Yesterday, a Utah court filing refuted a theory popular on the left: that the suspect in the murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was a right-winger. “I had enough of his hatred,” the suspect, Tyler Robinson, wrote in a text message to his romantic partner, according to a transcript of their exchange released by the prosecutors. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” An assassin to the right of Kirk, irritated by Kirk’s moderation, would have criticized him for being insufficiently hateful. The other charging documents describe Robinson’s recent drift to the political left. Robinson’s romance with a trans person, and decision to kill Kirk just as he was speaking about transgender mass shooters, strongly suggests that the alleged killer felt special zeal for the cause of trans rights, which is itself closely identified with the left.
The evidence that Robinson was a “Groyper”—a member of an online further-right-than-thou movement that had harassed Kirk and President Donald Trump—was paltry. Why did anyone believe that idea to begin with? Already it bore the marks of an incipient conspiracy theory, a soothing nugget of esoteric knowledge, suppressed for political purposes. Many of those suckered in were victims of their own motivated reasoning. It hurts to admit that a movement you like has produced a bad person, and it hurts even more to admit that bitter truth to a gloating member of a movement you hate. But there is another reason this theory, which would have absolved the left completely, was so enticing. Lethal left-wing political violence, in America, has been a relative rarity, and the last time it was commonplace was when most Americans living today were not yet born. Seeing a real left-wing American killer, motivated by ideology, is like seeing a passenger pigeon or a saber-toothed tiger.
The rarity of left-wing political violence is well established. Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute compiled a list that provides a helpful overview of the types of political killing that have occurred in the United States in the past 50 years. The first thing to notice is that these killings are rare: Whole years go by in which zero people or one person is killed by ideologically motivated extremists. The second salient feature of the data is the spikes: Nothing approaches the September 11 attacks in death toll (2,977); the nearest competitors are the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (168) and the attack on the Pulse nightclub, in Orlando, in 2016 (49), by an Islamic State–aligned terrorist. No single incident by a leftist escapes the single digits. Inevitably, the categorization of individual killers is debatable. (Was the Unabomber a leftist? How about Robert Rozier, who murdered white people while in a Black Hebrew Israelite cult? Both are listed as leftists.) But the data are still clear. The United States has very few political killings, and not many are by leftists.
Further distorting perceptions of these numbers is the time elapsed since leftist killing was more common. During the 1960s and early ’70s, leftist violence grabbed the attention of ordinary Americans, thanks to widespread reports of various murders, bank robberies, and bombings. That era—which had just about ended when Nowrasteh’s data begin—featured regular hijackings and other colorful criminality by Communists, anarchists, and Black-liberation groups. “If we had been having a conversation about political violence in the 1960s or 1970s,” the political scientist Thomas Zeitzoff told me, “we would be talking about leftist political violence.” But in the early ’80s, the left-wing killers sat out a round, and the right-wingers ascended. The Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols ensured that, in the ’90s, the right had a kind of proprietary hold on political violence, and al-Qaeda and the Islamic State ensured that jihadism wrested it from the right for the first two decades of the 2000s.
Those 40 years have lulled many Americans, especially those eager to be lulled, into forgetting that leftists are susceptible to the same impulses that strike everyone else. Michael K. Logan, who studies political violence at Kennesaw State University, told me that leftist violence nowadays is furthermore a fragmented category, because many of those who support it come from narrow, issue-oriented perspectives, such as obsession with animal rights, gender, or immigration. “They are all anti-authority, and often reactionary,” he told me, and define themselves in opposition to “specific moral shocks,” as well as “threats they perceive from the far right.” Logan, too, points out that leftist violence was much more prominent in the past—think of the 1920 Wall Street bombing, or the assassination of William McKinley in 1901 by the left-wing anarchist Leon Czolgosz—and says that, recently, the left is much more associated with property crime and nonlethal violence. “In the Portland riots in 2019 and 2020, you see arson, Molotov cocktails, firebombings on law-enforcement targets,” Logan said, acknowledging that fire can kill. “Lethal violence does occur, but to a much lower degree than among the right-wing or religious.”
These facts do not match the perceptions of those on the right. Yesterday, the fill-in host for Charlie Kirk’s radio show, Vice President J. D. Vance, referred to “this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years,” and he cited a YouGov poll that indicated far greater support for political violence among liberals than among conservatives. (A quarter of “very liberal” Americans think political violence can be justified.) These numbers are dreadful, though it is a challenge for Vance to explain why liberals who support this odious activity so rarely engage in it, and why conservatives who reject it sometimes partake nonetheless. Polling on this subject is notoriously difficult. Violence covers a wide range of sins, from a bop on the head to a public execution, and when people are asked about their support for specific acts of violence, their answers might change in interesting ways.
One reason for this paradox might be found in a 2022 journal article by Joseph S. Mernyk and others, which showed that each side, left and right, thinks the other is much more supportive of political violence than it is. Mernyk uncovered an ominous feedback loop: Believing that the other side is more violent than is really the case seems to make the believer more supportive of violence, too. The perception of violence from the other side licenses violence from one’s own side—and so on. It would be helpful for both sides to understand that political violence is a curse for which both the left and right have, at different times, been responsible, and also that neither side does as much of it as most people seem to think.
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