Political Violence and the Willful Self-Deception of the Left

This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire

By John R. Lott Jr.

Violence motivated by political differences has emerged as a defining, if alarming, feature of 21^st -century American civil life. Neither side in our nation’s increasingly dangerous ideological divide has a monopoly. But one side, the Democratic Party and its allies, refuses to acknowledge the increase in mayhem from the left.

This is true even in the face of the campus assassination of beloved conservative activist Charlie Kirk – or the very public attack against a televised banquet featuring the president of the United States in a ballroom room full of politicians and journalists.

On Sunday, well after authorities released Cole Tomas Allen’s anti-Trump administration screed, former President Barack Obama posted on X that the attacker’s motive remained unclear. Actually, Allen’s writings made his radical leftist views perfectly clear, along with his rage against conservatives and President Trump himself.

This brought to mind ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s stubborn insistence that Tyler Robinson, the man arrested for shooting Charlie Kirk was part of “the MAGA gang.” He wasn’t, of course. His own mother told investigators that her son, who was in a relationship with a gay man transitioning to female, had “become more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”

But willful self-deception has become a default position for liberals, who have convinced themselves for years that political violence is the province of the far right. It might still be, as some claim that might be the case of one Minnesota’s couple murder and another wounded in their homes, though the murderer had hundreds of  “No Kings” flyers and was appointed to advisory boards by two different Democrat governors. But the arson and violence that accompanied many of the George Floyd riots; the Lafayette Square riot near the White House, where more than 150 law enforcement officers were injured; the fire-bombings and attacks on pro-life facilities following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision; the plot to kidnap and kill  Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the 2024 ambush murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson – all came from the left.

On Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, whose own vitriolic rhetoric has been aimed at the president, whether he had any second thoughts in the wake of third assassination attempt against Trump. Raskin has repeatedly labeled Trump as “authoritarian” and exhibiting “fascism” and declared that Trump wants “to be a dictator.”

Raskin seemed surprised by the question and responded by doubling down: “The authoritarianism like we saw on display in Minneapolis where two of our citizens were gunned down in streets simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. Renee Good, Alex Pretti. And others have died in custody.”

This response not only ducked the question about whether elected Democrats’ intemperate rhetoric is spurring fringe Americans to violence, it also misstated the facts. Renee Good struck an officer with her car and ignored verbal orders from an officer. Alex Pretti put himself between officers and people they were trying to arrest, disobeyed orders from officers to stop, got into a physical confrontation with officers, and was carrying a gun.

Raskin isn’t alone. Democrat after Democrat seems incapable of discussing whether their own incendiary rhetoric has caused violence. After Saturday night’s frightening attack at the Washington Hilton, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries was asked about his comments urging Democrats to “maximum warfare” in the gerrymandering battles. “I don’t give a damn about the criticism,” he said. “Get lost.”

Even more bizarrely, Jeffries invoked the fire-bombing of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion while Josh Shapiro and his family were home and said Republicans should get their own house in order. But Shapiro’s attacker, who pleaded guilty, cited left-wing talking points about Gaza and his motivation.

This kind of confusion comes even from those who should know better. A frequently cited source used by the media to try to show that most violence is from the “right” is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Its latest annual report claims, “This is the third year in a row that right-wing extremists have been connected to all identified extremist-related killings.” According to the ADL, between 2022 and 2024 there were 34 so-called “right-wing extremists” murderers, with 23 of them (68%) carried out by white supremacists. They say those attacks took 61 lives.

Claiming that all the extremist murders are by “right-wingers” sounds dramatic, and the ADL report received extensive uncritical news coverage in media outlets including CNN, The Economist, and PBS. But it’s untrue. None of the cases listed by the ADL involved a right-winger murdering a political target.

Serious questions surround how the ADL defines “right-wing extremists.” Does it always classify all white supremacists as “right-wing”? Does it automatically label every mass murderer who targets a gay bar as a “right-winger”? At the ADL, the answer appears to be yes.

Consider Payton Gendron, the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooter who murdered 10 black shoppers. The ADL labeled him a right-wing extremist because of his racism. However, his own writings complicate that characterization. Gendron said he hated black people because he believed they had too many children, which he thought harmed the environment. In his manifesto, he identified himself as an “eco-fascist national socialist” and even called himself part of the “mild-moderate authoritarian left.”

Or take Anderson Lee Aldrich, who murdered five people at Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs, in 2022. The ADL classified him as a right-wing extremist because he targeted LGBT people. Yet Aldrich identified as nonbinary and used they/them pronouns – facts the ADL left out of its framing. Those identifiers are hardly the hallmarks of right-wing ideology, especially when the ADL itself emphasizes the “LGBTQ+” nature of the venue.

Meanwhile, the ADL conveniently leaves other mass shooters off its list entirely:

• In 2022, transgender shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale attacked the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, and murdered six people. In her writings, she raged against “white privilege,” vowed she wanted to “kill all you little crackers,” and resented the wealth of the students at the school. The Nashville Police report also noted her support for gun control.
• Robert Crimo murdered seven people in Highland Park, Illinois, in 2022. He made no secret of his hostility toward Trump.
• In 2023, Connor Sturgeon murdered five people in Louisville, Kentucky. He had previously praised the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and posted sharp criticism of police violence and Donald Trump.
• That same year, Kimbrady Carriker murdered five people in Philadelphia. Carriker supported Black Lives Matter, wore women’s clothes, and called for defunding the police.

These crimes claimed a total of 38 lives. Yet the ADL claims that people on the left committed none.

The ADL also makes other questionable assumptions. The Aryan Brotherhood, a white gang with roots in the California prison system, is certainly racist, but it has no political ideology beyond racism and making money through racketeering, drug trafficking, and murder. None of the Aryan Brotherhood murders the ADL cites were politically motivated. Most involved disputes with other gang members, or in one case, the killing of a two-year-old girl the perpetrator had sexually assaulted, and in another, the murder of an 11-year-old girl living on the same property. Removing these cases cuts six murders from the ADL’s tally.

Three of the murderers were neo-Nazis, who murdered one person each. They are again classified as right-wingers based on their being racist even though they are “national socialists.” But again, none of these murders had anything to do with anyone’s political views, with one murdering his aunt.

Other cases are listed as right-wing because the perpetrators held antisemitic views. But given the recent anti-Israel riots, those views can hardly be considered right-wing. One of the killers, tied to QAnon and anti-vaccine beliefs, murdered his wife. Another case involved a man who beat his five-year-old to death. Why do any of these killings qualify as a political murder?

If we exclude the Payton Gendron and Anderson Lee Aldrich shootings, along with the Aryan Brotherhood murders – but still include neo-Nazis and other debatable cases – the numbers show roughly as many “left-wing” murders as “right-wing” ones. The media treats the ADL’s selective definitions and exclusions seriously only because they support a political narrative rather than reflect the full reality.

Regardless of how one counts the cases, left-wing violence remains a serious problem – undoubtedly the most serious.

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