Debunking the Data That Claims to Show Most Political Violence Comes From the Right
There's a lot of funky data out there being compiled by nakedly partisan organizations and spread as though it's factual by the liberal media.
The third assassination attempt on President Trump’s life this weekend has reignited a debate between Left and Right about where political violence in America comes from.
The Right points to the assassination attempts on the President, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the rise of Islamist terrorism, the rabid violence of the George Floyd riots, the elevation of political violence fan Hasan Piker to celebrity status in the Democratic Party, and the recent polling showing that the more liberal a person is, the more likely they are to support political violence.
On the Left, people point to January 6 as well as data purporting to show that most political violence comes from the Right. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, The Economist ran a piece claiming to explain “what the data show,” which suggested that most political violence was a Right-wing phenomenon. Other publications cited studies from the Center for Strategic & International Studies or the CATO Institute.
The problem is, the “data” that these outlets have been relying on is deeply flawed.
One of the major sources is the Prosecution Project, an initiative of the University of Cincinnati, which analyzes felony criminal cases involving political violence and sorts them by ideology. “The project examines criminal complaints, indictments and court records, looking for crimes that seek ‘a socio-political change or to communicate’ to outside audiences,” per The Economist. “Its data show that extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”
Yet if you pull up the data center yourself, you can see immediately that it is deeply flawed.
The data set doesn’t include either of the previous two assassination attempts on President Trump’s life, as far as I can tell; a search for the time frame and the names of the would-be assassins turns up zero hits. Nor does it include the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The data set is based on prosecutions, which might explain the absence of Thomas Crooks, who died at Butler. But what explains the absence of Trump’s other would-be assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, or Tyler Robinson, who killed Charlie Kirk? I couldn’t find Elias Rodriguez on the list either, who shot and killed two people outside the Jewish Museum in D.C. in May of 2025 to protest the war in Gaza.
It’s pretty easy to say that the violence is coming overwhelmingly from the Right if you overwhelmingly edit out any political violence from the Left.
The editing goes deep. During the summer of 2020, the George Floyd riots were in full swing. Political violence claimed the lives of dozens of Americans and caused $2 billion in property damage. Yet the data set from the Prosecution Project lists a grand total of five incidents “left wing” incidents that summer, two of them “eco-animal focused,” meaning it counts just three incidents of left-wing violence during that time.
Compare this to a list compiled by Forbes of 19 people who lost their lives during the first 14 days of George Floyd riots. Why don’t these people merit a mention in the Prosecution Project? They were killed during a politically motivated explosion of violence and rioting. These were, to cite the Project’s own criteria, “crimes that seek ‘a socio-political change or to communicate’ to outside audiences.” Yet they do not appear in the dataset.
Surely we can all agree that their omission massively skews the data.
Maybe you think that people murdered during political riots shouldn’t count as victims of political violence. But what about a meth dealer who happens to belong to the Aryan Brotherhood? Should their meth dealing count as political violence?
The Prosecution Project thinks so! Among the Right-wing examples it makes sure to include, you’ll find an Aryan Brotherhood meth gang that merited 10 entries for drug-related crimes. I’m no fan of the Aryan Brotherhood, but can you honestly say this is an example of Right-wing political violence? In what world does producing meth constitute “crimes that seek ‘a socio-political change or to communicate’ to outside audiences”?
You can also find people on the list who did things like vandalize an LGBTQ crosswalk—though not people who vandalized entire neighborhoods in 2020 in the name of racial justice.
Is vandalism political violence? I guess only if you’re conservative.
The Prosecution Project also counts every time and every person who blocked access to an abortion clinic.
You may not agree with blocking access to an abortion clinic, but a tally of political violence that counts those instances and not Charlie Kirk’s assassination is deeply, deeply flawed.
And amidst a historic rise in massive political violence against ICE agents, the data set records a grand total of six cases of left-wing violence for the first year of Trump’s second term.
I couldn’t find a complete dataset for the CSIS graphs, yet in their methodology, they note some glaring absences. For starters, the information it cites is culled from data provided by the ADL, which “uses public records such as media reports and police filings to reach their numbers,” and the Southern Poverty Law Center—the same organization that was just indicted for actually manufacturing the racist violence it was “chronicling.” Needless to say, if you are relying on the media, wildly skewed to favor the Left, for your data set, it’s not data; it’s propaganda.
Moreover, even when acknowledging that left-wing political violence is on the rise, CSIS admits it went out of its way to absolve the Left of even more violence. In a recent report, it excluded pro-Palestinian terrorism from the Left, reclassifying it as “ethnonationalist incidents rather than left-wing ones,” despite the Palestinian cause becoming the most important litmus test for belonging on the Left these days.
This is just a naked attempt to absolve the Left of a signature issue because that issue inspires violence and the people tallying up the crimes want the Left to win.
The report also excluded the massive anti-Tesla terrorism of last year, and it refused to include any of the anti-ICE political violence across the nation we saw over the last year, arguing that these incidents “did not reach a level of violence” that satisfied their criteria. I just don’t understand that. It is a textbook example of trying to change politics through acts of violence.
This is far from an exhaustive list of the way the Left cooks the books when it comes to its tabulations of where political violence is coming from. Others have done a great job of showing the limitations of the CATO research, which you can find at this thread.
Suffice it to say, it’s enough to make any honest broker truly suspicious of what they’re seeing out there as “data.”
The truth is obvious to anyone without an agenda: The bullets are only flying in one direction, and it’s Left to Right.
One of the common tricks for such data sets is to count violence by white prison gangs as right-wing, but somehow violence by black or Hispanic prison gangs doesn’t count as left-wing.
I am a data geek and my first instinct is always to check the data. Let me pick the base year and I can win any argument.