In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder last week, Vice President JD Vance announced that he would host an episode of Kirk’s eponymous talk show as a way to honor his friend.
I will admit that I never listened to Kirk’s show when he was alive, but I was interested to hear the sitting vice president of the United States as a radio show host (even for a day). So I tuned in. After listening to a portion of the broadcast, I shared some quick thoughts in a tweet:
I listened to the first 30 minutes of JD Vance hosting Charlie Kirk’s show today.Vance is very invested in selling political violence and extreme rhetoric as a left wing problem.The data doesn’t bear that out.This is not a party problem. It’s an American problem.
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) September 15, 2025
I was not alone in this assessment. Here’s how the New York Times recapped Vance’s hosting gig:
“In their comments, Mr. Vance and (White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller) spoke in vague and menacing terms about far-left groups that they said facilitated violence.
Mr. Miller said that a formal effort would be coming, with federal agencies rooting out what he referred to as a “domestic terror movement,” and that they would be doing it in Mr. Kirk’s name.”
Little did I know that what I took to be an innocuous observation—that neither party is solely to blame for political violence—would turn into a, well, “thing.”
As of this morning, there are more than 3,500 comments on my tweet. The vast majority of them seem to be from the right insisting that political violence is far more common on the left, and arguing that I am a tool of the liberal establishment by failing to acknowledge it. (Or just a tool generally.)
To be clear: My goal is not to fight for a side. It’s to fight for the facts. Facts don’t have a side. To that end, I did some deep-diving into the available data on the sources of political violence in terms of our current right/left dynamic.
The most recent comprehensive and nonpartisan study on the question of whether the right or left commit more acts of political violence comes from the University of Maryland in 2022. You can read the full paper here.
The study cited two data sets to draw its conclusions: 1) Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS), which tracked acts of extremism from 1948-2018 and 2) START’s Global Terrorism Database that catalogued “violent acts of terrorism from around the world from 1970-2017.”
From those two datasets, University of Maryland professor Gary LaFree concluded this:
“There has been a strong presumption among many that while left-wing and right-wing ideologies vary a great deal in content, they resemble each other in terms of their willingness to use violence to further their political agenda. However, our analysis shows that right-wing actors are significantly more violent than left-wing actors…I think the data suggests that we should be taking right wing domestic terrorism way more seriously than many have done.”
And then there’s Alex Nowrasteh, vice president of economic and social policy studies at libertarian think-tank The Cato Institute. I cannot recommend the two pieces that Nowrasteh has written on the recent data concerning political violence at his Substack highly enough.
His first post—written the day after Kirk’s murder—contained three very useful charts. The first details the 3,599 people who have been murdered in politically-motivated terrorist attacks in the United States between 1975 and 2025. This skews heavily to Islamism as the motivating ideology behind the incidents in question, because of the attacks of September 11, 2001. That one day’s death toll accounts for 83% of the total people murdered in America in politically-motivated terrorist attacks since 1975.
destroyed World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. Shannon Stapleton/REUTERS
But those attacks were not the result of far-right or far-left political thinking, per se. Removing 9/11 from the totals, then, leaves Nowrasteh finding 65 deaths caused by leftist extremism—and 391 by the right. It is a small sample size, thankfully, but the data suggests that right-wing ideology is responsible for 63% of the politically-motivated terror murders since 1975 while left-wing ideology is behind 10%.
Zooming in even more, Nowrasteh looked at that same data since 2020— it’s an even smaller sample size (of course), but evidence that right-wing ideology is still responsible for a majority of the deaths from politically-motivated terrorism. (In a follow-up post published Saturday, Nowrasteh provided the full data back-up for the charts.)
I am not putting my full faith and credibility behind these studies. Data is data, yes, but we all know it can (and has) often be manipulated for a specific viewpoint or purpose. My goal below is simply to present the findings on the topic of political violence, knowing full well that partisans in both parties will find reasons not to believe data that contradicts their world view. For more insight, check out my analysis in full on Substack.
Want more ball and strike calling—no matter what uniform the batter at the plate is wearing? Check out Chris Cillizza’s Substack and YouTube channel.
The post Opinion: Who’s Really to Blame for America’s Rising Tide of Political Violence? appeared first on The Daily Beast.
