Not sure that your categories are correct. As the far-left are allied with Islamists in Europe and the US, then we may claim that 9/11 is a leftwing cause, as the western right have never allied with Islamists. But then you can argue that Islamofascism is a rightwing movement.
The best way to categorize is by the number of attacks that resulted in injuries/fatalities and not by body count. This should be obvious to any unbiased observer.
With this metric you will find the left probably commits 80% of political violence in the west.
This is such a brainless take. "Align with Palestinians" ≠ "align with radical Islamic terrorists."
I wouldn't align radical Islam to either left or right wing politics, but with its ties to religion, it's anti-LGBTQ stance, and rejection of pluralism and gender equality, it's easily closer to the far-right than far-left.
I still wouldn't bucket 9/11 into either category, though.
Implying that only the gay can be leftwing is a fallacy. Have you not studied the gay pedophiles of Afghanistan who openly flaunt their boy lovers? Don't the Trans and the Queer are coming to hate the true gays?
The far-left is already very anti-science and religious. Their religion is the non-theocratic and cult-like religion of Marxism. Followers of Marxism are uneducated and intellectually challenged believers just like in Islam.
You are confusing classical Islam with the new crop of Islamoleftist and Islamic Marxist Islamists.
Have you not heard of the MEK who are self-described Islamic Marxists, partly responsible for the takeover by Khomeini? They continue on as a major force in Iranian politics today.
The right agrees to gender equality. What you say is bigoted. The right allows for diversity of opinion but the left does not. Obviously you are stuck in the 1970s left. All things changed in 1989.
Why would you think that "number of attacks that resulted in injuries/fatalities" as a better measure, rather than body count? Doesn't seem that obvious to me. It seems like an attack that kills 10 people is twice as bad as an attack that kills 5 people.
So you equate BLM riots that killed 33 people and caused 3 billion in property damage with a political dispute that killed one? In any case 55% of political attacks in the past decade are committed by the Left. This list here omits many important acts of violence by the left, such as the two attacks on Andy Ngo that almost killed him, and the attacks on Trump.
It is junky. He explicitly excludes the vast majority of political violence, ie anything that does not result in death, in order to draw conclusions about "political violence".
Hey I'm happy for leftists to take the blame for most property damage -- it still doesn't change the fact that the right is responsible for most political murder. One is much worse than the other by a magnitude of hundreds.
I suppose that's fair enough, but for every right-wing politically-motivated murder in the US there are easily hundreds of left-wing politically-motivated property crimes and simple assaults, from burning down buildings to throwing bricks through windows that innocent shopkeepers need to spend hours replacing, to rapes in Chaz, to kicking over conservatives' tables at universities, to beating up people outside of Trump rallies, to jostling conservative speakers on campus, to kidnapping Reilly Gaines for a few hours... I mean, it does sort of even out.
His data is obviously incomplete. He deliberately ignores the vast amount of incidents that fall under even his own definition of terrorism, and only counts deaths.
Thank you Alex. Two things I want to put on the wishlist:
1. A graph of left-wing violence alone, separated from other categories, showing no increase.
2. Comparison graphs to other countries, like Germany or the EU as a whole. That would probably take a long time, but I think this subject will continue to be misunderstood by many.
This may be true, I don’t know how to check your data or its classifications about attacks since 2020. But this begs the question if perception is true - that assassination is a far more acceptable solution among those on the left than the right? I’d be curious how those numbers bear out.
I feel like this is not the best way to assess political violence. Terrorism and assassinations are intended to intimidate people and influence policy.
I think it is at least useful to put it in perspective of overall violence, but yes, you are right... the point of political violence is that it has outsized effects on society and is meant to affect political processes.
You write "My methodology and sources are available here." but that link is very confusing. If you take it at face value, the article is subtitled "50 Years of Foreign-Born Terrorism on US Soil, 1975–2024", and it's conclusions are just about foreign born terrorists.
That seems to imply that this article uses data that is just about foreign born terrorists, but I don't think that is true. I think this article is drawing on sources used in the other article, not the other article itself, and those sources include both foreign born and US born terrorists.
