What were the ideologies, manifestos, or stated motives behind major right-wing attacks in late 2024 and throughout 2025?
Executive summary
Right‑wing attacks in late 2024 and through 2025 were driven predominantly by white‑supremacist, neo‑Nazi and ethnonationalist ideologies, plus anti‑government, misogynistic (including “incel”) and anti‑abortion motives; analysts report that right‑wing actors historically account for the majority of domestic terrorist lethality in the U.S. and remained a dominant force in 2024 even as some 2025 studies note a short‑term rise in left‑wing incidents (CSIS; ADL; Observatorio) [1] [2] [3]. Researchers and monitoring groups identify manifesto culture, online networks and conspiratorial projects such as “Project 2025” as accelerants for radicalization and justification for violence (The Guardian; academic reviews) [4] [5].
1. White supremacy and neo‑Nazi doctrine: the recurrent core
Most reporting and monthly monitoring characterize classic racial hierarchy ideologies — white supremacy and neo‑Nazi beliefs — as the consistent ideological core behind many right‑wing attacks and plots in this period. Observatorio’s recurring monthly analyses list “White Supremacy, Anti‑Semitism and Neo‑Nazi ideology” as dominant drivers across 2024–25, and argue that these doctrines remain the central pillar of extremist mobilisation [6] [7] [3].
2. Anti‑government, conspiratorial and partisan motivations
Counterterrorism researchers define a strand of right‑wing violence as motivated by opposition to government authority and conspiratorial narratives — including QAnon‑style beliefs and claims of electoral fraud — that frame the state as illegitimate or tyrannical. CSIS describes right‑wing terrorism as including opposition to government overreach and anti‑authority sentiment among its chief motives [1].
3. Gendered grievances and “incel” misogyny
Misogynistic currents — notably the “incel” or involuntary celibate subculture — are repeatedly cited as explicit motives behind a subset of attacks. Analysts place gendered anger alongside racial motives as an amplifying grievance used to justify violence by some perpetrators [1] [5].
4. Anti‑abortion and single‑issue violence
Opposition to policies such as abortion appears in multiple source definitions of right‑wing terrorism: anti‑abortion animus is named as a motive category within broader right‑wing extremist profiles and has been associated with violent acts in previous years [1] [8].
5. Manifestos, “testaments” and the rhetoric of justification
Far‑right attackers have increasingly produced long "manifestos" or written testaments to explain or glorify their acts. Academic literature shows those manifestos reveal common themes — glorification of identity, protector narratives, and masculine grievance — which researchers use to map motive and recruitment dynamics [5] [9].
6. Project 2025 and mainstream policy templates as accelerants
Long‑form conservative policy projects and high‑visibility manifestos like “Project 2025” are cited in public and congressional debate as influential blueprints that can normalize hardline policy aims; journalists and critics argue they help fuse mainstream policy aims with more radical rhetoric, which can be exploited by extremists — The Guardian and other reports document this debate around the manifesto’s proposals [4] [10].
7. Online networks, messaging platforms and the financing question
Monitoring groups and intergovernmental reports stress that online platforms and encrypted channels have become primary conduits for radicalization, tactical instruction and small‑scale fundraising; the FATF work on ethnically motivated terrorism highlights that while many attackers self‑fund, legal donations and membership fees also finance extremist ecosystems [11] [12].
8. Data disputes, short‑term trends and political framing
Empirical accounts agree that right‑wing extremists historically committed the majority of extremist murders in recent decades (ADL; CSIS), but 2025 saw contested short‑term shifts: CSIS and some media reported a temporary decrease in right‑wing incidents and an uptick in left‑wing attacks through mid‑2025, prompting debate about whether the landscape had meaningfully changed or simply reflected short‑term variation in plots and prosecutions [1] [13] [14]. Multiple analysts warn against using such short windows to overturn long‑running patterns [14].
9. What sources don’t settle
Available sources do not mention a comprehensive, single catalog of every “major” right‑wing attack across late 2024–2025 with the specific manifesto text for each perpetrator; instead reporting and monthly monitoring synthesize motives from prosecutions, manifestos where released, and thematic analysis by experts [3] [1]. Sources do not uniformly attribute every incident to a single ideology — several cases remain coded as mixed, unclear, or non‑ideological in datasets cited by researchers [14].
10. Takeaway for readers
Researchers and watchdogs converge on a clear long‑term picture: racialised, neo‑Nazi and ethnonationalist narratives, anti‑government conspiracism, misogynistic grievance and single‑issue extremism (abortion) form the ideological backbone of right‑wing attacks; manifestos and online ecosystems amplify and spread those motives, while short‑term statistical shifts in 2025 prompted fresh debate without overturning the broader body of evidence that right‑wing extremist violence has been a dominant lethal threat in recent years [1] [6] [5].