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Fact check: Do left or right leaning individuals commit more violent crimes during protests and demonstrations?
Executive summary
Research assembled in September 2025 shows a consistent pattern: right‑wing political violence in the United States has been more frequent and deadlier than left‑wing violence in recent decades, with studies estimating roughly 75–80% of domestic terrorism fatalities since 2001 attributable to right‑wing attackers [1] [2]. Analysts also emphasize important caveats about definitions, data collection, and the difference between organized domestic terrorism and episodic violence at protests, which complicate simple partisan comparisons [3] [4]. Recent reporting on crime trends stresses that broader violent‑crime geography does not map cleanly onto partisan narratives about cities or rural areas [5].
1. Why multiple analyses point to a right‑wing violence majority — and how strong that signal is
Multiple analyses from September 2025 converge on the finding that right‑wing extremism accounts for the majority of politically motivated violence and fatalities in the U.S. since 2001, with authors Jipson and Becker summarizing aggregated data that places right‑wing attacks at roughly three‑quarters to four‑fifths of domestic terrorism deaths [4] [1]. These summaries draw on incident catalogs and fatality counts compiled across law‑enforcement and academic sources; the repeated conclusion across pieces strengthens the inference that the pattern is real rather than an artifact of a single dataset or framing [2]. The authors explicitly present this pattern as a rebuttal to political claims alleging left‑wing predominance in political violence [4].
2. What the headline percentages mean — the practical implications for protests and demonstrations
The cited 75–80% figure refers to domestic terrorism fatalities, a category that typically captures lethal incidents motivated by extremist ideology rather than every instance of protest‑related violence [1] [2]. That matters because demonstrations and demonstrations‑adjacent clashes include many nonfatal assaults, property damage and transient disorder that may not be recorded as terrorism. The analytical pieces note this distinction and warn against equating broader protest violence with organized extremist attacks; the larger casualty share by right‑wing actors does not automatically translate into a simple metric for who “causes more scuffles” at any given protest [3].
3. Why definitions and data collection change the picture — agencies and researchers differ
Researchers emphasize that definitions of “extremist,” “domestic terrorism,” and “politically motivated violence” vary, and those definitional choices materially affect incident counts and fatality attributions [3]. Some agencies may classify single‑actor mass shootings differently than coordinated groups; some datasets include criminal actors with political rationales, while others exclude ideologically mixed motives. The analysts caution that comparisons across left and right must account for these methodological divergences, because inconsistent labeling can either undercount or overcount incidents tied to one side of the spectrum [3] [4].
4. Alternative evidence and contested narratives about crime and politics
Contemporaneous reporting in September 2025 complicated the partisan narrative tying crime rates to party control, showing violent crime higher in many rural, Republican‑leaning areas while many Democratic‑run cities have similar or lower crime rates compared with Republican‑run cities [5] [6]. These pieces underline that perceptions of who is “soft” or “tough” on crime are often shaped by partisan identity rather than uniform empirical patterns. This broader crime context is relevant because political actors selectively cite crime or protest incidents to support partisan claims that do not always align with the underlying data [6] [7].
5. Where the evidence is strongest — fatalities, organized plots, and historic trends
The strongest empirical signal in the assembled analyses lies in fatality counts and documented plots tied to organized extremist networks, where multiple sources show right‑wing actors composing the large majority of deaths and many high‑casualty events [2] [1]. These measures are less subjective than arrest counts or protest scuffles, and they are routinely used by researchers to assess the lethality of political violence. Analysts use these durable metrics to support policy debates and threat assessments, noting that lethal incidents drive the greatest public‑safety and counterterrorism responses [4].
6. Bottom line for interpreting protest violence claims and public discourse
Taken together, the evidence assembled in September 2025 supports the conclusion that right‑leaning actors have been responsible for more lethal politically motivated violence in recent U.S. history, but analysts warn against equating that pattern with every protest encounter or with local crime trends that follow different geographies and drivers [1] [3] [5]. The data are robust on fatalities and organized extremist attacks, but definitional complexity, reporting practices, and partisan framing all shape public perception—so policy and media discussions should use carefully specified metrics rather than broad partisan labels [4] [7].