Political Violence in America Is a Far-Right Problem, Not a Left-Wing One

Despite Trump’s claims, decades of research prove that far-right extremists, not progressives, are overwhelmingly responsible for U.S. political violence.

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Following the assassination of far-right influencer Charlie Kirk, prominent Republican figures have pushed claims that liberals are responsible for the majority of politically motivated violence in the United States. President Donald Trump told reporters during a September 15 press briefing that “the radical left causes tremendous violence, and they seem to do it in a bigger way.” His Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, further alleged that U.S. progressive groups constitute “a vast domestic terror movement.”

Further cementing the purported association between the so-called “radical left” and ideological violence, Trump signed an executive order this week declaring antifa as a “terrorist organization” (even though it’s not actually an organization). He has threatened a coming EO targeting left-wing groups more broadly.

“The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists… must be stopped,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday. “I will be signing an Executive Order this week to dismantle these Domestic Terrorism Networks.”

As the president ramps up his attacks on his avowed political opponents, the vast majority of research indicates that the pretense behind his administration’s campaign is untrue. Although researchers on gun violence say that politically motivated attacks in the U.S. remain fairly rare, the vast majority of such violence is not the result of left-wing actors. When politically motivated attacks do occur, experts say they are largely the result of far-right ideologies.

Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, says that the lion’s share of political violence in the U.S. comes from “white supremacist, anti-government organizations.” The Montgomery, Alabama nonprofit’s most recent data shows that there are 1,371 such groups currently operating domestically.

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“When there have been disruptive actions on what we would call the left in the United States, those have primarily been related to property destruction,” Carroll Rivas tells Queer Agenda. “The right is generally an all-means-necessary movement, and those means include manipulation and force. We see that in what we document from particularly neo-Nazi, militia-style organizations, who are more focused on direct action as their tactic and are advocating violence.”

The Reality of Political Violence

Although it can be difficult to determine the motivations of bad actors, most reputable studies on the subject strongly suggest that political violence is far more common on the right than on the left. Data released earlier this month from the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, examining 50 years of terrorist incidents — beginning in 1975 — indicates that these attacks are six times more likely to be motivated by far-right, authoritarian ideologies than leftist ideals. When excluding the September 11 attacks, the organization found that left-wing actors were responsible for just 10% of all political violence on U.S. soil.

This pattern holds true even when examining only our current era. Research from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that every single extremist murder committed in 2024 was perpetrated by a far-right actor: Eight were white supremacists, while five were anti-government. “This is the third year in a row that right-wing extremists have been connected to all identified extremist-related killings,” the ADL’s data notes.

As the Trump administration attempts to scapegoat the left for political violence, the White House has purposefully attempted to hide the link between the right and ideologically motivated attacks. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) archived its own internal research finding that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.” The DOJ’s 2024 report found far-right political violence to be five times as common as attacks from the left.

Mark Bryant, founding executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, finds the Trump administration’s insistence — against its own evidence — that liberals are solely responsible for violence to be highly contradictory. “They have a little cognitive dissonance going on: that the left wing is a bunch of wusses and then on the other side of that, they’re the ones causing all the violence,” he tells Queer Agenda. “ There’s no statistics to support that.”

The GOP’s naked attempt to obfuscate the reality of political violence extends to the trans community, Bryant notes. Although the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation is reportedly attempting to pressure the Federal Bureau of Investigation to classify trans people and their supporters as “nihilistic violent extremists,” trans Americans are responsible for very few of the attacks in the Gun Violence Archives’ database. Of all 450,000 mass shootings that have occurred in the last 10 years, Bryant says that just 22 of the perpetrators were trans. That’s just .004%.

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Trans people are far more likely to be the targets of violence than the cause, as the data shows. A 2024 report from the Williams Institute, a pro-LGBTQ+ think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that trans people are four times as likely as the general population to be victimized by a violent crime. Since 2013, more than 370 trans people have lost their lives to violence, per the Human Rights Campaign.

“It’s very, very frustrating that they will just make up numbers,” Bryant says of far-right attempts to paint trans people as disproportionately violent. “It doesn’t matter how much you prove them wrong.”

How to Curb Gun Violence

Experts believe that falsifying the root causes of America’s epidemic of violence — and particularly gun violence — will make these issues more difficult to address. As the American right continues to point the finger at the other side, what is seldom recognized is that a preponderance of violence in the U.S. has no political motivation at all. For instance, the majority of domestic mass shootings (defined as crimes involving four or more victims) are actually acts of domestic partner violence, in which a shooter targets their family members. Most children killed in mass shootings are murdered not in their schools or classrooms but by a family member, according to a Stanford Medicine analysis.

Daniel Webster, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says this pattern of violence is “remarkably common,” but it doesn’t capture the public attention as often as headline-grabbing news like Kirk’s death. “Most of these are people who have some grievance,” he tells Queer Agenda. “Obviously, they have access to firearms. Mental health plays a role in probably about a third of them.”

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Rather than scapegoating, Webster believes that U.S. leaders need to focus on tangible policy solutions to curb the country’s gun violence problem. Although gun deaths have declined slightly since their 2021 peak — when an estimated 21,383 Americans lost their lives to gun violence — he says that the fact remains that the U.S. has “more firearms and the weakest gun laws among high-income nations.” Nearly every single state has a higher rate of deaths from gun violence than the majority of foreign countries do.

Creating good gun policies, Webster says, would target high-capacity magazines, which allow shooters to fire a greater number of shots before they reload, and accessories that are used to “turn a semi-automatic gun into something that fires like an automatic gun.” He also advocates for requiring a license prior to firearm ownership, as data shows that many shooters acquire a gun shortly before committing violent acts. Licensure requirements typically slow down firearm acquisition by mandating a slower process involving a background check, fingerprinting, and even gun safety training.

“Licensing suppresses violence from firearms, as does bans on large-capacity magazines,” he says. “The weaponry matters.”