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Lies, Damn Lies, and X
A lot of conversation after the Charlie Kirk assassination has revolved around whether the left or right wing is more violent. See here, here, here, here, and here (this one an actual politician, Rep. Seth Moulton). I won't belabor the point by finding everyone with a blue checkmark that's said something on the subject recently, I'll just say it's a conversation that is happening. Much of the conversation revolves around repeating a claim made by the usual suspects (various left-wing think thanks, policy centers, and some from academia) that right-wing violence is significantly more likely than left-wing violence. See here ("“I think the data suggests that we should be taking right wing domestic terrorism way more seriously than many have done,” he said. “The ‘Fox News angle’ that Antifa is just as dangerous as the Proud Boys just doesn't hold up right now.”), here ("In both datasets we find that individuals and attacks associated with left-wing causes are less likely to be violent."), here ("Heritage Foundation leader wrong to say most political violence is committed by the left"), and so on. Many commentators will pull up graphs from the ADL or the Economist (I did see one using graphs from Reason magazine to my surprise), showing that no no, the right is more violent, see? The experts say so! This is, in a nutshell, the left-wing argument.
The right-wing argument is that these studies and articles consist almost exclusively of methodology errors that would make a first year polysci student blush, such as counting prison violence by the Aryan Brotherhood as right-wing political violence. This seemed... reasonable to me, but to my frustration it took a long time before I could actually find anyone publishing raw data that I could download and take a look at.
Enter The Prosecution Project, "a long-term, open-source intelligence research platform tracking and analyzing felony criminal cases involving political violence in the U.S. since 1990." All of their data is available for download online for free, which I promptly did. Thank you Prosecution Project, very cool. If anyone would like to check my work, there's the resources to do so. Many, not all but many, of the various articles being linked on X during this discussion, after a long and torturous path, lead back to either this database or a similar one. So I decided to do a little digging of my own, and see what I could find.
To fully state my biases before moving on, I am right-wing (shocker I know). But, and this is important, the right-wing argument made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Anything that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside gets my hackles up because I assume it means I am being lied to. Not necessarily on purpose, I am fairly sure most of the commenters on X espousing one side or the other fully believe their own arguments. I've found most people are usually wrong, not deceitful. Sometimes they are deceiving themselves by refusing to dig deeper and cocooning themselves in the soft blanket of ignorance, but I still consider that being wrong, not lying.
Anyway turns out the right was more-or-less correct, subject to a big caveat at the end.
I started by limiting myself to the last 20 years. First, because any American political violence data-set that includes 9/11 is inherently skewed. It's the outlier to end all outliers. Second, because I wanted it to be a nice round number and 25 years included 9/11. Thus, 20 years. From January 1, 2005 to the last data point in the set, 8/15/25. This left me with a table of 3874 entries. Holy cow that is a lot! Well first things first let's clean up the table a bit. I don't need most of the headers that the project has such as separate columns for full name, first name, last name, aliases, name of the case, jurisdiction, location county, location state, location city, whether the defendant was a federal informant (820 such instances for the curious), and so on. The very first case in the data-set was from January 6, 2005. It was an indictment for orchestrating the killings of three civil rights advocates in 1964.
Sigh.
Okay, let's filter out all indictments. I'm looking for acts of political violence that occurred between 01/01/2005 and 08/15/25. Not the slow wheel of justice grinding on to a then-40 year old crime. In fact let's limit the data set to actual crimes, attacks, and just in case "unknown/unclear" so as to also filter out pleas, complaints, arrests, arraignments, and sentencing. Now we're down to 453 incidents out of the original 3874. Wow that is a change.
Next I'll filter out "planned but not attempted" crimes. I really don't care about the FBI catching Syed Haris Ahmed's "conspir[acy] to join jihadist terrorist organization, Toronto 18, by providing them with material footage of the U.S. Capitol Building and the Canadian Parliament Building." Attempted, carried through, or unknown only. Down to 409 entries.
Next, since first I'll specifically be looking at what is termed right-wing violence, I'm going to, well, limit the table to the varieties of right-wing violence. Shockingly, of the 409 entries there are 194 coded as "right-wing". Almost half! Except, when I start going through the table, something jumps out at me. A group of black men beat up an elderly woman and her disabled son for not paying a "white person fee." I'm not joking, that's on the table. Rows 344-347. That's... not really what we're looking for so I'm going to take a bold step and filter out everyone who is not classified as white. Allow me to explain. The bailey with this claim is that there is a simmering undercurrent of white nationalist violence in the United States that the GOP is tapping into because they are all racist/xenophobic/homophobic/sexist Nazis just itching to break out the jackboots. 309 incidents left. Then remove "unknown/unclear" targets because a guy who was jammed up for lying about sending funds to a foreign terrorist organization is also not an act of political violence. Down to 307. Now actually filter by right-wing. Down to 113 rows. That seems like enough to start going through more individually. Filtering out things that look like gang violence, prison violence, domestic violence, anything that does not look like "right-wing white violence." This includes things like a 2008 bank robbery by someone who claimed the IRS seized his accounts after he didn't pay income tax, or a 2009 incident in which a man had a domestic incident with his mother and decided to go down shooting when the cops arrived. Then filtering out multiple rows for the same incident, I don't think that fire-bombing a mosque should be counted four times just because three other guys stood around and cheered. Also because leaving it in will fuck up my total casualties number. Filtering out a surprising number of incidents that appear to be run-of-the-mill unhinged people acting unhinged and sometimes shouting a slur while they do so, we're left with 41 incidents, for a total of 86 people harmed, broken down further into 19 killed and 67 injured.