Incel is a right wing ideology? Would Charlie Kirk consider incel right wing? How many republicans endorse incel-ism? What pro-incel legislation have they passed? If the incel is non-white is that still right wing?
How does a trans person shooting up a Catholic school count in your data? Word is the bullets the shooter had in his gun had transgender stuff carved into them. Trans is an official dogma of left wing politicians and they have passed laws in support of it. Whole states boycotted other states over their trans bathroom policies.
OKC bombing feels like left wing to me, but we could just call it “kook”. Where did you put the unibomber?
I admit it happened before my time and I didn't watch any coverage of it. Lookin at what google can tell me now the bomber appears to be motivated by anti-government, anti-militarization, anti-use of force. These are not exactly values in common with the Nazis.
Katherine Belew's book Bring the War Home looks at the rise of white supremacist violence and she discusses McVeigh and the OKC bombing in detail. It includes some detail of McVeigh's influence by the Turner Diaries, an explicitly White Supremacist novel. The novel details a white resistance movement that executes anti-government attacks. The concept of a Jewish or Zionist Occupied (ZOG) US Government is a long time belief of Neo-nazism and this is one of the reasons for their anti- federal government philosophy. The original Nazis were involved in anti-government violence prior to taking power. https://www.britannica.com/event/Beer-Hall-Putsch
But what was the end goal of the Nazi movement? What did they hope to achieve if their coup worked? Mussolini had his march in Rome and he didn’t establish an anarchist state.
It certainly wasn’t to establish an anarchist state where people were free to live as they pleased. That sounds more like one of the left wing factions in the Spanish civil war.
I agree, the categorization in these kinds of analyses is typically subjective and problematic. For example, you're correct about incels - plenty of research establishes they are not a "right-wing" ideology (eg, Costello et al 2022 Evolutionary Psychological Science). Grouping them as "right-wing" here probably distorts the numbers somewhat
"Furthermore, we should all at least realize how uncommon politically motivated terrorism is."
I think a key factor to keep in mind here is it's how uncommon the VERY SUCCESSFUL politically motivated terrorism is. A whole lot of politically motivated terrorism is prevented because of the massive amounts of resources invested in countering those who would do it. I so regularly write stories about police somewhere busting some guy for some low level offense only for them to find an arsenal and a hit list, or for them to stop some guy with a rifle waiting outside the house of a Jewish congressman. I certainly value the economists for their ability to analyze the numbers, but there is broader context around the numbers to consider too.
Democrats in this nation have murdered more than 60 MILLION CHILDREN since Roe, and they've paid the murderers with tax dollars. EVERY PERSON who voted DEMOCRAT since 1973 is covered with the blood of the innocent. DEMOCRATS murder decent Americans in their homes and on the streets of this nation EVERY DAY AND NIGHT. Obama dropped bombs on brown people in SEVEN different nations. Democrats more than once have murdered CHILDREN AT PRAYER. They shot Scalise, attacked Rand Paul, tried to murder Cavanaugh, murdered Iryna, tried twice to murder Trump, and murdered Kirk. Democrats LOVE to spill the blood of the innocent. Murder is what they do. IT'S WHO THEY ARE! SIXTY MILLION MURDERS . . .
I looked at your numbers and ADL numbers for politically motivated homicides. They have a higher tally of right wing homicides, but completely miss left wing and Islamist homicides in the past 5 years. I looked over your cases and think that your left and Islamist cases are valid and this is a bias in ADL's data collection, underestimating it. They have counts for other years, so it is not they ignore it as a possibility, but they ignore most cases of it.
They didn't have their case lists, but i imagine their right wing counts are accurate and that they just cast their net further in that direction than you did. the definitions are actually slippery at the edges and their are a lot of edge cases.
I did a re-tabulation, synthesized your and their counts, taking the higher of the two for a given category and year as a lower bound. i also thought it appropriate to also consider hate crime based homicides, most of which are not in the counts of politically motivated violence, which usually involves premeditation. For this reason, i also added FBI hate crime statistics for homicide.
