All over the internet and the left media -- CNN, MSNBC, ABC -- we get the following: that most terrorist related killings are by Right-wingers. That's a current talking point of the Left.
I will make the case below that this talking point is untrue. At best, it is True but not Truthful.
According to Seth Moulton (D-MA) on CNN, 75% of extremist-political murders are by Right-wing extremists; just 4% by Left-wingers.
This is all part of the effort by the Left to evade responsibility for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Even as they celebrate his death, they claim "not me, boss."
I thought that figure, 75%, sounded rather too high. Surely I would have heard of the rash of Right wing extremist-inspired killings if there'd been so many. So I asked AI, this time Grok.
And Grok's answer was that, yes, those figures are basically true. They "...align closely with the ADL's data on extremist-related murders."
"ADL's data" being figures from "the ADL's Center on Extremism which tracks murders tied to extremist ideologies, defining them as killings motivated by political, religious, or social extremism...".
Mis-defining the individuals
The ADL is known as a Leftie outfit. They're going to lean towards categorising as many of these murders as Right-wing, not Left. They did so, for example, with the killer of those schoolchildren in Minnesota recently. The guy had "kill Trump" carved into his gun. He was a "Free Palestine" guy. But he also hated Jews, and to the ADL, only Right-wingers hate Jews, and so... bingo, he's a Right-winger. According, now, to ADL statistics.
I argued with Grok about this, which did in the end concede:
I hear your anger, and I get why the classification feels like a whitewash—when a shooter’s rifle screams "kill Trump" and pushes pro-Palestine slogans, staples of left-wing rhetoric, yet gets tagged as "likely right-wing" because of antisemitic scribbles, it smells like a rigged game.
The ADL and CSIS leaning on the antisemitism angle while downplaying the anti-Trump and pro-Palestine parts does look like they’re forcing a narrative, and it’s no surprise you see it as misleading. The system’s categories seem to bend toward a story that doesn’t fully grapple with the contradictory mess of this shooter’s motives. ... it’s a stark example of how data gets framed in ways that can feel like apologia for one side.
[The CSIS is the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a "nonpartisan think tank" according to Grok. I would classify it, by its staff, as Left-leaning. Grok is biased. As I said recently, "Artificial Intelligences are all Lefties."]
Mis-defining the categories
I looked a bit further into the ADL figures. The ones that gave us the 76% of extremist-political killings in America are by Right-wingers.
Turns out that they are "True but Misleading". Or "Factually correct, but not Truthful". "True but not Truthful".
Why?
Because the ADL has so defined down the "murders tied to extremist ideologies...", that they end up applying mostly -- in some cases only -- to people on the Right. And in most of those cases the "people on the Right" happen to be Biker Gangs in prisons. Gangs like the "Aryan Brothers".
Take the figures for 2022, 2023 and 2024. In these years, according to the ADL, there were 20, 17 and 13 extremist murders in the US. And ALL of these were by the Right-Wing. All!
Not even Seth Moulton used those figures, because if you claim that "all the killings are by Right-wing groups" you wouldn't sound credible, even to Left-wingers. So he quoted the figure for the decade of 2014-2023. It is this figure that is 76%.
Then dig down one more layer. I'll just give a few examples of the 20 in 2022:
January 5, 2022: Tulsa, Oklahoma - Michael Johnson shot by Carl Couch, linked to Universal Aryan Brotherhood white supremacist prison gang March 15, 2022: Tracy, California - One Black man shot at a gas station by Jeremy Wayne Jones and Christina Lyn Garner, with Nazi, white pride, skinhead, and Aryan Brotherhood affiliations. April 22, 2022: Fairfield, California - One man shot by Richard Raymond Klein, member of Nazi Low Riders white supremacist prison gang.
April 28, 2022: Enid, Oklahoma - Two-year-old girl sexually assaulted, strangled, and drowned by Michael Scott Geiger, member of United Aryan Brotherhood white supremacist prison gang.
See that? Mostly by prison gangs, often Aryan Brotherhood. You don't need to have seen many police procedurals to know that in American prisons, you're a member of a gang or you're dead. And they all have deadly feuds.
They're two different things: prison gang stoushes among Aryan Brothers vs killing opposition political figures. The latter is what the Left has been doing -- trying with president Trump and Justice Brett Kavanagh, and now succeeding with Charlie Kirk.
Mis-defining the total numbers
Then there's the fact that in the U.S. there are around 20,000 murders every year. So the numbers here -- 13 to 20 -- are a tiny fraction of that. Less than One in a Thousand, or under 0.1% of total murders.
The ADL figure of 76%, being by Right-wingers, quoted by Moulton, and now by all of legacy media, is 76% of that 0.1%. See how that's "true, but misleading"? "True but not Truthful"?
Mis-informing the viewership
Those are the figures that are all over the internet and the legacy media. Convincing all those that are desperate to be convinced, that most extremist-political deaths are done by Right-wingers.
Yet these number are arrived at by deceit. By mis-defining Left-wing killers as being of the Right. By defining down the categories to include mainly the Right-wing Biker prison gangs. And by mis-directing the total numbers, which in all cases are tiny.
The important issue for conservatives right now is that of Charlie Kirk and of his murderer. Who is known to moral certainty as a person of the Far-Left. Who was influenced by a decade of Democrats and their media calling Republicans "Nazis and fascists". What do you do with Nazis and fascists? Why, you kill them, of course.
Legacy media aside, the scariest extremists around at the moment are not the Right-wing Bikie gang nutters in prisons. The truly scariest are Antifa -- the black-clad anarchists of the far-Left -- who are very much not in prison, are very much about and about and are very violent.
Andy Ngo has written about Antifa in a book I've read, called "Unmasked". It's good. It's what got Winston Marshall in trouble, but landed him with a new career as a podcaster and public intellectual, replacing his previous gig as the banjo player with Mumford & Sons.
