In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, politicians and political pundits have been engrossed in discussion over the rise of political violence in the United States and what role current rhetoric may play in fueling it.
While Kirk’s assassin was subscribed to leftist ideology, targeting Kirk because he “had enough of his hatred;” Democrat leadership has pushed the narrative that political violence is disproportionately committed by right-wing extremists rather than left-wing extremists.
Just five days after Kirk’s assassination, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) tweeted out a pie chart created by the Washington Post based on a data analysis by the Anti-Defamation League, which shows that right-wing extremists are responsible for the majority of incidents and deaths from 2013 to 2022.
The ADL analysis found that 335 of 444 deaths were committed by right-wing extremists. According to the ADL, right-wing extremists were responsible for more murders than domestic Islamist extremists and left-wing extremists combined. The Washington Post article was published in February 2023 with the headline: “Underrecognized: Extremist murders are usually from right-wing actors.”
However, upon examination of the ADL’s , it’s revealed that people who are subscribed to “extremism,” such as white supremacy, Q’Anon ideology, or radical Islam, are included in the list regardless of whether the murder was inherently based on their extremist views.
“Extremists can also commit murders while engaging in non-ideological criminal activities ranging from home invasions to domestic violence,” the report “In some cases, the motive for a particular murder connected to an extremist may never be discovered. We include all these types of killings in this report, as each is important for different reasons.”
For example, among the 335 murders that the ADL attributes to right-wing extremists was committed by a member of a white supremacist prison gang called the Nazi Low Riders shot and killed a man after being released on bail in December 2022. The motive for the murder was never determined by authorities. Another member of the Nazi Low Riders shot and killed a man over an argument in 2022. A Tulsa man was killed by the Universal Aryan Brotherhood over an alleged drug debt that he owed the leader.
“All these types of murders are conservatively classified in this report as ‘non-ideological,’ even though it is possible that extremism still played at least some role in many,” the report stated. “It is important to account for such killings, as to do otherwise would offer a misleadingly small sense of the dangers that extremists pose—after all, a murder is a murder.”
However, the report notes that white supremacists are identified not just based on rhetoric they’ve espoused but “such by his or her tattoos, or perhaps a gang association previously documented by law enforcement or corrections officials.”
“It is likely that non-ideological murders committed by extremists other than white supremacists are underrepresented in ADL’s data.”
However, in its , the ADL omitted the inclusion of transgender Covenant school shooting Aubrey Hale, who wrote in her manifesto her intent was to “kill all the white kids.”
The ADL defended its decision to not include Hale to the .
“Three pages of a document were later leaked that contained hateful epithets directed at white and LGBTQ+ people, which did not provide evidence of any particular extremist ideology, but rather primarily resentment and grievance at students from the shooter’s former school perceived to be better off than the shooter was,” the ADL spokesperson said.
And in its , the ADL opted against including United HealthCare CEO Luigi Mangione was not politically motivated despite Mangione writing in his manifesto that his targeting of Brian Thompson was to “prove a political point about the health insurance industry.”
“Because hostility towards the healthcare system or health insurance companies is not in itself an ideology and because a good portion of the anger on Mangione’s part may have stemmed from purely personal reasons—though it does not appear that he utilized UnitedHealthcare himself—the Center on Extremism has not categorized the murder of Thompson as an extremist-related murder, though that designation may change if more information or clarity emerges in the future.”
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