Based on this, I would say that you significantly underestimated the fraction of ideologically driven violence produced by the right. I do think it is really important to count these cases of left and Islamist violence that you find and to keep this in mind for policy, though. It would be disingenuous to pretend it doesn't exist, even if the problem is first and foremost right wing violence.
Your title emphasizes the rarity of political homicides (in comparison to other drivers of homicide). This is true (and i have a graphic that shows this), but at the same time, it really needs to considered as a different category as it has outsized effects on politics and society... indeed that's its purpose.
Thanks so much for your contribution to the discussion. It's a valuable one, and mine is mostly extending off of the work you did.
How do you do a study on political violence but totally miss the Unibomber? Was that because his killings would have been classified left-wing, which would hurt your narrative?
White Supremacy is not right-wing nor is involuntary celibacy. Did you include those as right-wing to fluff your narrative?
Also, Richard Snell is labelled right wing but it has no baring on politics as he was a blatant racist who killed a cop. How does this get the label right wing?
Alex Nowrasteh's study contains many flaws. First, labeling something “right-wing” or “left-wing” is vague and nondescript. Libertarian organizations have often made a point of not using such terms but not in this case. Also, he only focuses on murder. Not Antifa violence, or the burning of Tesla dealerships, doxxing, debanking, lawfare or deaths from the George Floyd riots. This is why this study will be dismissed as propaganda.
Not sure that your categories are correct. As the far-left are allied with Islamists in Europe and the US, then we may claim that 9/11 is a leftwing cause, as the western right have never allied with Islamists. But then you can argue that Islamofascism is a rightwing movement.
The best way to categorize is by the number of attacks that resulted in injuries/fatalities and not by body count. This should be obvious to any unbiased observer.
With this metric you will find the left probably commits 80% of political violence in the west.
This is such a brainless take. "Align with Palestinians" ≠ "align with radical Islamic terrorists."
I wouldn't align radical Islam to either left or right wing politics, but with its ties to religion, it's anti-LGBTQ stance, and rejection of pluralism and gender equality, it's easily closer to the far-right than far-left.
I still wouldn't bucket 9/11 into either category, though.
Implying that only the gay can be leftwing is a fallacy. Have you not studied the gay pedophiles of Afghanistan who openly flaunt their boy lovers? Don't the Trans and the Queer are coming to hate the true gays?
The far-left is already very anti-science and religious. Their religion is the non-theocratic and cult-like religion of Marxism. Followers of Marxism are uneducated and intellectually challenged believers just like in Islam.
You are confusing classical Islam with the new crop of Islamoleftist and Islamic Marxist Islamists.
Have you not heard of the MEK who are self-described Islamic Marxists, partly responsible for the takeover by Khomeini? They continue on as a major force in Iranian politics today.
The right agrees to gender equality. What you say is bigoted. The right allows for diversity of opinion but the left does not. Obviously you are stuck in the 1970s left. All things changed in 1989.
Why would you think that "number of attacks that resulted in injuries/fatalities" as a better measure, rather than body count? Doesn't seem that obvious to me. It seems like an attack that kills 10 people is twice as bad as an attack that kills 5 people.
Just because the left fucks up everything they touch should not diminish that they tried to commit the violence. The volume certainly matters.
So you equate BLM riots that killed 33 people and caused 3 billion in property damage with a political dispute that killed one? In any case 55% of political attacks in the past decade are committed by the Left. This list here omits many important acts of violence by the left, such as the two attacks on Andy Ngo that almost killed him, and the attacks on Trump.
This looks junky. This is driven by OKC? Why not just look at modern America?
And "incel" is a right-wing ideology? What? So you counted that Santa Barbara shooter as "right-wing"?
Just show us your data. Enough of the games. Your data isn't provided at the Cato page.
It is junky. He explicitly excludes the vast majority of political violence, ie anything that does not result in death, in order to draw conclusions about "political violence".
Hey I'm happy for leftists to take the blame for most property damage -- it still doesn't change the fact that the right is responsible for most political murder. One is much worse than the other by a magnitude of hundreds.
