The "left terrorism hits 30-year high" headlines are a lie
A new study has the media inaccurately reporting on a statistical fluctuation in left-wing terrorism.
Take a look at the chart above. Let it sink in. These are the numbers that, this weekend, provoked a maelstrom of panicked media coverage from outlet after outlet over a supposed surge of left-wing terrorism.
The left has been associated with an average of two terrorist attacks per year for the last thirty years. To put that in perspective, the right has averaged sixteen every year. But in 2025, left wing terrorist attacks have ticked up by… two. That’s less than we saw just three years ago under President Biden, and it’s only two more than we’ve seen from the right this year. But this barely discernible statistical fluctuation was more than enough to spark this explosion of headlines:
If you really want to appreciate how honest this is, consider the claim — which appears in article after article — that left-wing violence has reached a 30-year record high. As already noted, this is just demonstrably untrue: just three years ago the number was higher, and it was also higher in 2020 and 2016. The “30 year” figure seems to have come, as far as I can tell, from this passage in The Daily Mail:
Should the pace of far-left attacks continue, 2025 would have the most from that side in more than 30 years - though still far short of the far-right’s worst years.
It is worth adding that the study has problems of its own. For instance, the authors conclude that the Charlie Kirk murder “seems likely” to have come from the left, even though subsequent reporting has made it clear that the killer was an evidently apolitical gamer. It includes the arson attack on Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro’s house, but places this in a special “ethnonationalist terror” category instead of including it on the right. It also counts as terror the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione — a charge that judge Gregory Carro has already dismissed.1
The study also, in its discussion of left-wing terrorism, concedes that “left-wing violence is often narrowly directed at specific individuals rather than indiscriminate killings of civilians.” Without diminishing the seriousness of these crimes, it seems to me that the definition of “terrorism” has undergone some real semantic drift if attacks that go out of their way not to hurt civilians are considered terrorism. Historically, we have defined terrorism as a political tactic that deliberately targets civilians; is all political violence terrorism now?
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America’s anti-terrorism discourse is completely warped. You can see it in the sudden rush in the media to highlight the miniscule danger of left-wing terrorism based on a tiny outlier blip (sorry, “surge”) amid three decades of terroristic dominance on the right. But I would argue that this weekend’s coverage marks a new phase in this biased discourse; to understand why, let’s look at a recent poll by YouGov:
Compare the topline: the average rate of right-wing terror is eight times higher than it is on the left, where it barely exists, and yet Americans are still more concerned about left-wing extremism. To see why, just break down that total among Harris voters and Trump voters. Among Harris voters, the levels of concern are about what you would expect: they are way more worried about right-wing extremism than left-wing extremism. Trump voters, on the other hand, are just completely uncoupled from reality. And it isn’t just that they are way more concerned about left-wing extremism; they are almost twice as unconcerned about right-wing extremism as Harris voters are about left-wing extremism.
Here, in other words, one can argue that the main force driving biased perceptions about terrorism is right-wing apathy about their own contribution to the problem.
But that isn’t really the story of the CSIS report and the media coverage that’s followed. What we have seen this weekend is something new: not apathy towards right-wing terrorism, but a wildly disproportionate hyper-focus on the left. Obviously the Trump administration is intent on portraying everything at odds with Republican party politics as terrorism. Presumably, neither the media nor the public will completely buy into this line. But even if they buy into it a little — concluding, for example, that this is an “both sides” problem — they will have wildly misunderstood where the overwhelming majority of terrorism comes from in the United States.
And unfortunately, liberals are as likely to play along with this as anyone. This evening, Senator John Fetterman shared the inaccurate “30-year high” figure on Twtter. I imagine he thinks that this is the sort of noble, high-minded unbiased criticism that will cool down political violence in this country. If the recent uptick in “retaliatory” threats against the left are any indication, Fetterman’s enlightened centrism will almost certainly make things worse.
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For these reasons I have adjusted CSIS’s numbers by subtracting the Mangione killing from the left and adding the Shapiro arson attack to the right. Unfortunately the report does not list all of the terror attacks anywhere so it is unclear how many more of these numbers need adjustment.