In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance — as well as senior administration officials, members of Congress and powerful allies outside of government — have painted left-wing violence as one of the greatest threats to the United States, as they have announced their intentions to intensify the federal government crackdown on their political enemies.
“In a country of 330 million people, you can, of course, find one person of a given political persuasion justifying this or that or almost anything, but the data is clear: People on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence. This is not a both-sides problem,” Vance said near the conclusion of his time guest-hosting Kirk’s show on Monday. “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left.”
But repeated insistences by Trump, Vance and others that left-wing political violence is far more dangerous of a threat than right-wing violence is contradicted by years of data and academic study, including by a report the Justice Department removed from its website in the days following Kirk’s killing.
Vance's office pointed to a single YouGov poll conducted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting last week that found 16% of liberals believe it is "usually or always acceptable" to feel joy after the deaths of political opponents, including "24% of those who say their ideology is very liberal and 10% who say they are liberal but not very liberal. That compares to 4% of conservatives and 7% of moderates."
But that poll, taken in the wake of an assassination of a prominent right-wing figure and as a debate raged in political circles over the appropriate response to such an incident, does not match the reality of recorded incidents of political violence nor previous polls. In 2023, with President Joe Biden in the White House, a Public Religion Research Institute survey found 33% of Republicans agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country" compared to 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats.
The pledge to wield the full power of the federal government against left-wing groups and individuals — “with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government,” senior White House aide Stephen Miller told Vance on Monday — also comes as state and local officials in Utah and federal law enforcement have said Kirk's alleged killer acted alone and, while Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said the gunman held left-wing political views, details of a suspected motive have not yet been made clear publicly.
Despite this, the Trump administration and their allies are plowing ahead with their calls for retaliation and retribution based on the dubious claim left-wing organizations enabled, encouraged and celebrated Kirk’s killing.
“The left is the party of murder,” billionaire Elon Musk said, addressing an anti-immigrant rally in London over the weekend.
“Most of the violence is on the left,” Trump said at the White House on Tuesday morning after saying federal investigations into left-wing organizations and individuals were already underway.
But data, from both federal law enforcement and independent institutions, don’t back up that claim.
What the data says
The right-wing think tank Cato Institute published its own report last week in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, concluding that 3,599 people “have been murdered in politically motivated terrorist attacks in the United States from January 1, 1975, through September 10, 2025,” with 83% of those deaths occurring during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But, the report continued, “right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total” during that time period, accounting for killings by “those motivated by white supremacy, anti-abortion beliefs, involuntary celibacy (incels), and other right-wing ideologies.”
“Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total,” the Cato report continued. “Left-wing terrorists include those motivated by black nationalism, anti-police sentiment, communism, socialism, animal rights, environmentalism, anti-white ideologies, and other left-wing ideologies.”
While the report emphasized that “politically motivated murder is very uncommon in the United States, it also examined the data excluding the enormity of the 9/11 attacks, noting “it may make sense to exclude them because they obscure other trends.” In this dataset, right-wing murders jump to a 63% share of the deaths across the same period, compared to left-wing murders accounting for 10%.
Similar examinations in recent years reached similar conclusions on the frequency and deadliness of right-wing violence compared to left-wing violence, including from the University of Maryland, Reuters, the nonpartisan The Prosecution Project, the centrist Center for Strategic and International Studies, the liberal think tank New America, the Anti-Defamation League, and a 2022 study by researchers in the U.S. and Poland published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A deleted federal report
The federal report pulled from the website of the National Institute of Justice — the Justice Department’s research arm — was still available on the government’s website as of roughly 4:45 p.m. EDT on Sept. 11, about 24 hours after Kirk’s killing, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Published in the NIJ Journal in June of last year, both the links to the report’s webpage and the PDF file hosted by the federal government no longer lead to the report, and archived versions on the Wayback Machine indicate it was pulled down at some point on Sept. 11 or 12 last week.
Independent investigative reporter Jason Paladino was the first to report on the missing study, which is still listed on the Department of Homeland Security’s website.
“Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States," the report stated. "In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism. Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.
“In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives,” the report continued.
The Justice Department on Wednesday declined to comment on the report's disappearance. The National Institute of Justice did not respond to a request for comment. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson referred requests to the Justice Department and declined to answer questions on whether the White House played a role in or was aware of the decision to remove the report.
The study’s webpage redirects to the home page of the NIJ’s parent agency, the Office of Justice Programs, where a notice states that the DOJ is “currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance” and that “some pages and publications will be unavailable” during the review. That notice has been up since at least Feb. 6, according to the Wayback Machine archive, and came amid a purge of publicly available scientific data and reports across the federal government since Trump returned to power in January.
The link to the PDF file now redirects to a page that simply states “the requested page could not be found.”
The shadow of Jan. 6
While Trump now decries political violence, he has had a long history of encouraging violence on his political enemies, including urging on the mobs of his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a failed and violent bid to keep him in power despite his 2020 election loss.
When he returned to the White House this year, he pardoned more than 1,500 people convicted of or charged with crimes connected to that day, including the assault of more than 100 law enforcement officers and seditious conspiracy.
More than 600 of those were charged with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents or officers or obstructing those officers during a civil disorder, including approximately 174 defendants charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer,” according to the Justice Department prior to Trump’s pardons. Information on the Jan. 6 cases is no longer available on the DOJ website.
The leaders of the far-right street gang the Proud Boys and the militia known as the Oath Keepers were among those freed by Trump with his pardons and commutations in January. Last week, in response to the Kirk killing, Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes — who was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2023 for seditious conspiracy and other charges — vowed to restart his extremist organization hours after Kirk’s assassination during an appearance on the far-right conspiracist network Infowars.
“When it comes to the radical left in this country, you’re already in a civil war,” Rhodes said. “They hate you, they hate our Constitution, they hate our way of life and they want to destroy it.”