I suppose that's fair enough, but for every right-wing politically-motivated murder in the US there are easily hundreds of left-wing politically-motivated property crimes and simple assaults, from burning down buildings to throwing bricks through windows that innocent shopkeepers need to spend hours replacing, to rapes in Chaz, to kicking over conservatives' tables at universities, to beating up people outside of Trump rallies, to jostling conservative speakers on campus, to kidnapping Reilly Gaines for a few hours... I mean, it does sort of even out.
You provide much-needed data-driven sanity, as always! :)
His data is obviously incomplete. He deliberately ignores the vast amount of incidents that fall under even his own definition of terrorism, and only counts deaths.
where can I find this data
Alex...according to you, none of this qualifies as left-wing violence. Did you design your study around the conclusion you wanted to draw?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXZCTHmPn0g&rco=1
and neither does January 6th. this is about killings not rioting.
Leftist political rioting in 2020 caused multiple deaths.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-killed-protests-political-unrest-acled
Thank you Alex. Two things I want to put on the wishlist:
1. A graph of left-wing violence alone, separated from other categories, showing no increase.
2. Comparison graphs to other countries, like Germany or the EU as a whole. That would probably take a long time, but I think this subject will continue to be misunderstood by many.
This may be true, I don’t know how to check your data or its classifications about attacks since 2020. But this begs the question if perception is true - that assassination is a far more acceptable solution among those on the left than the right? I’d be curious how those numbers bear out.
I feel like this is not the best way to assess political violence. Terrorism and assassinations are intended to intimidate people and influence policy.
I think it is at least useful to put it in perspective of overall violence, but yes, you are right... the point of political violence is that it has outsized effects on society and is meant to affect political processes.
You write "My methodology and sources are available here." but that link is very confusing. If you take it at face value, the article is subtitled "50 Years of Foreign-Born Terrorism on US Soil, 1975–2024", and it's conclusions are just about foreign born terrorists.
That seems to imply that this article uses data that is just about foreign born terrorists, but I don't think that is true. I think this article is drawing on sources used in the other article, not the other article itself, and those sources include both foreign born and US born terrorists.
Can you confirm that that is correct?
Incel is a right wing ideology? Would Charlie Kirk consider incel right wing? How many republicans endorse incel-ism? What pro-incel legislation have they passed? If the incel is non-white is that still right wing?
How does a trans person shooting up a Catholic school count in your data? Word is the bullets the shooter had in his gun had transgender stuff carved into them. Trans is an official dogma of left wing politicians and they have passed laws in support of it. Whole states boycotted other states over their trans bathroom policies.
OKC bombing feels like left wing to me, but we could just call it “kook”. Where did you put the unibomber?
OKC bombing - one of the most infamous neoNazi attacks - "feels left wing"
Well one thing we can say about MAGA is that they're all about their feelings lol
What is neonazi about it?
I admit it happened before my time and I didn't watch any coverage of it. Lookin at what google can tell me now the bomber appears to be motivated by anti-government, anti-militarization, anti-use of force. These are not exactly values in common with the Nazis.
Katherine Belew's book Bring the War Home looks at the rise of white supremacist violence and she discusses McVeigh and the OKC bombing in detail. It includes some detail of McVeigh's influence by the Turner Diaries, an explicitly White Supremacist novel. The novel details a white resistance movement that executes anti-government attacks. The concept of a Jewish or Zionist Occupied (ZOG) US Government is a long time belief of Neo-nazism and this is one of the reasons for their anti- federal government philosophy. The original Nazis were involved in anti-government violence prior to taking power. https://www.britannica.com/event/Beer-Hall-Putsch
But what was the end goal of the Nazi movement? What did they hope to achieve if their coup worked? Mussolini had his march in Rome and he didn’t establish an anarchist state.
It certainly wasn’t to establish an anarchist state where people were free to live as they pleased. That sounds more like one of the left wing factions in the Spanish civil war.
Was that McVeigh's goal? Seems to me he was pretty clear he was following the Turner Diaries quite closely.
