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| Lorie Shaull/Flickr/CC BY 2.0 |
The rot in the so-called data pushed by leftist scholars studying political violence gets worse the deeper you dig.
Even before Charlie Kirk had been pronounced dead, the narrative apparatus of the Left was in full gear trying to blame the assassination on the Right. Once it became clear that the shooter was a standard-issue leftist, the narrative shifted to “this is a both-sides problem.” But before Kirk had been laid the rest, the experts and researchers had been mobilized to assert that the original claims, if not accurate, were consistent with a pattern in which political violence in America is largely a right-wing problem. Having spent my career in academia sopping up such unctuous claims, let me assure you that this is complete nonsense. Political violence in America is mostly a problem of the Left.
Begin with some bright, shining facts. There were two assassination attempts against President Trump in the recent election and none against his opponents. The California gunman arrested outside Brett Kavanaugh’s home in 2022 planned to assassinate three conservative Supreme Court justices, not any liberal ones. Attempts on the lives of members of Congress this century have resulted in one Republican (Steve Scalise) and one Democrat (Gabby Giffords) suffering serious injuries.
The most recent violence against elected politicians — the murder of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the serious injuring of State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife in June — was committed by a deranged loner with no political motives, despite efforts by the Left to portray it as a political act of the Right.
As for violent political assaults on government operations, there have been three main occurrences in recent years. One was the left-wing Women’s March assaults during the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018 on both the Capitol (227 arrests) and then the Supreme Court (164 arrests); the second was the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots against police, courthouses, and local government and business across the country, resulting in over 10,000 local arrests and over 300 federal charges brought, in addition to dozens of assaults on police (including the killing of Bothel, Washington officer Jonathan Shoop in 2020, five Dallas police officers in 2016, and two New York cops in their squad car in Brooklyn in 2014) by BLM activists. There was also one targeted killing of a BLM counter-protester in my hometown of Portland. The third was the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol (1,575 arrests) in which one police officer and one protester (who was a Trump supporter) died. It was the BLM riots, not the Jan. 6 insurrection, that came first, normalizing political violence in the U.S.
Let’s add an even brighter fact to the mix. The overwhelmingly greatest source of political murder in the United States (80 to 90 percent of deaths depending on how you measure) is committed by Islamic radicals, motivated by some toxic mixture of hatred of the United States, hatred of Israel and the Jews, and support for the fiction called Palestine.
Take your pick of Islamic horrors over the last decade — 14 people killed at an office holiday party in San Bernardino, 49 killed in an Orlando nightclub, 14 dead on Bourbon Street — to highlight this overt threat. While the Left does not openly align itself with Islamic radicalism, its elected members like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib play down the Islamic threat and excuse atrocities against Israel. President Biden’s declaration in 2023 that “white supremacy” rather than Islamic radicalism was the main terrorist threat in the United States was borderline treason. The murder of two Israeli diplomats in DC this year by a left-wing activist from Chicago was a predictable result. Attempts to portray Islamic violence as “non-partisan” fail the laugh test. I have never seen a Hamas flag or heard “Death to America” at a conservative gathering.
When Violence is a Feature, Not a Flaw
More generally, the culture of political violence is overwhelmingly a culture of the Left. The belief that “justice” requires the forceful dismantling of “the system,” whether through “revolution” or through “civil disobedience,” is as central to the DNA of the Left as is the countervailing belief in the preservation of ordered rule on the Right.
Today’s ongoing assaults on ICE agents (including the attack in Dallas on Sept. 25 that killed two detainees with bullets inscribed “Anti-ICE”) show that violence is a feature, not a flaw of left-wing politics in America, just as the violent groups the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers were in the 1960s.
This taps into a more general romanticization of political violence by canonical figures of left-wing thought like Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara, central figures whose writings are forced onto our young people by professors even today. President Obama invited a black rapper to the White House, whose album featured a dead white judge on the cover that resembled Ronald Reagan. Luigi Mangione is a folk hero on the left for his politically motivated murder of a health care executive in New York City. The currently running movie One Battle After Another features actor Leonardo DiCaprio as a superannuated revolutionary who regains his mojo by taking up arms against nefarious forces in government that ring like sad attempts to reflect the Trump administration.
There is no parallel on the Right — no t-shirts celebrating the legacy of Timothy McVeigh, no movies that romanticize the Klan. The fact is that the Left has a political violence problem; the Right does not.
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