Finger Pointing and Charlie Kirk

The night that right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk was gunned down at Utah Valley University I flipped back and forth between two news programs, Erin Burnett’s Out Front on CNN and Laura Ingraham’s The Ingraham Angle on Fox News. I wanted to see how the TV press was covering the story. Both broadcasts reported that there was a “person of interest” in police custody but that their identity had not been released and nobody knew yet what their motivation was.

CNN was clear about this. Fox News, the dominant right-wing cable news station, was not. Ingraham and several of her guests implied that a radical, left-wing crank was responsible. One guest called for vengeance against “the other side” (meaning the left) for the murder. But a few hours later, police announced that their suspect was innocent. Ingraham and her guests had jumped the gun.

Ingraham’s guests weren’t the only ones pointing fingers at the left like this. The New York Times reported that Donald Trump blamed the “radical left” for the killing even before anybody had been arrested. Later during an interview on Fox and Friends he called for unity and calm but then quickly pivoted, ranting about how political violence in America was all the left’s fault for ramping up its dangerous political rhetoric. Never mind that in the same interview he launched his own inflamatory rhetoric claiming that “The radicals on the left are the problem and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.” The Times concluded that Trump and his administration were “using the moment to blame the left—and only the left—more broadly” for political violence in America. What are we to make of all this reckless finger pointing?

Trump, Ingraham and their friends brushed right-wing violence under the rug. They never mentioned the politically motivated murder of Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House, Melissa Hortman, or Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro, whose house was torched while he and his family were sleeping upstairs? They also ignored the plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi by someone who was really targeting his wife former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Nor did they acknowledge the attack on the Capitol in January 2021 where hundreds of right-wing insurrectionists—urged to action by Trump himself—tried violently to block the election of Joe Biden.

It’s just not true that the left is more prone to violence than the right. Figure 1 presents data from the Cato Institute, a well-known libertarian think tank. Not including deaths from the 9/11 attacks by Islamic terrorists, it breaks down the 620 politically motivated terrorist murders committed in the United States from January 1, 1975, through September 10, 2025 by the perpetrator’s ideology. It turns out, contrary to the claims of Trump, Ingraham and their compatriots, that 63% of these murders were committed by right-wing terrorists while only 10% were committed by left-wing terrorists. In other words, the right was six times more likely to kill for political reasons than the left!

Research published in 2022 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences came to similar conclusions. The Anti-Defamation League found that a sharp rise this century in right-wing terrorism has exacerbated this violence. White supremacists were the primary culprits, but anti-government extremists, anti-abortion extremists, and other right-wing extremists were also at fault. The ADL concluded that “the country is likely experiencing the highest numbers of right-wing extremist terror incidents since the white supremacist violence of the Civil Rights era. Moreover, the current elevated numbers of terror incidents show no likelihood of significantly decreasing soon.” Nevertheless, Donald Trump and the right-wing media blame the left for political violence in the United States.

The fact that the right jumps to conclusions without evidence to support their claims and accusations shouldn’t surprise us. It happens all the time. But in this case, they have grossly misrepresented the facts—and that’s very dangerous. Why?

The Brookings Institution found that “a range of research suggests that the incendiary rhetoric of political leaders can make political violence more likely [and] gives violence direction.” So, by laying blame with careless disregard for the facts as they have done in the Kirk case, people like Trump and Ingraham are stoking the flames of political hatred and violence among their followers. Even though the evidence contradicts their baseless claims that it’s always the left that’s at fault, it’s the radical right’s rhetoric—not the left’s—that more often percipitates political hatred and violence.

It may turn out that Kirk’s murderer was a left-wing extremist. We don’t know yet. But even if they were, that’s not the point. There should be no place for political violence in the United States—not on the left nor on the right. And nobody should cheer Charlie Kirk’s murder. But let’s be clear about the source of most of the political violence in America—it’s coming from the radical right, not the left. In saying this I’m not deceitfully pointing fingers at the right. I’m pointing at the evidence.

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