By Noah Rothman
Thursday, May 14, 2026
The demonic year 2020 was the source of innumerable
indignities and insults. The American right was afflicted by too many to count,
but one that was perhaps more vexing than most was the American left’s
unwillingness to call the violence on our streets by its name. Instead, the
institutions in their control sought to dismiss the violence as somehow both a
figment of Republican imaginations and an understandable response to the
oppressive conditions that prevail in modern-day America.
A September 2020 study of the violence by a group
affiliated with Princeton University found that no fewer than 220 American
towns and cities were convulsed by “riots” over the course of that summer. But
the study blamed this historic outbreak on the “longstanding crisis of police
violence and structural racism in America,” attributing the worst of it to
covert “white supremacist” agitators and the police’s attempts to “violently
disperse peaceful protests.” Indeed, in some cities, demonstrators were met with
ever-increasing “state force,” the report observes without ever asking why.
We’re left with the implication that such force was gratuitous.
Even Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, was
woefully misunderstood, according to the report’s authors. “While CHOP”
(Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, as it was rebranded) “was marred by criminal
violence,” the authors insisted that “the creation of the encampment coincided
with a lull in violent demonstrations.” Indeed, during the autonomous zone’s
short life, “only peaceful protests were recorded.”
The implicit distinction the report tried to draw — one
that other progressives would soon make more explicit — was the difference
between violent but unremarkable criminality and political terrorism. That is a
real distinction with serious policy implications. It is important to
establishing why the mobs of 2020 did not merely comprise opportunists and
thoughtless but well-intentioned bleeding hearts, so many of whom were
themselves victims of circumstance.
***
Here, we should define our terms. As the National
Counterterrorism, Innovation, Technology, and Education Center notes, the shape
that “anarchist violent extremism” (AVE) takes is distinct within the broader
landscape of threats posed by “domestic violent extremism” (DVE). A document
produced by the Department of Homeland Security for the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence in 2021 defines active AVE threats as “DVEs who oppose
all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions,
which are perceived as harmful to society.” True AVEs eschew “traditional
hierarchies, leadership structures, and organization that characterizes other
DVE groups.” Instead, they “prefer small-cell activities, organize violence to
coincide with or target major events . . . and tend to prefer violence against
property.”
The National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and
Education Center (NCITE) study is valuable not just for its concise definitions
and its historical breadth, but also for the fact that its authors were brave
enough to conduct the inquiry in the first place. “Many researchers consider
study of AVE to be a ‘third rail,’” the report concedes, “entailing
ostracization, backlash, or other negative perceptions against those who assess
AVE as part of a multivalent threat picture from violent extremism in the U.S.”
The authors courageously call out their colleagues for
creating an atmosphere — real or perceived — in which students of “left-wing
extremism” fear “smear campaigns, loss of professional reputation, or social
isolation within academic circles,” to say nothing of the possibility that
their work “may provoke harmful responses by leftwing extremists themselves.”
In other words, the goal of a terrorism campaign, i.e., terrorization, had been
achieved.
The fear that NCITE’s researchers identified was on
display in the response to 2020’s rolling riots from honest liberals who found
themselves on the receiving end of the social justice they’d once welcomed. “I
wasn’t sure what side I was supposed to be on,” said then-33-year-old Meredith
Webb, a resident of an affluent Minneapolis suburb, who waged a war against
common sense to position herself on the right side of history. “It felt wrong
to say we’re with you until you start looting.” Though she admitted to fearing
that her own neighborhood could be next “to burn,” she successfully pushed
those thoughts aside. “I didn’t want to let myself default to the simplistic
reaction of wanting this all to go away,” Webb confessed.
Webb’s equally terrorized neighbor, Michelle Garvey,
admitted to having briefly entertained counterrevolutionary thoughts, like the
notion that violence of any sort against any target was wrong. She was cured of
her doubts when she read a Facebook post from the owners of a restaurant that
had been torched during the initial rioting. “Let my building burn,” the
restaurateur declared. “Justice needs to be served.” Somehow, that made sense
to Garvey. “It’s a form of taking back by the vulnerable,” she said of the
riots. “That’s why it felt righteous.” Webb nodded. “I am trying to push myself
to understand looting and understand that we have to go outside the law
sometimes to make things happen,” she agreed.
In Webb’s effort to “understand” the incomprehensible,
she could count on the assistance of a sprawling intellectual apparatus
dedicated to rehabilitating the riots and lionizing the vandals.