Well, that's a pretty big drop. Now let's filter by left-wing affiliation and... 12 incidents, totaling 19 victims of which 6 were killed and 13 injured after doing roughly the same work there in terms of filtering out duplicates. Note, I did not need to do any kind of sanitizing of the left-wing incidents for DV, generic crazy people, etc. For whatever reason no incidents matching that descriptor appeared in the data-set. Possibly because the number of people who would shout "FAGGOT" at someone who cuts them off in traffic is significantly higher than the number of people who would shout "CISGENDERED WHITE MALE!" Possibly because the data collectors are biased. I'm not going to make a fuss of it since both possible explanations ring rather true to my ears.
Okay this post kinda got away from me. So to summarize. The right accuses the left of being more violent. The left accuses the right of being more violent. The data points at the right being more violent, but the right claims that the data is flawed. The claim of the data being flawed appears to be more-or-less correct, however, once that has been controlled for to the best of my ability the right does appear more violent generally. That said, 19 deaths over 20 years is less than 1 a year, and is being pulled up rather significantly by the Club Q shooting which claimed the lives of 5 people. I did not run into many incidents of prison violence in this particular dataset, but I believe that those are counted in other datasets. Ultimately it appears that for the most part, politically motivated violence is still extremely rare in the United States. I sincerely hope this stays true.
Edit: Upon further review of the data, my sanitizing methodology was flawed. Several real attacks, including the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting, and the 2015 Charleston Church shooting, were all included in the dataset under "indictment" instead of "crime/attack." Presumably this also affected the left-wing data as well though I haven't gone back and checked. A systematic review of the incidents, all 3800 of them, will reveal different numbers, though presumably in roughly the same overall ratio.
The media pushing this kind of analysis mostly misses the point. You could easily point out differences in base rates, gross issues with misreporting, whatever.
The fundamental problem is that most modern right wing violence is an accident of ideology committed by a fringe with little support. Condemnations are widespread, the people engaging it have been mostly grossly mentally ill, no leading figures are calling for it, no mainstream institutions are calling for it or supporting it (at least up until current events).
In contrast modern left wing violence is demanded and supported by mainstream institutions both directly and by implication. Histrionic rhetoric like "they are going to put us in camps" "literally Hitler" and so on are mainstream positions that are asserted publicly (including at work in some places) that demand and rationalize violent action. Sometimes it's even more direct than that "bash the fash" for instance.
It's a miracle that we haven't had more of it, although that time is likely ended now - and we've already quite a lot, much of which was violence at protest actions is unlikely to be adequately captured in the data.
Usually the response of the left to this sort of criticism is "well X fringe red tribe figure said Y" or "well Trump's rhetoric is divisive because blah blah."
No, no that is not the same as what the left is saying - it's mainstream, blunt, pervasive in multiple domains and in blue tribe milieus almost completely unopposed.
I appreciate the effort to do a data driven approach but it is pointless, and buys into the left's frame, totally missing the heart of the issue and would be required to find solutions.
Trump literally pardoned people who beat up cops
Some of them had a history of rape, manslaughter, possession of child porn, didn't matter. If a rapist beat up a cop, he was still pardoned
Domestic abuser with history of attacking cops throws a bomb? Acceptable behavior apparently.
Most Jan 6th protestors were peaceful and were never even arrested yet alone convicted, that is true. It's true of basically every group, something I've said since forever. Most people are peaceful.
But not every single one. Why pardon rapist cop beaters? That's the exact opposite of condemnation.
My understanding is that the Trump pardons for Jan 6th are based on the (IMO correct) belief that this was a political persecution, where people were persecuted for non-crimes, and those that actually committed crimes were usually given excessive sentences. Many people who were pardoned did serve time, so it's not like they weren't punished.
I feel that it is a mistake to interpret a blanket clemency as individual pardons, where only the specifics of the case matter, rather than the desire to rebuke the establishment in general.
Even if it's correct that some crimes were unfairly prosecuted, assaulting cops on video is a genuine crime deserving of long punishment. Unless there's proof that they went past legal guidelines in sentencing, it's just letting cop beaters off early because what, other people didn't beat up cops?
This is even worse than guilty by association IMO, it's innocent by association where you can drag a cop around and tase him to he passes out and it's fine even as an individual as long as you can claim a peaceful neighbor was treated unfairly.
He was not forced to do a blanket clemency that covered violent crimes. The campaign even said before election that violent criminals would not be released.
Even Vance agreed it's obvious that violent criminals should not be sent into the general public. Yet what happened? Cop beaters with long rap sheets were freed. It sends a message that if you do violent crime in the name of the president, he'll be soft on it.