I agree, the categorization in these kinds of analyses is typically subjective and problematic. For example, you're correct about incels - plenty of research establishes they are not a "right-wing" ideology (eg, Costello et al 2022 Evolutionary Psychological Science). Grouping them as "right-wing" here probably distorts the numbers somewhat
OKC is fair to claim as right wing anti-government stuff of that era.
Of course, there are many incidents omitted (I named a couple above).
"Furthermore, we should all at least realize how uncommon politically motivated terrorism is."
I think a key factor to keep in mind here is it's how uncommon the VERY SUCCESSFUL politically motivated terrorism is. A whole lot of politically motivated terrorism is prevented because of the massive amounts of resources invested in countering those who would do it. I so regularly write stories about police somewhere busting some guy for some low level offense only for them to find an arsenal and a hit list, or for them to stop some guy with a rifle waiting outside the house of a Jewish congressman. I certainly value the economists for their ability to analyze the numbers, but there is broader context around the numbers to consider too.
Democrats in this nation have murdered more than 60 MILLION CHILDREN since Roe, and they've paid the murderers with tax dollars. EVERY PERSON who voted DEMOCRAT since 1973 is covered with the blood of the innocent. DEMOCRATS murder decent Americans in their homes and on the streets of this nation EVERY DAY AND NIGHT. Obama dropped bombs on brown people in SEVEN different nations. Democrats more than once have murdered CHILDREN AT PRAYER. They shot Scalise, attacked Rand Paul, tried to murder Cavanaugh, murdered Iryna, tried twice to murder Trump, and murdered Kirk. Democrats LOVE to spill the blood of the innocent. Murder is what they do. IT'S WHO THEY ARE! SIXTY MILLION MURDERS . . .
I looked at your numbers and ADL numbers for politically motivated homicides. They have a higher tally of right wing homicides, but completely miss left wing and Islamist homicides in the past 5 years. I looked over your cases and think that your left and Islamist cases are valid and this is a bias in ADL's data collection, underestimating it. They have counts for other years, so it is not they ignore it as a possibility, but they ignore most cases of it.
They didn't have their case lists, but i imagine their right wing counts are accurate and that they just cast their net further in that direction than you did. the definitions are actually slippery at the edges and their are a lot of edge cases.
I did a re-tabulation, synthesized your and their counts, taking the higher of the two for a given category and year as a lower bound. i also thought it appropriate to also consider hate crime based homicides, most of which are not in the counts of politically motivated violence, which usually involves premeditation. For this reason, i also added FBI hate crime statistics for homicide.
Based on this, I would say that you significantly underestimated the fraction of ideologically driven violence produced by the right. I do think it is really important to count these cases of left and Islamist violence that you find and to keep this in mind for policy, though. It would be disingenuous to pretend it doesn't exist, even if the problem is first and foremost right wing violence.
Your title emphasizes the rarity of political homicides (in comparison to other drivers of homicide). This is true (and i have a graphic that shows this), but at the same time, it really needs to considered as a different category as it has outsized effects on politics and society... indeed that's its purpose.
Thanks so much for your contribution to the discussion. It's a valuable one, and mine is mostly extending off of the work you did.
https://karlfrost.substack.com/p/ideologically-driven-homicide-in
How do you do a study on political violence but totally miss the Unibomber? Was that because his killings would have been classified left-wing, which would hurt your narrative?
White Supremacy is not right-wing nor is involuntary celibacy. Did you include those as right-wing to fluff your narrative?
This is blatant misinformation. Do better.
Also, Richard Snell is labelled right wing but it has no baring on politics as he was a blatant racist who killed a cop. How does this get the label right wing?
Alex Nowrasteh's study contains many flaws. First, labeling something “right-wing” or “left-wing” is vague and nondescript. Libertarian organizations have often made a point of not using such terms but not in this case. Also, he only focuses on murder. Not Antifa violence, or the burning of Tesla dealerships, doxxing, debanking, lawfare or deaths from the George Floyd riots. This is why this study will be dismissed as propaganda.