“The demand to protest peacefully is a trap,” the New
Republic’s John Patrick Leary wrote in June 2020. After pretending to be
confused by what constitutes a violent demonstration, he mocked the notion that
a mob that hurls rocks and water bottles at riot police could be considered
violent. After all, it’s the police that enjoy the legal monopoly on force and
have access to “rubber bullets and gas,” he protested. In Leary’s estimation,
the presence of a power imbalance, not the discrete actions of individuals, is
the primary determining factor distinguishing wanton violence from noble
resistance. “What good, then, is this ‘peaceful protest?’” Leary asked. “Until
justice is served, don’t expect any peace.”
Leary was not innovating a novel argument. Throughout
that summer, the rarefied ranks of respectable American society treated the
violent radicals in the streets to endless flattery.
“Show me where it says protesters are supposed to be
polite and peaceful,” former CNN host Chris Cuomo asked on air. “Because I can
show you that outraged citizens are what made the country what she is and led
to any major milestone.” Cuomo’s confusion was further illustrated by his
contention that “police are the ones required to be peaceful, to de-escalate,
to remain calm,” an assertion betrayed by the First Amendment’s protections on
the right of the public to “peaceably” assemble.
In a conspicuously soft NPR interview with author Vicky
Osterweil, the outlet summarized the author’s outlook as one that viewed
“looting [as] a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.”
Indeed, Osterweil implicated herself even further than NPR had. “When I use the
word ‘looting,’” she said, “I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass
shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot. That’s the thing I’m
defending.”
The author objected to the use of the word “violence” to
describe physical force that damages or destroys. Violence is such an
“incredibly broad category,” she reasoned. The word has the power to describe
but fails utterly at “guiding me morally,” which, we should say, is not a
word’s job.
In her theatrical befuddlement, Osterweil settled on a
subjective definition of the word “violence” that she left open to the
interpretation of the violent. “Ultimately, what nonviolence ends up meaning is
that the activist doesn’t do anything that makes them feel violent,” Osterweil
concluded. “We have to be willing to do things that scare us and that we
wouldn’t do in normal, ‘peaceful’ times, because we need to get free.”
So the riots were political. Of course they
were political.
As the Princeton study was even forced to concede,
throughout the summer, there were “at least 38 incidents in which demonstrators
have significantly damaged or torn down memorials around the country.” Only
some of those monuments and memorials were dedicated to Confederate military
figures, whom the anti-fascist rioters duly reviled.
The rioters also targeted figures from the Founding as
well as postbellum giants of American political and commercial history. In
Portland, Ore., a statue venerating Thomas Jefferson was marred with graffiti
labeling him a “slave owner.” He was torn from his pedestal to the cheers of
the crowd. George Washington, a “genocidal colonist,” met a similar fate. Lest
you conclude that the protesters practiced some anti-racist consistency, they
applied the same tactics to a statue of Abraham Lincoln.
It was not inchoate or directionless violence. It was
revolutionary.
Democrats in positions of power followed the rioters’
examples. New York City officials would follow the vandals’ lead in tearing
down the statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural
History and removing Thomas Jefferson’s visage from City Hall. In Congress,
Democratic lawmakers took to Statuary Hall, adorned themselves in scarves with
thematically African colors, and silently knelt to honor the memory of George
Floyd, a conscious mimicking of the protest movement’s aesthetics. They adopted
the protesters’ slogans, too, including “I can’t breathe,” “Say their names,”
and “Defund the police,” the latter of which some Democratic lawmakers took
quite literally, to the party’s lasting political detriment.
If the riots were not political, neither their
participants nor their spectators acted like it.
We cannot say how many well-adjusted Americans were swept
up in the moral panic of it all. But we should not pretend that the riots did
not fit within the parameters of AVE violence. It was a radical moment in which
small-cell terrorism and violence were deployed to advance a political program.
Indeed, it wasn’t just the American right but those on the far left who drew
equivalencies between the revolutionary violence of 2020 and similar periods of
left-wing violence in America.
“In 1919, African Americans tried, in various places, to
fight back during the Red Summer,” Claflin University assistant professor
Robert Greene II wrote for the far-left journal Jacobin. “In 2020,
demonstrators in Minneapolis and around the country are struggling to overturn
a brutally racist social order. We are now living, it seems, in a Red Spring.”
***
Slapping a pseudo-intellectual gloss on 2020’s violence
only to smooth out its terrifyingly sharp edges was just part of the trick the
left played on themselves. Many of those who did not believe that the summer’s
violence could be honestly considered political violence also conveniently
defaulted to their belief that domestic political extremism was a right-wing
thing. After all, that’s what they’ve been told for decades.
“The extreme right has held a near-monopoly on political
violence” since the 1980s, as The Nation’s Joshua Holland tells it. The
growing threat posed by “right-wing extremists” coincided with a “decades-long
drop-off in violence by left-wing groups,” the Anti-Defamation League’s Center
on Extremism averred. The very idea of a “violent left” is a “myth,” according
to the Southern Poverty Law Center. A Washington Post analysis in 2018
also identified a long-running “drop-off in violence by left-wing groups.” By
contrast, “violence by white supremacists and other far-right attackers has
been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency.”
