Right-Wing Lies, Left-Wing Violence
The WHCA dinner gunman and what the data actually say about political rage.
SATURDAY NIGHT’S APPARENT assassination attempt against Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner caused a new flurry of right-wing accusations of complicity against Democrats and “the left.” These charges have come not only from pundits like Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who says there’s an “assassination culture” in the Democratic party, but from Trump administration figures—such as press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who evidently thinks that metaphors like “heads need to roll” amount to violence when used by Democratic politicians,1 and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who thinks the media are guilty by “being overly critical and calling the president horrible names.”
And then there’s the inexhaustible font of bad takes that is NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon:
In her Substack post on the subject, Ungar-Sargon also claims that last week, “we learned that the Unite the Right Charlottesville rally was funded by the Left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center.” In reality, we learned nothing of the sort; the federal fraud indictment against the SPLC for paying informants inside far-right groups claims that one of those informants was a member of the “online leadership chat group” that planned the 2017 event and “helped coordinate transportation” for several attendees. (That person was allegedly paid about $270,000 over the course of eight years.) It doesn’t even come close to proving that the rally, during which a far-right extremist deliberately struck and killed a counterprotester with a car, was a hoax or a setup; but there’s little doubt that the Department of Justice indictment is intended in part to feed narratives like Ungar-Sargon’s.
Ungar-Sargon and others have also cited a September 2025 YouGov poll in which self-identified liberals were more likely than conservatives to agree that violence is sometimes justified in order to achieve political goals. Among those younger than 45, the difference was particularly stark: 26 percent of liberals and only 7 percent of conservatives in that age group said political violence was sometimes acceptable. But there’s a caveat: That poll was conducted immediately after the murder of Charlie Kirk, and YouGov data from the same report show that both Democrats and Republicans are more likely to see political violence as a “very big problem” after a well-publicized violent attack on one of “their own.”
Other polls have yielded a different picture. In late September 2025, an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that 31 percent of Republicans and 28 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement that “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track.” And much depends on wording: Ask people if “violence is often necessary to create social change,” and you’re going to have more liberals agreeing; ask if “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” and twice as many Trump supporters as Trump opponents will say yes.
What about actual, real-life violence? Well, the Babylon Bee certainly knows where it comes from. (Yes, it’s a satirical website, but you see the point.)
Meanwhile, Fox News contributor Guy Benson has a “partial list”:
“Missing any?” Well, yes, Guy, you missed that pretty big event five years ago where a raging mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and injured 140 cops, with one suffering a fatal stroke shortly after being assaulted by the mob and sprayed with chemicals. But even that aside, Benson’s account of the murders of Democratic Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband in June 2025 is a blatantly dishonest attempt to muddy the politics of a far-right act of deadly political violence. Broadcaster Erick Erickson has also joined in the obfuscation, stating that “the assassin in Minnesota was not actually rightwing, but was a Tim Walz appointee.”
In reality, the accused killer, Vance Luther Boelter—who also shot and wounded Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife and had a handwritten “hit list” of dozens of Democratic officials and organizations—was known by those close to him to be a Trump supporter with strong anti-abortion politics. The Blaze, of all places, has debunked attempts to portray him as a leftist. Yes, Boelter had been appointed by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz (and the previous Democratic governor, Mark Dayton) to the governor’s “workforce development board,” but these were unpaid positions on nonpartisan advisory panels. As for the claim that Boelter “says the Dem[ocratic] governor told him to do it”: Immediately after the shootings, Boelter wrote a letter to the FBI saying that Walz had ordered him to kill the two U.S. senators from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, to clear the way for himself. Authorities at the time weren’t sure whether this was a genuine delusion or an attempt at misdirection. In any case, in an interview to the Blaze a month later, Boelter told a very different story: that the shootings happened while he was trying to carry out “citizen’s arrests” over supposed deaths from mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines.
Benson’s assertion that Paul Pelosi’s attacker, David DePape, had a “mix of far left and far right views” is equally misleading. DePape had once been involved in progressive activism; however, by the time of the hammer attack that left then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a fractured skull, he had gone down the rabbit hole of MAGA-adjacent conspiracies, including QAnon, Pizzagate, the harms of COVID-19 vaccines, and the “stolen” 2020 election.
Of course, even sticking strictly to attacks on politicians and political or government institutions, one could mention other incidents not on Benson’s list: the 2020 kidnapping plot against Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, or the August 2025 attack on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Atlanta headquarters by a rabid antivaxxer, in which a police officer was killed.
