The Scourge of Left-Wing Violence

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.