Who is to blame?
When headlines flare and politicians say “it’s the radical left,” it’s tempting to accept a simple story. But the data paint a more nuanced (and frankly, different) picture. Let’s look at what credible sources say about who commits political violence in the U.S.—and how big that slice is compared with everyday violence.
First, scope it correctly. Politically motivated killings are a tiny fraction of U.S. homicides. Using long-run data, the Cato Institute finds 3,599 people were murdered in politically-motivated terrorist attacks from 1975–Sept. 10, 2025—about 0.35% of all murders over that period. Since 2020, 81 politically motivated murders amount to ~0.07% of homicides. Translation: most lethal violence in America isn’t ideological at all. It’s ordinary crime.
So, within that small ideological slice, who does what? Over the long run (since the mid-1970s), Cato’s breakdown shows Islamist-motivated attackers account for the largest share of terrorism deaths in the U.S., with right-wing attackers second and left-wing a much smaller share. That long-run picture is driven by major outlier events (e.g., 9/11 scale terrorism and other plots) that heavily influence totals.
But recent domestic patterns look different. For U.S. extremist murders in the last decade, multiple monitors show right-wing (especially white supremacist/REMVE) perpetrators dominate. The Anti-Defamation League reported that all extremist murders identified in 2022 were tied to right-wing extremism (e.g., Buffalo supermarket shooting), and its multi-year trendlines continue to show the far right as the largest source of U.S. extremist killings.
Incident counts—not just deaths—also lean right in recent years. CSIS’s long-running database of domestic plots and attacks finds the most common motive over three decades is general anti-government sentiment, with a marked post-2016 rise in attacks/plots targeting public officials and government entities for partisan reasons. That modern spike is not a “radical left” monopoly.
Where does the “radical left did it” story come from? Part of the confusion stems from mixing apples and oranges:
- Long-run fatalities (1970s-present) are skewed by large Islamist attacks, which dwarf typical domestic incidents; that’s not “the radical left.”
- Recent U.S. extremist killings have overwhelmingly been far-right, per ADL’s year-by-year tallies.
- Overall homicides in America (the vast majority of violence) are not ideological, and tracking them requires FBI crime data—where “left vs. right” isn’t a category because most murders have nothing to do with politics.
Bottom line:
- If you’re talking about all murders, ideology barely registers; political violence is a rounding error compared with ordinary crime.
- If you’re talking about recent extremist murders, far-right actors are responsible for the largest share.
- If you zoom out to 1975-present terrorism deaths, Islamist-motivated attacks have the highest totals, followed by right-wing, with left-wing much smaller—again, because of outlier mass-casualty events.
Policy implications (the adult table version):
- Stop pretending one tribe owns violence. Focus resources where risk is empirically concentrated today (e.g., white supremacist and anti-government violent extremism), while maintaining tools to disrupt any ideology that turns lethal.
- Don’t inflate the threat to score points. As Cato notes, politically-motivated murders are rare within America’s overall violence—so we should resist panic laws that trample civil liberties while doing little to reduce ordinary homicide.
- Invest in prevention that actually works: threat assessment, community reporting, and tailored interventions for people drifting toward violent movements—right, left, or religious—without criminalizing dissent.
When someone insists “it’s the radical left,” ask: Which dataset? Which years? Deaths or incidents? The credible numbers don’t back a blanket claim. If we want less violence—and fewer funerals—follow the evidence, not the slogans.
Julie Bolejack, MBA
