...Ari Melber was just one of the reporters this week who made the mistake of equating what he called the 'rise in violence in the U.S.' with what all of the people who measure extremist violence in America say, with the exception of apolitical Islamic violence, is coming mainly from 'white nationalists and anti-abortion advocates.'
from Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the CATO institute :
___Terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology are responsible for 87 percent of those murdered in attacks on US soil since 1975
Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total. The definition here of right-wing terrorists includes 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. 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.
There isn’t an obvious recent spike in politically motivated terrorism when the outlier deadliness of the 9/11 attacks is excluded from the analysis. The spikes in 1995 and 2016 are from the Oklahoma City Bombing and the Pulse Nightclub Shooting, respectively. Twenty-four people have been murdered so far in 2025, including Kirk.
Terrorism since 2020 paints a slightly different picture. Since January 1, 2020, terrorists have murdered 81 people in attacks on US soil that account for about 0.07 percent of all homicides during that time (estimated for 2025 so far). Right-wing terrorists account for over half of those murders, Islamists for 21 percent, left-wingers for 22 percent, and 1 percent had unknown or other motivations. There are not many politically motivated terrorist killings in the United States.
The number of deaths in politically motivated terrorist attacks is so tiny that any statistical analysis is extremely fragile. However, there is one consistent finding from analyses of politically motivated terrorism: there aren’t many deaths. Thus, their small numbers mean it’s important to intensely analyze individual politically motivated terrorist offenses because the inclusion or exclusion of just a few killers or misclassification makes a big difference in the final tally.
read more: https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states
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