There’s a graphic circulating on social media. It indicates that left-wing political violence occurs at a much smaller rate than does right-wing political violence, and it was published in The Economist, a generally trustworthy source. Since I don’t have a subscription and couldn’t read the article, when I saw it I had only the graphic to go on. Even so, it struck me as probably accurate.
Although there have been very troubling instances of left-wing violence, including Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week, it makes sense to me that the overall threat would be higher from the right—from abortion-clinic bombings, and from attacks by white supremacists, and because of the close ties between the right wing and gun culture. I have also heard warnings over the past decade about a rise in far-right violence after Trump entered politics. That rise is visible in the chart, followed by a decline under Biden.
Still, I am wary of things I see on social media, especially things that confirm my own assumptions. I did more digging to see if the graphic was correct.
Searching for other sources on political violence, I found a good article from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The libertarian angle gave it extra points from me—I was looking for perspectives that might balance what my liberal friends had been saying.
Alex Nowrasteh, the writer, published this piece on the day after Charlie Kirk’s murder. Focusing on deaths from political violence, he begins his dataset in 1975 and carries it up to the present. And here I found surer confirmation of what I had heard: at least in term of deaths, the threat of right-wing political violence is far greater in the United States than that of left-wing violence. The other main threat, historically, has been Islamist violence—but when 9/11 is excluded from the data, the number of political deaths from Islamist violence is nearly tripled by those from the right. Since 1975, excluding 9/11, 141 political deaths were caused by Islamists and 391 by right-wingers.
Compared to either right-wing or Islamist violence, the impact of left-wing violence has been far smaller, at just 65 deaths since 1975. In the last five years, the proportions have changed: deaths caused by right-wingers still take the lead at 44, followed by left-wingers at 18 (presumably now 19, including Charlie Kirk) and Islamists at 15. In other words, left-wing violence seems to be on the rise, but only relatively speaking. And it is still dwarfed by right-wing violence.
What do these data mean? Nowrasteh’s main message is that political violence, overall, is rare in our country. From 2020 to 2025, all deaths from political violence accounted for just 0.07 percent of U.S. violent deaths—only 7 out of every 10,000 people killed. But a secondary takeaway, more relevant now than on the day Nowrasteh published his article, is that the political left is significantly less violent than the right.
That doesn’t mean left-wing violence is unimportant, or that political violence in general is unimportant. Such violence has an outsized, chilling impact on democracy, and it must always be strongly condemned and prosecuted. What the numbers do mean, however, is that the Trump administration is being false and disingenuous in using the threat of left-wing violence as an excuse to silence their opposition.
Over the last several days, in the wake of Kirk’s killing, Trump and his allies have predictably lashed out in anger at the left. Their response has been deeply troubling from a democracy and free-speech perspective. Using Kirk’s death as a pretext, they are now threatening a sweeping crackdown on liberal groups in general, even though most liberal groups and leaders swiftly condemned Kirk’s assassination. As Stephen Miller said:
With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.
In an echo of McCarthyism, the administration is encouraging people to report on immigrants, fellow citizens, teachers, professors, and left-wing leaders who appear at all unsympathetic about Kirk’s death, or even just critical of Kirk’s perspectives, so that the accused may face firing or legal action.
The hypocrisy is staggering and painful to watch. Trump’s movement has always claimed to embrace free speech, branding itself as a contrast to left-wing cancel culture—and yet here they are, enthusiastically canceling and even prosecuting people for legal speech they find distasteful. Perhaps, if their net were far narrower and they themselves did not use violent rhetoric, their actions might be more justified. But the net is quite broad, and Trump himself has often engaged in speech far uglier and more violent than that of many people he is going after. He has variously pardoned, joked about, or shrugged off political violence when that violence has come from the right. He and his administration thus have no leg to stand on in persecuting left-wing speech—even without considering that such pursuit is generally blatantly unconstitutional. This is a naked authoritarian power grab.
As The Guardian reported:
The weaponization of Kirk’s death is so alarming that even one of Trump’s former allies is rattled. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host…recently issued a stark warning about the way that the Trump administration appears to be leveraging Kirk’s murder to trample civil liberties.
“You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we’re seeing in the aftermath of [Kirk’s] murder won’t be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country,” Carlson said on Wednesday during an episode of his podcast.
“And trust me, if it is, if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that, ever…. Because if they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think … There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human.”
Senator Ted Cruz has also spoken out in alarm.
Trump’s escalated crackdown had not yet begun by the time Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh had published his article on political violence, but the crackdown was easy to predict given Trump’s authoritarian history. As Nowrasteh wrote back then, before Kirk’s killer had even been caught:
“The big fear from politically motivated terrorism is that the pursuit of justice will overreach, result in new laws and policies that overreact to the small threat, and end up killing far more people while diminishing all our freedoms. This is the major lesson from the government’s overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“The government can and should vigorously pursue justice for Kirk and all the others murdered by politically motivated terrorists, but it can and should do so without new political witch hunts, expanded government powers, and a revived war on terrorism. Furthermore, we should all at least realize how uncommon politically motivated terrorism is.”
