihilistic left-wing extremist assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk for his political beliefs, liberals rushed to deny that left-wing political violence is a problem and claim that the real problem is right-wing domestic terrorism. At their disposal, Democrats in Congress and the media had multiple studies, supposedly proving that right-wingers are responsible for many times more political killings, attacks, and hate incidents than left-wingers and Islamists combined.

“Data isn’t vibes,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) posted above a pair of pie charts showing that “right-wing extremists” are responsible for 80% of all “incidents” and 75% of all “killings,” and “left-wing extremists” are only to blame for a tiny sliver of the violence.

Liberal columnist Jill Filipovic responded to worries about left-wing violence by posting at conservatives, “Please do let actual facts get in the way of your conclusions about political violence.”

These liberals’ “actual facts” and “data” are two studies purporting to count and compare the extremist or political violence by the different sides.

“Between 2013 and 2022, right-wingers committed the vast majority of political murders,” said liberal columnist Eric Levitz of Vox. “If you actually care about political violence, you should not spread wild lies about it.”

Levitz and Omar cited the Anti-Defamation League, which has published studies on extremism for years. Filipovic cited a study by libertarian Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute. The Center for Strategic and International Studies published its own study, and a liberal academic study called “The Prosecution Project” asks similar questions.

The major news media cited all four studies and reported that they found exactly what reporters and commentators would want to find: conservatives are far more violent and murderous than liberals.

These quantitative studies are worthy of consideration because our memories of headlines can leave false impressions, especially in a day and age when media diets can be so siloed, either by choice or by default. But upon even light examination, the bold claims fall apart.

The first problem is that these studies do not show what the commentary on them claims. A deeper problem with these studies is their conceit of being objective data when they are really subjective research. What counts as “extremist violence” or “political violence” is a judgment call. Who is really motivated by ideology over madness is a judgment call. Some calls are easy. On the tough calls, most of these researchers seemed to err on the side that would support their ideological prior suppositions.

The studies fall prey to poor methodology and questionable judgment calls, and the media accounts of them are even worse. 

The Authors

The Prosecution Project is the brainchild of University of Cincinnati assistant professor Michael Loadenthal, whose intellectual approach is helpful in interrogating the various studies touted these days.

The Economist and former CNN and Washington Post journalist Chris Cilizza rely on it. So does Bloomberg News, which cited the project as showing “Islamists and those on the political right to be the main culprits of U.S. terrorist attacks over the past three decades, with leftists accounting for a relatively small portion.”

Loadenthal is a left-wing academic (one of his papers is titled “Operation Splash Back!: Queering Animal Liberation Through the Contributions of Neo-Insurrectionist Queers“) who sees his job as inculcating a “decolonial framework” into his students’ thinking. “Queering the nation” is another way he describes his life’s work. 

Notably, Loadenthal is explicitly pro-violence: In an article in the Peace Chronicle, the magazine of the Peace & Justice Studies Association, he notes that one of his central goals is “to advance the argument that violence as a response to colonialism is expected and just.”

That is, “emancipatory violence” — violence directed at oppressors — is good and just. (This, of course, is exactly the sort of mentality that could justify killing a political commentator and activist you hold to be a “fascist” or a bigot.)

The project is an exercise in critical theory, “countering dominant narratives,” to borrow a phrase from Loadenthal. The U.S. media and academia are controlled by the Left, and their dominant narrative, as we’ve seen in recent days, is that the Right is far more violent than the Left.

A critical approach involves examining the biases of those who craft the dominant narrative. 

For the Prosecution Project, such an analysis is simple: This is the project of a radical-left academic who wants to justify left-wing violence.

The other projects are not so obviously biased, but the authors all lean left or at least closer to the Democratic Party than to the Republican Party. If we are to take Loadenthal’s scholarship seriously, we need to consider this bias as part of a critical reading of the studies.

The ADL is run by Jonathan Greenblatt, a former political appointee of former President Barack Obama. Under Greenblatt’s leadership, ADL has ventured far away from its purported aim of fighting antisemitism and has become more purely partisan and ideological. For instance, the organization petitioned the courts to force the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns, to violate its consciences and provide contraception coverage to its employees.

CSIS is much more centrist, including Democrats and Republicans in its leadership.

