The third assassination attempt on the president’s life, this time by left-wing extremist Cole Allen, has once again exposed the blind spot among academics and journalists when it comes to left-wing violence.
I’ve experienced this in academia. When Portuguese professor Pedro Zuquete was trying to publish his Handbook of Left-Wing Extremism, to which I am a contributor, he repeatedly hit brick walls. One reviewer for a publisher grudgingly admitted that the volume filled a gap and that there were no handbooks on left-wing extremism in existence, but focused mainly on ideology: “Chapter 15 … equates BLM and Antifa as a ‘destructive’ force of extremism, but shows no indication that a balanced investigation of the context and causes of these movements will be provided.”
Needless to say, there is no such equivocation or calls for “context” and understanding when it comes to interrogating right-wing extremism. Jeffrey Bale and Tamir Bar-On convincingly argue that a moral panic around fascism has been consistently manufactured since 1945 by Western intellectuals. Lazy and nebulous definitions of terms such as “fascism,” “racism,” and “far-right” go unchallenged by their peers, reinforcing a continuous “fascist scare.”
While a staple of left-wing discourse is that words lead to violence – think ‘hate speech’ or ‘stochastic terrorism’ — and that this justifies censorship and cancel culture, such reasoning falls away when it comes to expressing hatred toward conservatives. In fact, left-wing assassins like Luigi Mangione, or those who condone political violence such as Hasan Piker, are viewed by many progressive elites as chic radicals.
The media practices a blatant double standard in its treatment of Left and Right violence, exhibiting the classic features of what psychologist Keith Stanovich terms myside bias. The pattern has accelerated in the past decade. For instance, a big data study of content from major American and British newspapers by David Rozado and me revealed that superlative adjectives like “extreme,” “far,” and “radical” were used far more often to describe the Right than the Left, with this lopsided rhetoric taking off in the mid-2010s.
Mainstream institutions and outlets continue to have a log in their eye when it comes to leftist extremism. After the latest attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, the Economist ran a story arguing that most political violence comes from the political right. Batya Ungar-Sargon tore the analysis apart, showing that the source material used by the Economist comes from progressive organizations whose coding decisions memory-hole leftist violence while manufacturing right-wing incidents. This cooks the results to serve up the right conclusion. For instance, the source data failed to record two previous assassination attempts on Trump or the murder of Charlie Kirk. It omitted the dozens killed and over $2 billion in property damage due to George Floyd rioting, but somehow saw fit to record 10 drug-related crimes committed by the Aryan Nations. Pro-Palestinian violence is not coded as leftist but as ethnonationalist.
Hating conservatives does not appear to fall under the definition of “hate” recorded by self-styled “anti-hate” expert groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) or their fellow-travelers in Britain (Hope Not Hate) and Canada (Canadian Anti-Hate Network, or CAHN). These well-funded activist groups have repeatedly laundered partisan radicalism as dispassionate analysis.
The SPLC, currently under investigation by the Department of Justice, was successfully sued for $3.4 million by British Muslim writer Maajid Nawaz, whom the SPLC smeared as an “anti-Muslim extremist.” The SPLC learned nothing, continuing to routinely label mainstream conservatives like Chris Rufo, Dinesh D’Souza, or the late David Horowitz as extremists. This is a stock-in-trade of these organizations. In Britain, Hope Not Hate claimed that a Muslim woman was the victim of a far-right “acid attack” during the 2024 Southport riots, with over 100,000 retweets, which it was later forced to retract. In the febrile atmosphere of the riots, this could have stoked Muslim attacks against whites. In Canada, CAHN, which regularly smears conservatives, failed to name the 300 phantom far-right “hate groups” they claimed existed in Canada. Meanwhile, the organization has been exposed as having Antifa ties.
These organizations ignore anti-conservative leftist extremism while stretching the definition of “hate” to include mainstream conservatives. Yet due to progressive bias and elite credulity, they can hide behind the “expert” label and are regularly cited as a credible source by journalists, courts, and governments.
Despite this, there is growing evidence that the left is becoming more violent. YouGov found that 25% of “very liberal” Americans say violence can be justified to achieve political goals compared to 3% of “very conservative” Americans. After the first Trump assassination attempt, I discovered using a list experiment survey that one-in-three Democrats wished he had been killed. Young leftists are especially prone to such thinking. Increasingly, young educated progressives believe that morality is absolute rather than relative. They are much more likely to cut ties to friends and family who do not share their political views. In a recent survey, nearly half of Gen-Z liberals agreed with the statement, “Violence is often necessary to create political change.”
While men and gun owners are more likely to be violent and on the Right, this is counterbalanced by the fact that leftist young men support political violence at greater rates than conservative young men. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s massive annual college student surveys show that ‘very liberal’ and ‘democratic socialist’ male students are significantly more likely to agree that violence is an acceptable form of protest than conservative or moderate male students. Minority and LGBT students are also significantly more likely to endorse political violence.
Though our institutions are blind to it, a new intolerant strain of the Left is on the rise, and with it support for vandalism, looting, and violent groups like Antifa or Black Lives Matter.
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Eric Kaufmann is a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham.