Of course, no one in Trump’s circle is heeding this caution.
What’s happening is thus a grave injustice, one wrong leading to another: first Kirk’s horrific murder, and now a noose tightening over dissident speech across America. I have lost a great deal of sleep worrying about it all.
More disturbing to me than Trump’s attacks on free speech is the complacency with which his supporters are accepting and rationalizing his actions. They seem not to realize that much of the speech being punished is not violent at all, and that if you only support speech you agree with, you don’t support free speech. And today’s right-wing canceling and censorship is far more dangerous than left-wing cancel culture has ever been—because now it’s coming directly from the federal government.
The big question in my mind has been: What can we do about it? What can I do?
A couple days ago, alarmed and wanting to do something, I wrote a Facebook post. I have been more active than usual on Facebook since Kirk’s assassination. In this post, I was responding to Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension—on Tuesday, his show was yanked unexpectedly off the air for comments he’d made about Kirk’s death.
I am no longer a fan of Kimmel or Late Night, which I consider a destructive influence along the lines of Fox News. When I saw Kimmel’s comments after he was suspended, I found them misinformed and tasteless: he had implied that someone from MAGA had killed Kirk, when for days it had been apparent that the killer likely hailed from the left. (The left-wing echo chamber was full of rumors about the killer being a white supremacist—but by Saturday, Axios and other sources had reported on his transgender roommate and his recent shift to the left.)
Despite disliking Kimmel’s comments, I was still incensed over his suspension, just as I was incensed over Kirk’s killing. The two are not the same—Kimmel is obviously still alive—but both fall under the umbrella of attacks on free speech. Both men had the constitutional right to say things others found offensive. Kimmel’s suspension is blatant censorship, especially in the context of the various heinous things that right-wing pundits and leaders, including Trump himself, have said about political violence—for example, when Donald Trump Jr. mocked Paul Pelosi as he lay in a hospital bed after an attack by a far-right conspiracy theorist, or when Donald Trump himself retweeted a video stating that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” In comparison, Kimmel’s comments were benign.
I had been largely sharing more positive things on Facebook this week, but in my post about Kimmel I was fiery. I challenged Kirk’s grieving supporters to stand up for free speech, saying that I shared their outrage about Kirk’s death, and that they should be outraged about this injustice too. My post got likes and comments.
But I discovered, to my consternation, that something began curdling in me after I posted it. I felt conflicted about it, but I couldn’t pinpoint why. What I had said was true, wasn’t it? It felt righteous, and it had seemed important to say.
Eventually I landed on what felt wrong. My outrage was appropriate, but in the heat of my passion, I had not only expressed myself but had called for others to be outraged alongside me. I had thus fanned the flames of political anger, at a time when that anger is already burning hot.
Although what I had said was technically correct, it was not wise. It had been okay, even good, to share my feelings and thoughts—but I now wished I had done so in some different way.
A few days after creating the post, I archived it, something I don’t think I’ve ever done before. I am still upset about Kimmel, but it was a relief to take the post down.
Over the past week and a half, I have greatly admired the leadership of people across the left-right spectrum who have been calling for wisdom and compassion in this time of crisis. I think everyone should watch Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s moving speech from the day Kirk’s assassin was arrested:
I also highly recommend this pitch-perfect video by Senator Bernie Sanders:
Alexandra Hudson, creator of Civic Renaissance and one of many strong voices in the civility movement, wrote a post on her website called “A Call to Courage, Not to Violence.” In it she shares statements from several journalists across the left-right divide, including writers from the New York Times, the right-leaning website The Dispatch, and the Marxist Jacobin Magazine. These and many other voices are courageously urging Americans to turn to our better angels instead of fueling the flames of outrage.
This is how the Axis of Democracy works. It’s about unity, across the left-right spectrum, to protect core values like freedom of speech. It requires solidarity and tolerance—and it also requires working to cool the temperature, even when outrage is justified. This is something we all can do.
Each of us has daily choices in how we respond to and talk about what’s happening, even choices as small as what we say to those around us and what we share on social media. “History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country,” said Spencer Cox in his speech on the day after Charlie Kirk died. “But every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.”
I want to be one of the people cooling the temperature, not fanning the flames.
I don’t know what the offramp is for our national crisis. I fear that our tension will escalate before it cools. There is something ominous in the air; I worry about more violence, from either side, and about more retaliation from Trump. But we have to try to cool things down anyway. We have to try.
This is our mandate now, if we have it in us to engage. Not to “just be nice”—civility requires more than that—and not just to fester in our angry echo chambers. Instead, we are called to keep communicating while striving to see each other’s humanity. As a curtain seems to fall over America and darkness threatens, I cannot see another way forward that has any hope in it. I think this is the only possible way out.