Nowrasteh is not a liberal but a libertarian who sometimes sides with the Right and sometimes with the Left. Because immigration is Nowrasteh’s main concern and because he describes himself as a globalist and elitist, he often ends up on the Democratic side of things in the era of Trump, an immigration restrictionist who rails against globalists and elitists.

Now to the substance and methods of those studies.

What Are They Actually Counting (and Ignoring)?

Levitz, posturing as something of a fact-checker, said ADL’s study showed “right-wingers committed the vast majority of political murders.” But the data he provided didn’t even try to make that claim. 

If you read ADL’s methodology notes, the organization doesn’t claim to be tracking “political murders” as Levitz falsely claimed, but murders “by people associated with a variety of domestic extremist movements.”

That may sound like a thin distinction, but it really matters, especially on the ADL study. A “political murder” would be the assassination of Kirk. Murders “by people associated with a variety of domestic extremist movements” is a far larger category. If a KKK member murders his wife, that is a murder by a person associated with a domestic extremist movement.

It turns out that this sort of apolitical murder by extremist-associated people is a massive portion of the ADL’s study.

For instance, Aidan Ingalls was an obviously disturbed and suicidal boy who planned a school shooting and made a “hit list” of people he wanted to assassinate, including Trump. A few years later, Ingalls shot two random strangers — an elderly white couple on a pier.

ADL counted this as a “right-wing extremist” killing in the chart Levitz posted, because “police found swastikas and other white supremacist markings on the gun he used.” That’s obviously inapt, but it’s even more obviously not what Levitz called it: a right-wing “political murder.”

For another example, Jesse James Sullivan of New Hampshire in 2024 shot and killed his half-brother, who was white. Sullivan, during an earlier stint in prison, joined a prison gang.

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle deconstructed ADL’s 2021 study and suggested that ADL overrepresented white supremacist killings. Violent criminals in prison have incentives to join gangs, often organized along racial lines. Those who join the white gangs are easily recognizable by the swastika tattoos they get. When they leave prison, every violent crime they commit now counts as “right-wing” violence in the ADL’s tally. 

ADL includes plenty of “non-ideological” yet “extremist-associated” killings. It explained: “Extremists can also commit murders while engaging in non-ideological criminal activities ranging from home invasions to domestic violence. In some cases, extremists may commit a murder, the motive for which is never revealed. We include all these types of killings in this report.”

Half of the killings ADL has tracked over the past decade are nonideological, and those are disproportionately classified as “right-wing” killings.

There’s more reason to doubt ADL’s findings: It consistently tosses ambiguous cases in the right-wing pile.

One example: A Black man named Corey Cobb-Bey, who identifies as a Muslim, killed a policeman in 2024. ADL called this a right-wing ideological killing because his specific sect, the Moorish Science Temple, has “ties to the sovereign citizen movement.”

Just as important is who is not included. 

Darrell Brooks was a black man and a budding rapper who drove a car into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six people and injuring dozens. His Facebook profile showed he was racially motivated and a supporter of BLM. One post showed the middle-finger emoji and the words “The old white ppl 2, KNOKK DEM TF OUT.” Brooks posted anti-police content and made posts about white privilege.

Where did this BLM supporter murdering white people show up in ADL’s study? He didn’t. It simply never mentioned the mass killing in its 2021 report.

Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old woman who identifies as a man, went into a Christian school and killed six children. She railed against white privilege and chose her target — her former elementary school — in part because it was Christian. In her manifesto, she railed against parents whose “conservative religion” makes them reject gender transitions. She also railed against white people and “privilege.”

Hale’s crimes do not show up in ADL’s 2023 report. Brooks and Hale were obviously mentally ill, and so it’s fair to say theirs weren’t ideological or extremist crimes. But it’s hard to ignore a transgender shooter who railed against conservative Christian parents shooting up a Christian school, while you count a white kid who wanted to kill Trump killing two random white strangers as a white supremacist crime.

Yet that’s exactly the way the ADL study works.

A Clear Pattern

The four studies cited these days have different methodologies, all of which call into question their accuracy, even-handedness, or relevance to the question of right-wing political violence.

For instance, CSIS excluded violence at protests, but made an exception for that rule and included violence at the Charlottesville protests populated by white supremacists. Violence at BLM protests? Ignored. Violence at Proud Boy protests? Counted. Likewise, riots were generally excluded, with the exception of Jan. 6. 

You get the pattern.

Likewise, the TPP study excluded obvious examples of left-wing violence, including when BLM protesters torched the Minneapolis Police Department.