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Returning to the “right-wing violence is more common than left-wing violence” topic, I’ve been paying attention to how it’s covered in mainstream tech-adjacent media. I’ve been reading Ars Technica for years — I loved John Siracusa’s old macOS deep dives — but the tone of their reporting has shifted. A lot of it feels like “heckin science!” coverage: snarky debunkings of RFK Jr., endless FCC drama framed as “look at the dumb Republicans.” Earlier this year, they had weeks of coverage about a Texas measles outbreak, written with the same undertone. I visit Ars because I love technology and will always have a bone to pick with vox-owned The Verge becoming yet another HuffPost 10 years ago (I remember when it was called This is My Next, a blog run by Engadget editors who left after a Verizon takeover).
What surprised me was their decision to wade into the Charlie Kirk assassination. While it’s syndicated from another publication, it is not a technology story. The study they cited was already making the rounds, but the comment section is so obnoxiously hard-left. According to media bias trackers, Ars is still rated “highly credible” and “nonpartisan.”
Yet the style itself has gotten more sneering. I’d really urge you to look at the comment section of this article. Very, very ingroupy, more so than Reddit even. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/right-wing-political-violence-is-more-frequent-deadly-than-left-wing-violence/
With the Kirk shooting, the unwillingness to look inward is striking. No one on the left seems interested in the object-level reading of what happened. There’s some truth to the idea that some were more upset about Jimmy Kimmel being fired than about a historic political assassination.
Also the implication behind saying right wing violence is more frequent than left wing violence is that the right wing needs to get its house in order too. But I’m sure not seeing many on the left besides Gavin Newsom (cynically, probably) try to tell lefties that real fascism isn’t imminent (which, if it were true, would justify resistance, partisan violence). Joe Biden famously ramped up scrutiny of far right extremists based on the Charlottesville march. Would you not expect some authoritarianism if the shoe was on the other foot?
Trump’s been pretty tepid, especially considering he had an attempt on his life and less than a year later, a supporter of his is gunned down. If violence escalates (and based on the violence only over the last year, that is likely to happen), what do they expect him to do? What would a democrat president do? Would it be any less ‘fascistic’? We’re literally dealing with high profile, public murders and assassinations. Pretty scary and there are much more authoritarian ways Trump could have taken this.
We’ve had pretty authoritarian presidents before. Not a huge deal and not historic. Nobody is going to cross the rubicon. We’ve had presidents in living memory round up ethnicities and put them into camps for monitoring. Trump is, in reality, a lib that gets spooked and backs off on anything whenever the market looks bad. He probably does have some tyrant tendencies but he’s still an elected official who won his way into office. Ultimately the left needs to come to terms with their rhetoric blowing things out of proportion.
Do you remember the net neutrality war of the 2010s? Ajit Pai got bomb threats because people were so convinced it was the end of the world to deregulate isps or something stupid like that. Thats why suddenly jumping to free speech arguments and this right wing violence study feels more like an attempt to rile people up than earnest reporting on the context around the violence that just happened.
Psychologically, it feels like the left is struggling with wanting to be the side “on the right side of history,” and at the same time, knowing their rhetoric and zealotry may be feeding into radicalism.
I think it is defined quite poorly. Most media cite this study from Cato institute. Just look at the entry for 2020: four deaths by rightwingers and 1 death by leftwinger. So if you did not know, the 2020 BLM summer of love year was actually more violent from the right by factor of 4.
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I quit reading Ars Technica when they banned me for roasting them for keeping an open pedophile on staff until he was arrested by the FBI in their "Republicans Pounce" defensive review of Cuties. I think all I said was "What, was Peter Bright not available to review this?" I don't recall exactly and can't look it up because it's been deleted. The degree to which it's devolved into senseless resistance slop was evident during Trump's first term.
for me, it was when they published the Damore memo with all the citations removed and almost nobody in the comment section questioned why (fuck you Jango The Blue Fox)
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(snip)
Funny, it seems like a decade ago that I myself was Noticing that Ars was following the path of Slashdot and no longer worth a read. Shame, too, they were one of the good ones BITD; I learned a lot from Jon Stokes' articles there.
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I think if Trump did something like with colors reversed
Yeah, that would be great, even if cynical
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That seems non-trivial. It's certainly the assumption of many on the left, but that needn't mean it actually logically follows. Very plausibly, you still shouldn't do assassinations even if American fascism is a very direct threat - for all sorts of reasons from the practical to the ethical.
The crux would be if the total utility with the intervention would be higher than without the intervention.
This depends on a lot of things. How bad the fascism would get, there is a difference between Franco and Hitler. How effective the murder would be in disrupting the fascist organization. (Part of coup-proofing your organization is that you do not have an obvious second-in-command who will just take over for you.) How the normalization of assassinations will affect politics long-term.
Of course, unless you are a time traveler going back to 1930 to kill Hitler, there is a lot of epistemic uncertainty about what your intervention will do, precisely, so it might be worth it to err on the side of caution.
For the US, I do not see MAGA approaching the point of no return. They might gerrymander a bit more to gain a few more seats in the mid-terms, but they will not effectively outlaw the Democratic party. As long as MAGA can be defeated at the ballot box, going for the cartridge box instead it total bonkers.
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If real fascism is in the offing, you should oppose it effectively - which doesn't necessarily mean violently. The moral imperative to be effective is as strong as the moral imperative to oppose fascism in the first place. Empirically, disorganised political violence in a democracy is an ineffective tactic.
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I 100% agree. Just thinking the connection is there for left wing extremists to cling onto in the same way some right wing lunatic might justify their actions through X belief system.
In popular movies, anticolonialist writing, and Hasan streams, progressives are told violence against an oppressor is de facto justified and moral. And it’s easier to think of someone like Charlie Kirk as an oppressor if you think he’s spreading ‘hate’.
That’s the key part of this I think. Crazy people on the left think they’re on the right side of history and that ends justify the means. I think it is a good basic explanation for why the Charlie Kirk shooting happened, most likely.
Even some of the posts on 'Charlie was essentially violent since he argued with an intent to win against left-wing ideals, which may reduce the likelihood of obvious true ethical things that I believe happening and therefore equates to violence'. Like the sense of 'I have a position but others are valid seems to have been washed out into a super black-white good v evil dichotomy'
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