The left, including sitting members of Congress, love nothing more than to rail against the perceived threat of radicalized white men and "white supremacists." To listen to the likes of Hakeem Jeffries and Ilhan Omar, one can't turn a corner without encountering a gang of angry white supremacists. While they would have us believe you can find a white supremacist under any flat rock, those people sure seem pretty thin on the ground to the rest of us. I mean, my own Susitna Valley has a mostly white population, but nobody I'm aware of hereabouts much cares what color anyone is, as long as you're a good neighbor. Around here, that generally means minding your own business.
The sad and sorry fact is this: It's not right-wing political violence and terrorism that's on the rise. No, it's the left that is growing increasingly violent. These people won't mind their own business and sure won't leave us to mind ours; they are more than willing to use force to make us mind our business the way they want. It's getting worse, and plenty of it is motivated by Trump Derangement Syndrome. Last year, the Center for Strategic & International Studies put out a report on the topic.
They find two key things:
The first half of 2025 was marked by an increase in left-wing terrorist attacks and plots in the United States, which continues a trend noticeable over the last decade. In absolute terms, left-wing incidents are on track in 2025 to reach historically high levels in the last 30 years, as shown in Figure 1.
From 1994 through 2000, there was an average of 0.6 left-wing incidents annually; in the following decade, that figure doubled to 1.3 a year. Numbers began to grow substantially, however, in 2016, and from 2016 to 2024, they averaged 4.0 a year. Through July 4, 2025 (thus excluding the Kirk attack), there were five left-wing attacks or plots, which sets a trajectory for a record-breaking year in the last 30 years.
But why, one might ask? Isn't the left supposed to be the warmer, fuzzier, more tolerant side of things? Not according to CSIS's findings.
The increase in left-wing incidents in the past decade is driven by plots and attacks directed at government and law enforcement targets. Of the 41 left-wing incidents since 2016, anti-government extremism motivated 17 of them, and partisan extremism motivated another 11. All left-wing attacks through July 4, 2025, appeared to be motivated by one of these ideologies, and the Kirk killing fits this pattern, although details about Kirk’s alleged killer are still emerging.
The only significant break from this trend was a surge of six left-wing firebombings against pro-life targets (pregnancy crisis centers and the office of an anti-abortion group) in the summer of 2022 around the time of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. These attacks were intentionally perpetrated at night against unoccupied buildings to reduce (though not eliminate) the risk to people.
My friend and colleague Bob Hoge wrote a detailed account of this report last September; read that for more.
We've seen too much of this here in the last year, including such high-profile attempts on the life of a former president, then presidential candidate, and now (again) President of the United States, that being, of course, President Trump. We've seen attacks on cops, we've seen attempts at assassination of other conservative-leaning figures, we've seen arson and riots from the left over matters ranging from immigration enforcement to abortion.
And, of course, there was the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk, which shook a lot of us.
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It seems likely that part of the reason for this rise in left-wing crime and terror is due to the very fact that the prosecutors in these very jurisdictions were the acts are happening are sympathetic to left-wing causes themselves. We've seen this across the Atlantic, where the United Kingdom stepped up security in the wake of a few high-profile jihadi attacks but have done little to nothing in response to the rising tide of left-wing violence.
While lethal violence associated with the far Right has been episodic, radical Islamist assaults have been far more common, accounting for well over 90% of terrorist related deaths over the past 25 years.
Despite this disparity, security institutions have frequently treated Right-wing extremism as comparably dangerous, reflecting pressure to demonstrate political neutrality to counter accusations of ‘Islamophobia‘. Indeed in February 2023, the Independent Review of Prevent concluded that the programme had lost its way and had left the public at risk by focusing far too much on non-violent Right-wing ideology to the detriment of where extant threats actually resided.
Left-wing militancy, by contrast, escaped similar scrutiny. After the retreat of Left-wing terror in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Leftist violence rarely announced itself through spectacular mass-casualty attacks. Instead, it often appeared through public disorder, vandalism or targeted intimidation embedded within larger protest movements. The relative absence of headline-dominating attacks meant that it seldom featured highly on the security agenda in the same way.
Militancy, yes, violence, yes, and it all starts with the rhetoric. Absent an outright incitement to violence, it's difficult to deal with speech, but acts? That's a different story, and it goes hand in hand with the problem many of these exact same jurisdictions have with increasing, non-political crime: Too many invertebrates occupying key roles in city or state justice systems. Lax prosecutions and easy sentences make the cost low enough that the violence is still appealing. In other words, the goblins, political and non-political, will take their chances, knowing that the odds are in their favor.
None of this will end well. There's the old saying explaining a key difference between left and right: The right thinks the left is stupid, while the left thinks the right is evil. And that, indeed, may be at the very heart of the issue; that ironclad conviction among the left that the right is evil, which justifies every act.
The problem, the fatal flaw in their reasoning, is this: If they stay the present course, sooner or later the thinking on the right will change, to the point where the right likewise sees the left as evil, and that is the recipe for an increasing spiral of violence.
And you know what the thing is about violence that the left doesn't know? We're better at it than they are.
