Are "both sides" really to blame for political violence?

How Biased Data and Ideological Excuses Fuel Left-Wing Terrorism, from Charlie Kirk’s Assassination to BLM Riots

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has ignited an online dispute over the nature of violence and terrorism in the United States. The Left insists that the shooter was a Republican, while the Right counters—correctly—that he was not. The Left argues that political violence is primarily a right-wing phenomenon, or at best claims that “both sides” are equally culpable. The Right, however, contends that it is the Left which bears the greater share of responsibility for political violence.

As of September 16th, most Americans appear to align with the leftist narrative, either believing the shooter may have been a Groyper Republican or expressing uncertainty. By September 17th, I expect the picture to shift somewhat, but the dominant framing remains that political violence is either a “both sides” issue or primarily the fault of the Right.

Thus, I will first explore the left’s claim that “ackshually its the right which is more violent” and then present a logical and empirically sound case for why one side—namely, the Left—is predominantly responsible.

Here are two main statistical examples that I will look over and debunk before establishing my case:

Prosecution Project:

I will start off with Owen Winter’s data which comes from the Prosecution Project as it is more professional.

Now, the Prosecution Project is an archive designed to trace and evaluate high-level criminal prosecutions of politically motivated violence and so it has some authority in terms of tracking political extremism that should not be dismissed out of hand.

Nonetheless, just like the subsequent source for political extremism (literally the ADL lol), it is plagued with methodological issues. The first fundamental issue with this chart is that, you’d believe that 2018-2019 were the most politically violent years in America and 2020 was when the violence has started to decrease while the last two years have been really peaceful.

This contradicts multiple independent data sources. For once Peter Turchin has quantified the number of political assassinations in the United States since 1850s, showing that the late 2010s were relatively peaceful, whereas post-BLM America, particularly the last two years, has been the most violent.

However, actual data paints a completely different picture. Political violence really explodes at around 2020.

2020 was the year of BLM riots, of mass looting, of destroying the property of White people, of anarchists from CHAZ killing people left and right and blocking the police from investigating, causing up to 2 billion in insurance damages overall. Yet, for some weird reason, the Prosecution Project’s database includes only one incident of left wing violence in the entire year of 2020 (even though 19 people were killed during BLM riots). If you went with their data, you’d assume that 2020 was another year of right-wing violence, but overall much more peaceful than 2019 and 2018 (the year of peak political violence in America).

That is because, in 2020 the left has gotten a permission structure to engage in violence on a mass scale which they have proceeded to do during the BLM riots. But the people running Prosecution Project as well as the people citing them to advance the thesis that the Right is more violent do not believe that the 2020 BLM riots have constituted an act of domestic terrorism because they agree with their message.

So right off the bat, if you are running a database and you’re including the most politically violent year of the 21st century post 9/11 because you are sympathizing with the goals of the BLM movement, you are not running a serious database, you are running a political operation.

The second issue is, what even passes for right wing extremism?

The data significantly inflates the appearance of right-wing violence. For example, if a person belongs to a white nationalist group and commits a homicide unrelated to politics, that act is nevertheless counted in the statistics as right-wing violence. Cases like this are all over the place.

Other cases of what constitutes right wing terrorism are no-less amusing being; road rage, insurance fraud and sovereign citizens are all classified as right-wing terrorism simply because they disliked BLM. Nobody died, yet supposedly that is equal to killing Charlie Kirk or attempting to kill Nick Fuentes and Donald Trump.

Btw, notice how they are charging those resisting BLM protestors with hate-crimes and terrorism while completely ignoring the BLM riots which were the most violent riots in the 21st century.

As

Cremieux

has remarked:

I checked the database to see if the racially motivated murder of Iryna Zarutska was included and, unsurprisingly, found it was not. And guess what else wasn’t? That’s right! Neither any of the last two mass-killings committed by transgenders (with a manifesto!) and of course, most importantly, the murder of Charlie Kirk. But also guess what was included in the data base?

A Jewish supremacist Mordechai Brafman shooting up two other Jews because he thought they were Palestinians. This is what passes for Right-Wing violence in America these days. So whenever the ADL complains about the rise of right-wing extremism in America, this is what you should keep in mind.

Nonetheless, even if we take this source for granted, it clearly shows that the left is responsible for most of the political violence in the past few years, directly contradicting previous claims.

ADL data:

Now let’s look at ADL’s database (which is even worse than the Prosecution Project’s database)

The first problem with citing the ADL is the selective credibility it’s granted. The same leftists—and even Wikipedia—reject the ADL as a reliable source on antisemitism or the Israel–Palestine conflict. Yet, when it comes to claims about right-wing violence, we are suddenly expected to accept their word without question.

The second problem, is that just like the previous source, it reports that 2020 and onwards were the most peaceful years since recording, but unlike the previous source, it believes that peak violence occurred in 2015-2016, as opposed to 2018-2019.

In other words, the ADL, just like the previous source, totally misses the bigger-picture, that political violence is actually increasing! Not decreasing! And so whoever is using the ADL as a proxy for measuring political violence is full of shit, because political violence has been steadily increasing since the early 2010s before exploding after the BLM riots.

The third problem is that just 58% of what classifies as extremist violence by the ADL is. And the fourth problem is that most of “right-wing violence” (at least for 2024) is non-political prison violence.

Finally, the fifth problem is that a significant portion of what is labeled ‘right-wing political violence’ is neither right-wing nor politically motivated. They’ll grab some chaotic street crime carried out by some Black man and then try to brand it as a right-wing killing. As Jonatan Pallesan correctly quotes:

"ROCHESTER, N.Y. — A parolee was charged with murder after Rochester police said he stabbed 42-year-old Antoine Parris to death on Thursday night.

RPD said Lequan Hill, 29, got into an argument with family members on Frost Ave near Olean Street. According to police, Parris was trying to break apart an argument when Hill stabbed him five times in the neck and body.

If our cameras were allowed inside the court, you would have seen a murder suspect screaming profanities at the judge and his lawyer claiming he was a sovereign citizen and they have no authority over him

Mr. Parris had nothing to do with the argument, wasn’t involved in the argument with the defendant at all, was merely trying to be a good samaritan, a peacekeeper, and was literally in the wrong place at the wrong time trying to do the right thing.

Here’s what we know about Hill. He has three prior violent felony convictions including burglary and robbery. He was released from prison in September and put on parole."

Few of these crimes are actually politically motivated. The people at ADL simply hate a certain political group and as a consequence they implicate it with violence.

Business Insider wrote a whole piece about, but I’ll just cite one example from it. The people at the Business Insider checked the ADL’s methodology and recalculated White supremacist violence to be almost 4 times as less as the ADL claimed.

However, they have simply checked their data-base instead of creating their own, which has severely undercounted left-wing political violence, because the ADL is principally blind to including left-wing political violence unless it’s done by pro-Palestinians.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what they had to say about Luigi Mangione:

So who is committing most of the political violence?

Having dismantled the Left’s assertion that the Right bears primary responsibility for recent political extremism, we can now turn to the broader question: are both sides equally prone to violence and assassination? What drives such acts, and why does one side appear disproportionately responsible for them? What are the structural and ideological motivations for one side to disproportionately engage in crime and excuse it?