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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.
How did you manage to exclude the pittsburgh synagogue shooter, the el paso walmart shooter, and the Charleston church shooting?
... well shit. Upon going back and reviewing the table, it looks like all three of those got included as an "indictment" instead of an "attack." So they were filtered out when I chose to limit the data set to attacks. That's incredibly frustrating, thank you for pointing it out.
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