SEVERAL ATTEMPTS TO QUANTIFY politically motivated murder in America—including one by the Anti-Defamation League and another by Cato Institute fellow Alex Nowrasteh—show that deadly political violence is far more prevalent on the right than on the left. These datasets have been assailed as biased by critics on the right, who sometimes have valid points. The ADL reports, in particular, need to be treated with caution because they frequently include apparently nonpolitical murders by known right-wing extremists (and don’t always do the same for nonpolitical murders by people with far-left views, even when those views include advocacy of revolutionary violence). Nowrasteh’s approach is more rigorous, as it is limited to politically motivated killings, but ideological classification can still be a tricky thing.2 Should murders associated with the 2020 riots stemming from racial justice protests be regarded as “left-wing” even if they also related to robbery? When should killings by mentally ill people be treated as political terrorism? How to classify anarchic killers whose beliefs are a stew of far-left and far-right ideas and who really just want to watch the world burn?
A complete and impeccably accurate count of political violence classified by ideology is almost certainly impossible to compile. The point is, political violence does clearly exist across the political spectrum—as does, regrettably, the tendency to excuse or minimize violence on one’s own side. Liberals and leftists often downplay the violence in the 2020 unrest, pointing out that 93 percent of the protests were peaceful. But given the massive number of protests that varied widely by location and size—a total of about 7,000—that 7 percent is hardly negligible. Some 550 events did involve serious violence and/or property damage; at least 27 people lost their lives, excluding killings by law enforcement and right-wing counterprotesters, and hundreds of police officers were injured (400 in New York City alone).
Meanwhile, the violence of the January 6th insurrection is routinely downplayed on the right: In a 2024 YouGov poll, 60 percent of self-identified Trump supporters and 55 percent of all Republicans described the Capitol riot as an expression of “legitimate political discourse,” while only 18 and 20 percent respectively saw it as a “violent insurrection.” Reckless rhetoric justifying political violence also cuts across political lines, whether it’s leftists like Hasan Piker cheering for violent revolution or right-wingers like Jesse Kelly fantasizing about civil war.
After the White House Correspondents’ Dinner assassination attempt, Trump made surprisingly conciliatory remarks about national healing, saying that “we have to resolve our differences” and praising the “Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals, and progressives” who came together at the event with “a tremendous amount of love.” Of course, the elephant in the room is that Trump himself has a history of super-toxic violent political rhetoric unmatched by any major Democratic political figure. (My catalogue of such remarks goes up just to July 2024.) This is a man who has called for his political enemies to be executed, and granted blanket clemency to nearly 1,600 of his supporters who rioted on Capitol Hill, including ones who had assaulted police officers. This is a man who has promised to “root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
To be absolutely clear: None of that excuses or even mitigates left-wing violence. The left does, as Peter Hamby writes in Puck, need to confront the rise of violent rhetoric and conspiracy theories in its own midst. But when such toxicity on the right comes from the president of the United States and becomes the dominant mode in his party, the destructive effect is far worse.
Experience also suggests that Trump’s current benevolent mood won’t last long. Indeed, less than twenty-four hours later, he was already calling CBS’s Norah O’Donnell “disgraceful” for reading from the shooter’s manifesto.
But even during the brief period when Trump was supposedly calling for unity and love, some of his supporters were already using this latest event to urge a crackdown on a vaguely defined “left” or to accuse the “legacy media” and “mainstream Democrats” of complicity in the assassination attempt.
Such rhetoric is clearly intended to shut down political opposition—which is unlikely to succeed. But there is a nontrivial possibility that it could incite violence: As Elon Musk wrote on X last September, “Either we fight back or they will kill us.”
Of course we would all do well to try lower the temperature of political rhetoric. One way to start would be to stop blaming violence by lone, often mentally disturbed individuals on a collective “they.” Another would be to stop lying for a partisan narrative.
Never mind Leavitt’s own use of the expression “there will be some shots fired in the room” just before the dinner.
The principal alleged “debunking” of Nowrasteh’s dataset, by a blogger known as “Jennifer42” or “Recursion Agent” on X—cited, among others, by Ungar-Sargon—correctly flags a few mislabelings and omissions (for instance, of several non-robbery-related killings during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020). But “Jennifer42”’s own classifications are seriously skewed and indicative of bad faith. For instance, she asserts as fact that the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks by John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo were a “leftist” racially motivated killing spree, even though prosecutors believed that the principal motive was Muhammad’s plan to murder his ex-wife and use the other murders as a cover. Meanwhile, “Jennifer42” leaves out key facts to discount ideological motive in some killings Nowrasteh lists as right-wing. Thus, she describes Richard Poplawski’s 2009 shooting of six police officers in Pittsburgh (three of them fatally) as stemming from an “argument over dog pee”—the reason for the call to the police by Poplawski’s mother—and reduces the evidence of his far-right motivation to “antisemitic comments online.” In reality, Poplawski had been an active poster on the neo-Nazi Stormfront site and had been ranting about the “Zionist Occupied Government” just two weeks before the murders. And while “Jennifer42” thinks that killings by nonwhite people over personal racial grievances qualify as “left-wing violence,” she chastises Nowrasteh for putting murders motivated by explicit and ideologically formulated misogyny—such as Elliot Rodger’s 2014 shooting spree in Isla Vista, California—in the right-wing column.