Setting the Record Straight—The Left’s Legacy of Chaos: A Dive into the Numbers of Political Violence Since 2016

As the nation mourns the assassination of Charlie Kirk and sharply remembers the shocking assassination attempts on President Donald Trump alongside past attempts on other conservative activists’ lives as a backdrop, the question looms larger than ever: Who is truly responsible for America’s spiral into political violence? The left, from talking heads to Democrat politicians, has been quick to blame right-wing politics, which smacks of classic ‘victim blaming.’ 

The answer, backed by a granular breakdown of incidents and fatalities from news timelines and reports, is unequivocal: left-leaning sources, from BLM and Antifa to Islamist sympathizers, pro-Palestine extremists, anti-police militants, anti-immigration enforcement agitators, and transgender-led anti-Christian attacks, account for the lion’s share—70-90% of incidents and 75-85% of as many as 200 total fatalities since 2016 depending on sourcing.

This isn’t conjecture; it’s a careful dissection drawn from aggregated news data, including PBS and Reuters timelines, Heritage Foundation analyses, and Fox News investigations. While outlets like NPR and The Economist occasionally highlight a “balanced” surge, their own figures—when scrutinized by category—reveal the left’s outsized role, particularly in non-lethal chaos that escalates to deadly outcomes. In California, where anti-police sentiment and pro-Palestine protests have fueled campus lockdowns at UCLA and UC Berkeley, the stakes feel acutely local. Broken down, categorically, by the numbers, the pattern emerges.

Category Breakdown: Incidents and Fatalities (2016–September 16, 2025)

News reports tally roughly 400-600 political violence incidents overall since 2016, a “profound surge” per PBS, with left-leaning acts comprising 300-500 (70-80%). Fatalities total 150-200, with left-leaning responsible for 119-138 (75-85%).

Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, warned, “Extreme political violence is increasingly becoming the norm in our country, and the shooting of Charlie Kirk is indicative of a far greater and more pervasive issue: acts of violence are becoming more common, even without any clear ideology or motive,” per Reuters. Non-left sources (e.g., non-white supremacist, right-wing like January 6 or militia plots) contribute ~100-150 incidents and ~20-30 deaths according to the outlet. 

Here’s the granular split, sourced from Reuters’ 300+ post-January 6 cases, Heritage’s 2020 riot ledger, and Fox’s 2025 enforcement assault tracker, with a few important distinctions: 

1. White supremacy is not attributed as a right-wing motivator, given its explicit and broad rejection by the right. 
2. Conversely, Islamist attacks are considered left-leaning owing to the left’s ideological embrace of the Islamist cause, exemplified by support for Hamas, acceptance of Sharia law, and seeking comity with Iran.
3. Anti-police, anti-immigration enforcement, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian attacks are also ascribed to the left due to the wide acceptance of them.

2016-2025 Year-by-Year Fatalities Snapshot

To drill down further, consider this annual breakdown of left-leaning fatalities (aggregated from ABC News and Politico timelines):

• 2016: 60-65 (Orlando: 49; Dallas/Baton Rouge ambushes: 8; early BLM clashes: 3-8) (ABC News)
• 2017: 10-12 (NYC truck: 8; anti-Trump assaults/Berkeley clashes: 2-4, no direct deaths but injuries) (NY Times; CNN)
• 2018-2019: 8-10 (Pensacola: 3; Jersey City/Monsey: 4; scattered riots: 1-3) (Reuters)
• 2020: 25-30 (BLM riots: 18-25; Oakland federal: 1; CHOP: 2) (Heritage Foundation; PBS)
• 2021-2022: 5-7 (Antifa clashes: 1-2; Louisville mayoral attempt: 0; black nationalist: 2-3; UNM TPUSA Lahren attempt: 0; anti-abortion overlaps excluded) (The FIRE; Reuters)
• 2023: 9-11 (Thousand Oaks: 1; pro-Palestine surges: 2-4; Nashville school: 6) (AP; Reuters)
• 2024: 2-4 (Ongoing campus violence: 1-2; enforcement assaults: 1-2; Trump attempts: 1 bystander) (Reuters)
• 2025 (YTD): 23-27 (Kirk: 1; Thompson: 1; Hortman couple: 2; DC/Boulder: 3; Vermont agents: 2-3; Minneapolis school: 2) (PBS; ABC News; BBC)

This escalation—peaking in 2020 and rebounding now in 2025—correlates with left-wing mobilizations, from BLM’s summer of rage to the Gaza-inspired campus occupations. Reuters notes 21 political deaths YTD in 2025 alone, with left-leaning actors comprising ~80%.

