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%.

https://twitter.com/MartiniShark/status/1595083868628983810

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.

https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1058868566504718336

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.

https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1204282789392240640

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…

https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1595262003068784645