Articles of Distraction

[Angrboda]

Is “radical-left” violence really on the rise in America?

ON SEPTEMBER 10th Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist, was shot dead while speaking at a university in Utah. Although a suspect is in custody, the motive of the killer is still unknown. President Donald Trump, who has himself been the target of gunmen, pinned the blame on rhetoric from the “radical left”. Assessing political violence in America is inherently subjective: analysts must determine which forms of violence count as political and assign ideological labels to attackers or victims. But the studies and datasets available—largely compiled by researchers whom sceptical conservatives would probably dismiss as biased—suggest that the killing of Mr Kirk is not representative of broader trends.

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Data from CSIS also show that after a lull in the early 2000s, terrorist attacks and plots against government targets—including politicians and state employees—are rising again. The increase in those motivated by partisan political beliefs is particularly striking: between 2016 and 2025 there were 25 such incidents compared with just two in the previous 22 years.

That marks a shift from earlier eras. Some social movements in the 1960s were brutally violent but not partisan, notes Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins University: “It wasn’t that Democrats were on one side of it and Republicans were on the other.”

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Researchers stress that violent attacks remain rare. “The amount of actual political violence that has occurred is nowhere near what it was in the 1960s,” says Ms Mason. She also sees a different trend: attacks against political figures to get attention, not to advance a cause. “A lot of these are people who probably would have committed violence in some way,” she says. “It’s just that our politics has kind of aimed them towards political targets.”