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> I'm saying the left has a bigger problem with violent rhetoric and actions

Here is some data that seems to say something different. It was posted as a response to Musk’s comment, "The Left is the party of murder."

https://x.com/SocDoneLeft/status/1965887912530293069

Btw It’s really crazy to read what a person who has 225M followers on X writes when he replies "Exactly" directly to claim that people who fund the Left, like Bill Gates, are murderers.

	▲	elcritch 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Looking at that source I’m skeptical of the validity of graph. Anecdotally in recent years I generally see far more casual references to violence from left leaning people both online and in person. After the attempted assignation of Trump, my Facebook feed was full of left leaning friends saying “shame he missed!”. It was gross. Similar comments abounded on a Washington Post article about Kirk’s shooting. Or the guy who murdered the UnitedHealth CEO, etc. On the linked graph take the case of that attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania where the shooter is listed as “conservative/right leaning”. However no motivation for that shooting has been found and the shooters politics were mixed. Seems he registered to vote as a republican but that’s not uncommon in a rural state as otherwise you don’t get to vote in primaries. He also donated to a democratic cause. His Wikipedia page lists his political beliefs as unknown. Other cases I’ve looked into in my local Idaho area were listed as “right wing” or “white supremacist” but were a couple of members of a gang trying to free another who was imprisoned for dealing drugs. Most of those drug gangs aren’t left or right leaning, just thugs.

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consumer451 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is no need to self-censor a comment like this.

If you believe that one political side is more prone to violence than the other, then say so and show your supporting data.

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pm90 5 days ago | parent [-]

> As of 2021, the United States government considers white supremacists to be the top domestic terrorism threat.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_terrorism_in_the_Un...

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themaninthedark 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Using that list, let's look back at the last ~40 years: 1978-1995 : Unabomber - Not WS 1980-1985 : Jewish Defense League - Not WS 1995 : Oklahoma City Bombing - WS(Possibly Political and not WS but will count as linked) 1996 : Olympic Bombing - WS 2009 : Fort Hood shooting - Not WS(Radical Islam) 2012 : Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting - WS 2013 : Boston Marathon bombing - Not WS(Radical Islam) 2015 : Cartoon Drawing Contest shooting - Not WS(Radical Islam) 2015 : Charleston church shooting - WS 2015 : San Bernardino shooting - Not WS(Radical Islam) 2016 : Orlando nightclub shooting -Not WS(Radical Islam) 2017 : Congressional baseball shooting - Not WS(Political left) 2017 : Charlottesville car attack - WS 2018 : Pittsburgh synagogue shooting - WS 2019 : Escondido mosque fire and Poway synagogue shooting - WS 2019 : El Paso Walmart shooting - WS 2025 : New Orleans truck attack - Not WS

I would note; I know of at least one missing item, the attack on protesters in Denver. I also added back in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting which was linked to the page but also missing in the list.

Also possibly missing: DC Sniper attacks

However for sake of argument, I will only look at data prior to 2021:

8/16 attacks on that list are linked to White Supremacists(Counting OKC) ~50%

In the last 15 years, again about 50% are linked to White Supremacists and ~41% linked to Radical Islam.

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t0lo 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

As an outside observer- what about as of 2025?

	▲	thephyber 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		First of all, the current calendar year never gets stats. It usually takes the FBI 1-2 years to release data because it’s mostly collected by 10,000s of local police agencies, then collated and normalized by the FBI. Even then, there were problems with the data because some police departments lied when filling out the forms (notably one department in Louisiana). But I also heard that the FBI stopped collecting it as part of the DOGE / DEI policy changes (because some of the fields / dimensions of analysis are racial). That said, the next challenge is to agree on what constitutes the left-right political spectrum in the US. I would argue it’s too vague to exist. It’s important to realize when a data point is describing gun violence or any source of violence, and whether it is violence against civilians or violence against the government as well.
	▲	tdeck 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Once they seize state power they can use that, so it's not considered terrorism.

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lynndotpy 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your view is simply one that is not in line with reality.

There's the numerous Obama assassination plots, 2017 Unite the Right rally, Jan 6, the recent assassinations of Democrat politicians, Abbott in 2024 pardoning murderer Daniel Perry who went to a BLM protest with the intention of killing protestors, and the terror groups like the Proud Boys, the 3 Percenters, The Base, the O9A/Cvlt/764.

And that's not to mention the Christchurch mosque shootings, the Club Q or Pulse Nightclub shootings, the El Paso Walmart shooting, the Jacksonville Dollar Tree shooting, or the Charleston church shooting.

And these are just the ones off the top of my head. These aren't cherry picked; the stats disagree with you too. Here is one such study, but you would be hard pressed to find one that shows otherwise: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/

The right commits far more political violence. That is just a simple fact of reality.

(edit) If you are sincerely concerned about political violence, then it's worth keeping up with the far-right accelerationist movement. They have been increasing in activity since 2020, and attacks on gun proponents and conservatives are part of those plots, like The Base's foiled 2020 attack on a gun rights rally in Virginia, or the the foiled 2024 energy grid attack ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atomwaffen_Division_me... )

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stouset 5 days ago | parent [-]

Don’t forget about Melissa and Mark Hortman. Or the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot.

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lynndotpy 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I forgot their names; Melissa and Mark Hortman were the assassinated Democrat politicians I mentioned, yes. I did forget the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot though-- no reason other than it slipped my mind.

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pclmulqdq 5 days ago | parent [-]

It slipped your mind because 12 of 18 conspirators in that plot were FBI plants or informants, 2 took a plea deal, and 4 got off due to the entrapment.

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lynndotpy 5 days ago | parent [-]

This is a non-sequitur, why would that make it slip my mind? Those aren't even details I readily remembered, and searching them up, it looks like those details aren't even factual. Searching it up, it seems thirteen people were arrested. The defense claimed three and a half years ago that there were twelve FBI informants.

I think it slipped my mind because there were already too many examples of far-right and conservative terrorist violence, and I was not intending to write an exhaustive comment in the first place.

	▲	pclmulqdq 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		The reason for the non-sequitur is because if there were anything behind this plot, it would have gotten a lot more news coverage than it did as an FBI-seeded conspiracy. As it stands, there were better examples of crazy right wingers (many of whom were actually crazy right wingers), so they moved on to those. In some other parts of the country, the demand for crazy right wingers exceeded the supply, so hoaxes filled that. Thirteen out of eighteen were arrested. Five were directly agents, and FBI agents tend not to get arrested when they are the ones doing the arresting.

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grosswait 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You mean the one that came out of the FBI’s extremist cultivation https://reason.com/2022/09/04/its-almost-always-the-feds/

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misiti3780 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

what are you implying?

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next_xibalba 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Huh?

Trump’s two would be assassins were left aligned.

Man who murdered politicians in Minnesota was right aligned.

It’s probably safe to assume today’s murderer was left aligned.

Seems like it’s a both sides problem.