The growing threat posed by “white supremacist and
far-right violence,” PBS reported at the outset of the Biden administration,
represents “the biggest domestic terrorism threat facing the country.” As late
as 2023, Biden himself maintained that “the most dangerous terrorist threat to
our homeland is white supremacy.” That same year, the FBI “created a new
category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army
of MAGA followers,” Newsweek reported. The threat posed by right-wing
“anti-government activists” was so acute that it rivaled even the prospect of
foreign-directed plots.
There is no symmetry in the coverage of left-wing
political violence. Indeed, in some circles, left-wing intimidation tactics —
they so rarely rise to the level of “violence” — are considered a necessary
remedy to the ever-present threat of right-wing terror. As the NCITE study
observed, “Several recent popular books extol the virtues of anarchist groups
in the U.S. by painting them as necessary to respond to right-wing extremist
groups’ increased violent activity while denying outright any linkage between the
groups and violent actors.” In some cases, the authors are themselves
“long-time participants in their movements.”
Just to confuse the left further still, NCITE’s
researchers contend that much of the data in this realm is plagued by category
errors and sins of omission. The authors allege that the “political dynamic” in
which AVE researchers feel intimidated has “seeped into some of the major
databases that researchers use to evaluate incidents of terrorism in the U.S.”
For example, in one “recent study, [terrorism researcher Benjamin V.] Allison
found that several datasets on terrorism and political violence since 9/11
either systematically omitted cases of left-wing violence or, alternatively,
miscoded their perpetrators under other ideological categories even when some
evidence suggests they were partially driven by left-wing or AVE-related
motivations.”
NCITE’s authors are not alleging that a conspiracy is
afoot. Rather, the perpetrators of political terrorism can and often do
subscribe to what “the FBI refers to as ‘salad bar’ terrorism,” in which
violent extremists create their own bespoke blend of seemingly incompatible
extremist doctrines to justify violence. In other words, the violent mind is an
addled mind. That’s hardly a revelation.
Or at least it shouldn’t be. But the professional left’s
resistance to the notion that their ideological allies are responsible for
anything other than a paltry handful of violent events in America is vehement.
And their allies in media, academia, and advocacy have armed them with
statistics to support their self-deception.
“If you actually care about political violence, you
should not spread wild lies about it,” wrote Vox scribe Eric Levitz. The
“lies” he sought to stigmatize were those that ignored an Anti-Defamation
League information graphic that alleged that “left-wing extremism” is
responsible for only 4 percent of fatalities in the U.S. from 2013 to 2022. It
is a popular chart that is disseminated by those who do not expose themselves
to the myriad critiques of it.
The ADL got to its figure by counting, for example,
prison murders by gangs like Aryan Brotherhood and Nazi Low Riders as
“right-wing terrorism,” the victims of which are frequently gang members
themselves, prison guards, or even the perpetrators’ family members. While the
ADL study is careful to note that it includes “both ideological and
non-ideologically motivated killings,” those who promulgate it to settle a
political argument with the right seem not to care.
The ADL’s graphic isn’t the only crime against
informative statistics in this realm. The Prosecution Project, a University of
Cincinnati–led enterprise, also produced a popular infographic that conveys
visually the same notion: in short, the American right is a bigger terroristic
threat than even radical Islamism. That alone should render its data suspect,
at least among those who possess a cursory familiarity with the subject of
terroristic violence in America. In sheer numbers, Islamist fundamentalist terrorism
can claim by far the largest body count. At the very least, the Prosecution
Project’s contention that political violence peaked in 2019 should trigger a
skeptical impulse in curious minds.
Those who bother to dive into the data will find that
episodes like the one in which a homeless man broke into a hotel and attacked a
hotelier while deploying racial slurs are coded as right-wing violence. The
arrest of a woman for spray-painting anti-Christian slogans and obscene phrases
on the side of a church? That, too, is right-wing violence. In multiple
instances, interracial gang violence is attributed to right-wing extremism,
seemingly only because there was a racial element to those conflicts, even if
all involved were of minority extraction.
It’s not just that the project, as its name suggests,
measures only violence that resulted “in a guilty verdict.” The dataset is both
comprehensive and selective, and it has led those who wield it like a weapon to
draw selective conclusions.
Datasets like these preserve the left’s self-conception
that they are only ever the victims of political violence, never the
perpetrators of it. Mainstream progressives and liberals may have talked
themselves into the notion that the violent right is the only threat to social
stability, but the effect is the same as if they genuinely believed their own
hype.
