John Lott writes for the Federalist about a “bogus” new report on political violence.
On Sunday, at the memorial for Charlie Kirk — murdered by a leftist because of his political views — President Donald Trump declared “that violence comes mainly from the left.” And, on Friday, a leftist fired shots at the ABC station in Sacramento, California, in anger over Jimmy Kimmel’s temporary suspension.
Not everyone agrees. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) countered with its latest annual report, claiming,“This is the third year in a row that right-wing extremists have been connected to all identified extremist-related killings.” According to the ADL, between 2022 and 2024, so-called “right-wing extremists” committed 34 extremist murders, with 23 of them (68 percent) carried out by white supremacists. They say those attacks took 61 lives.
Claiming all the extremist murders are by “right-wingers” sounds dramatic, and the ADL report got extensive uncritical news coverage in media outlets including CNN, The Economist, and PBS.
Of course, those 61 deaths make up only a tiny fraction of the 58,781 murders the FBI recorded over the same three years. Still, as Trump noted, a political murder is “an attack on our entire nation.” Yet, none of the cases listed by the ADL involve a right-winger murdering a political target.
But serious questions remain about how the ADL defines “right-wing extremists.” Are all white supremacists really “right-wing?” Does every mass murderer who targets a gay bar automatically count as a “right-winger?” If you work at the ADL, the answer is apparently always “yes.”
Take Payton Gendron, the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooter who murdered ten black shoppers. The ADL labeled him a right-wing extremist because he was racist. But his own writings complicate that story. Gendron hated black people because he thought they had too many children, which he believed harmed the environment. In his manifesto, he called himself an “eco-fascist national socialist” and even described himself as a member of the “mild-moderate authoritarian left.”
He raged against capitalists for “destroying the environment.”