Debunking the Biased Stats: Why ADL and FBI Data Can’t Be Trusted

Critics of narratives downplaying left-leaning violence often point to “official” stats from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and FBI, which purport to show right-wing dominance. But these figures crumble under scrutiny, riddled with methodological flaws, underreporting, and quiet revisions that serve political ends.

Start with the ADL: Their extremism reports, like the 2020 tally claiming ultra right-wing violence as the top threat, inflate numbers by lumping in non-ideological crimes—interpersonal violence in drug deals, botched robberies, or other non-political criminal activity as “extremist incidents.” 

A Business Insider investigation found that only 58% of ADL-cited incidents from 2009-2018 were actually motivated by ideology, hate, or terrorism; the rest were just individual crimes. Examples abound: a 2015 family murder by a supposed extremist driven by domestic strife, or a 2008 KKK initiation gone wrong, counted as political violence despite no hate target. As the report warns, this “significantly increases the overall number of incidents,” eroding trust in the data and emboldening fear mongers.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) fared no better under any real scrutiny. Plagued by systemic underreporting that masks crime surges—particularly those that bear links to left-leaning unrest. 

The Washington Examiner exposed in April 2024 how the 2021 shift to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) caused a massive data blackout: Coverage plunged from 89% of agencies in 2019 to under 63%, with big cities like Chicago, LA, and NYC simply skipping submissions. The FBI’s “estimates” based on peers proved to be fatally error-prone, as Baltimore’s 2015 homicide spike (up 62%) showed when compared to calmer neighboring jurisdictions. Victim surveys revealed a far grimmer reality: Only 42% of violent crimes are reported, per federal data, while FBI figures undercount by thousands. The report cites Baltimore’s 262 murders in 2023 vs. the FBI’s 225, or Nashville’s 6,900+ assaults vs. 5,941. This isn’t incompetence; it’s a pattern that lets politicians tout phantom declines (e.g., 13.2% murder drop in Q4 2023) while real violence—up 23% from 2019 in major cities—festers.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer nailed it in his 2023 letter to the FBI: They quietly revised 2022 violent crime stats from a 1.7% decrease to a 4.5% increase, adding 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 assaults—without fanfare, even as Biden-Harris touted the original lowball. Comer ascribes political motivation, demanding documents to probe this “failure to report accurate crime data” to Congress and the public. 

“The FBI’s recent failures to report accurate data draws into question the veracity of the recently released 2023 Crime in the Nation report, which estimated a 3 percent drop in national violent crime. Vice President Harris has touted the 2023 data too, and the media has used it dispel Americans’ real concerns about crime,” Comer said at the time. “The Committee is concerned that the FBI’s recent failures to report accurate crime data are politically motivated. The Committee is seeking documents and communications to understand the FBI’s failure to provide Congress and the American people with accurate crime data and whether the 2023 data is, in fact, accurate.”

An OJP abstract drives the point home: UCR overestimates criminal homicides by 25-50%, misclassifying noncriminal deaths as felonies, while weapons data is a mess—unclear detection rates and lumped categories obscure firearm realities. No wonder analyses skew left: Flawed inputs yield biased outputs. Stripped of this smoke, the raw news tallies stand unassailable: Left-leaning violence isn’t a fringe; it’s the force majeure.

Why the Left Owns This Crisis

The numbers expose a clear pattern. Left-leaning violence thrives on decentralized networks—Antifa’s black blocs, BLM’s street heat, pro-Palestine’s “intifada” chants—yielding high volume but low accountability. As Northeastern criminologists warn in recent analyses, this “lone-actor” trend, radicalized via social media echo chambers, has normalized threats against figures like Kirk. In California, Newsom’s equivocation on anti-ICE mobs and UC regents’ tolerance of antisemitic harassment only amplifies the echo.

Contrast this with non-leftist acts: January 6’s single death and four tangentially related deaths were tragic but singular, per ABC timelines, while allegedly FBI-instigated militia plots like the 2020 attempted kidnapping of Governor Gretchen Whitmer fizzled without bloodshed. Even The Independent acknowledges a Trump-era rise in right-leaning incidents, but concedes that leftist chaos outpaces it in raw incidents.

America’s founders envisioned debate, not death. Yet, as The Economist grapples with “radical-left” upticks, the silence and deflection from progressive leaders—much like Biden’s 2022 dismissal of Antifa—betrays complicity. From knowingly miscasting the assassins of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, both the Hortmans in Minnesota and Charlie Kirk as conservatives and Trump supporters, to declaring the 2020 BLM protests “Fiery but mostly peaceful,” the left’s efforts go beyond gaslighting to an Orwellian re-write of history while it’s happening.