It is a crime, but did the perpetrators actually serve less time than others who have beaten up someone? I don't really agree that abuse of cops should result in much longer sentences, since cops themselves are protected from prosecution to an absurd degree and cops often violate people's rights, so then also give extra high punishment for assault on cops, makes the injustices in the way the police interacts with the populace, even greater.
Besides, I think that equal crimes should result in equal punishments, not that perpetrators get off much easier if they abuse the 'right' people.
The problem is that when there is a legal 'conspiracy*', the process we have to determine that what the actual proper sentence is, is broken, so it is not reasonable to expect justice on the individual level. There is no parallel justice system that is free from these immense biases and that can determine an actually fair sentence. And Trump does not have the ability to change sentences.
It is an established legal principle that legal injustices can result in sentences that are not actually fair in the individual case, like people going free over illegally gathered evidence that does actually prove the guilt of the person. In those cases, we value the long term view more, where we accept an injustice in an individual case to maintain global standards in the prosecution of people. We draw a line in the sand that we will not allow it.
So I see nothing wrong with Trump drawing a line in the sand against political persecutions.
* Really just collective bias.
Vance is not the president. Get back to me when Vance is president and something similar happens.
No, it sends the message that if the legal system commits political persecutions, politicians are going to intervene (of course).
Also, the claim that these people committed violence 'in the name of the president' is not a framing that I accept as fact. Trump did not call for violence.
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I will copy my response to the other guy-
"I don't agree with the rest of what you are saying but you are missing the point. Any mismatch or parity on violence in the political realm is completely overshadowed by everything else.
Traditional politics is a small portion of most people's interaction with the world.
Media, education, social media, and corporate employment are all very aggressive with pushing "silence is violence" "the personal is the political" "speech is violence" "they are going to put you in camps" "they are literally Nazis" and so on.
These things have nearly zero pushback and are firmly water for the vast majority of Americans.
I have to work very hard on Reddit, on Facebook, on TV shows to find the most mild of conservative views but I am going to see left wing violent extremism on the same unless I work very hard not to."
Yeah stuff like "This is CIVIL WAR" and "They want you dead!" and "the left is domestic terrorists!" is not receiving much pushback on social media, I'll agree with that. Our rhetoric across the aisle is hyperbolic and charged.
But despite that, we can count the number of explicitly political attacks on our fingers. People are more likely to say they support political violence when they think the "other side" does but it doesn't seem to translate much into anything real. After all talk is cheap, extremely cheap. They're all just being edgelords.
No, we can't. You have no idea how many buildings actually got burned down during the Floyd riots. You have no idea how many windows got a brick through them. You have no idea how many cars were torched or totaled. You have no idea how many people were beaten, nor how badly. Now multiply those unknowns by every other incident of organized leftist street violence, from the Battle of Berkeley on down.
We had at least two billion dollars worth of insurance claims, with no attempt I've ever seen to calculate the necessarily higher uninsurable economic damage.:
Throughout these incidents, the vast majority of that violence never involved an arrest, because over and over again the police stood down and watched people be victimized by organized gangs of thugs, often in broad daylight. On the rare occasion where arrests were made, prosecution was doubtful. When prosecution did occur, fellow thugs have been known to congregate in the courtroom, menacing the jury, and shockingly enough their comrades are found not guilty.
This person's opinion, that people like me need to be killed, is not in any meaningful sense "fringe". I would probably be fired for disagreeing with it publicly prior to the Kirk shooting. You are correct that we have not had large numbers of political murders. These people are trying to change that, and if they succeed, nothing you value will survive.
That's true we don't know how much damage was caused there and by how many people. We also don't know how many, if any, are only politically motivated crimes, and not the actions of typical criminal behavior exploiting large crowds to hide in, or false flags like this or this.
Out of an estimated 16-24 million people participating, the idea that the only people in the crowds are supporters is highly unlikely. But even if they were, 16-24 million is a huge number! Even a fraction of a fraction (a very small percentage) people committing crime would be able to do a fair bit of damage.
Random chest thumping social media accounts from leftists trying to signal how cool they are is just as meaningless as the chest thumping from the right currently calling for "civil war" or for killing judges. It's posturing by edgelords who thinks it makes them look cool, but they don't have an actual violent bone in them.
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Again. If I go about my day minding my own business attempting to avoid politics, or if I engage with politics but don't specifically seek out the few right leaning spaces I know about then I will see no right leaning extremism (unless it is signal boosted by the left as criticism of the right).
I will see tons of left leaning political extremism.
I've spent the last decade having left wing extremism up to and including actual advocacy for domestic terrorism shoved down my throat even while actively trying to avoid it and watched the places I know that are apolitical or the most inoffensive of right leaning slowly wither and die or be outright destroyed.
Ignoring this is a critical failure of objectivity and should trigger significant introspection.
We didn't get here because of the screaming minority on the left we got here because of the people who should have known better shoved their heads in the sand and stated things like "it's just a few kids on college campuses" until it became a pervasive and dangerous problem.
Plenty of people here have been shouting for years that minimizing and playing games was going to make this problem worse. It's worse now. Do something different unless you want it to continue to get worse.
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