Thread by @RVAwonk

I want to engage this question earnestly, b/c it’s a legit question. The answer is yes, I do look at left, too.

Left-wing activists are responsible for 2% of murders committed by political extremists in the US over the past decade; right-wing activists are responsible for 74%.

Furthermore, left-wing extremist violence is on a decades-long decline, while right-wing extremist violence is on the rise.
washingtonpost.com/national/in-th…

The statistics on left-wing extremist violence vs right-wing extremist violence come from this report on extremist murders in the U.S. Similar figures have been reported in other analyses, too.
adl.org/sites/default/…

Looking more broadly at terrorist attacks — not just extremist murders — right-wing attackers committed about 1/3 (~33%) of domestic terror attacks between 2010 and 2017. Another ~33% were attributed to unknown ideologies, while 13% were attributed to left-wing ideologies.

And this is the conclusion of a 2022 study that examined two datasets of politically-motivated extremist attacks:

“Across both datasets, we find that radical acts perpetrated by individuals associated with left-wing causes are less likely to be violent.”
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

As I’ve emphasized previously while discussing this very topic: There’s a difference between objectivity and neutrality. I strive for objectivity — for the truth — not neutrality, which in this case presents a false balance between two unequal sides.

And please don’t go pile on the guy who asked me the original question. He’s allowed to ask questions, and I’m allowed to answer them. I think my answer is sufficient on its own and doesn’t require a pile-on to prove a point. Let’s make this place better by being better.

Just adding a few things to this thread:

Here’s a former FBI special agent — and to be clear, the FBI is not exactly known for its leftist sympathies — explaining that fatal extremist violence is almost exclusively a far-right, not far-left, phenomenon.

Per a Nov. 2018 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the number of far-right terrorist attacks in the US more than quadrupled between 2016 and 2017.

Far-right-networks are “better armed and larger” than far-left ones, per CSIS.
csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/pu…

Another analysis found that every single one of the 50 extremist murders documented in 2018 was committed by a person or persons with ties to right-wing extremism. Right-wing extremists killed more people in 2018 than in any year since 1995. 
adl.org/murderandextre…

In the most recent iteration of this report, ADL found that “lethal extremist violence in 2021 was heavily dominated by right-wing extremism.”

All but three of the 29 murders (90%) documented in the report had ties to right-wing extremism.
adl.org/murder-and-ext…

Of the 443 people killed at the hands of extremists in the past decade, 333 (or 75%) were killed by right-wing extremists.

Some more stats:

-30 yrs of antifascist activity in the US: 1 confirmed fatality (a nazi who was shot during an altercation in 1993).

-20 yrs of far-right extremist activity (1990-2012) in the US: 670 fatalities, 3,053 nonfatal injuries, & 4,420 attacks.
cco.ndu.edu/Portals/96/Doc…

The source for these statistics on ideologically-motivated killings and violent attacks is the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which, again, is not exactly known as a left-wing organization. But they are known for being credible.
ctc.westpoint.edu/wp-content/upl…