by Batya Ungar-Sargob
The third assassination attempt on President Trump’s life this weekend has reignited a debate between Left and Right about where political violence in America comes from.
The Right points to the assassination attempts on the President, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the rise of Islamist terrorism, the rabid violence of the George Floyd riots, the elevation of political violence fan Hasan Piker to celebrity status in the Democratic Party, and the recent polling showing that the more liberal a person is, the more likely they are to support political violence.
On the Left, people point to January 6 as well as data purporting to show that most political violence comes from the Right. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, The Economist ran a piece claiming to explain “what the data show,” which suggested that most political violence was a Right-wing phenomenon. Other publications cited studies from the Center for Strategic & International Studies or the CATO Institute.
The problem is, the “data” that these outlets have been relying on is deeply flawed.
One of the major sources is the Prosecution Project, an initiative of the University of Cincinnati, which analyzes felony criminal cases involving political violence and sorts them by ideology. “The project examines criminal complaints, indictments and court records, looking for crimes that seek ‘a socio-political change or to communicate’ to outside audiences,” per The Economist. “Its data show that extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”
Yet if you pull up the data center yourself, you can see immediately that it is deeply flawed.
The data set doesn’t include either of the previous two assassination attempts on President Trump’s life, as far as I can tell; a search for the time frame and the names of the would-be assassins turns up zero hits. Nor does it include the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The data set is based on prosecutions, which might explain the absence of Thomas Crooks, who died at Butler. But what explains the absence of Trump’s other would-be assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, or Tyler Robinson, who killed Charlie Kirk? I couldn’t find Elias Rodriguez on the list either, who shot and killed two people outside the Jewish Museum in D.C. in May of 2025 to protest the war in Gaza.
It’s pretty easy to say that the violence is coming overwhelmingly from the Right if you overwhelmingly edit out any political violence from the Left.
The editing goes deep. During the summer of 2020, the George Floyd riots were in full swing. Political violence claimed the lives of dozens of Americans and caused $2 billion in property damage. Yet the data set from the Prosecution Project lists a grand total of five incidents “left wing” incidents that summer, two of them “eco-animal focused,” meaning it counts just three incidents of left-wing violence during that time.
Compare this to a list compiled by Forbes of 19 people who lost their lives during the first 14 days of George Floyd riots. Why don’t these people merit a mention in the Prosecution Project? They were killed during a politically motivated explosion of violence and rioting. These were, to cite the Project’s own criteria, “crimes that seek ‘a socio-political change or to communicate’ to outside audiences.” Yet they do not appear in the dataset.
Surely we can all agree that their omission massively skews the data.
Maybe you think that people murdered during political riots shouldn’t count as victims of political violence. But what about a meth dealer who happens to belong to the Aryan Brotherhood? Should their meth dealing count as political violence?
The Prosecution Project thinks so! Among the Right-wing examples it makes sure to include, you’ll find an Aryan Brotherhood meth gang that merited 10 entries for drug-related crimes. I’m no fan of the Aryan Brotherhood, but can you honestly say this is an example of Right-wing political violence? In what world does producing meth constitute “crimes that seek ‘a socio-political change or to communicate’ to outside audiences”?
You can also find people on the list who did things like vandalize an LGBTQ crosswalk—though not people who vandalized entire neighborhoods in 2020 in the name of racial justice.
Is vandalism political violence? I guess only if you’re conservative.
https://www.batya-us.com/p/debunking-the-data-that-claims-to
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