Liberals Push Bogus Stats and Biased “Experts” to Blame Conservatives for Political Violence

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week, liberals have been scrambling for talking points to shift the national conversation away from the escalating and now undeniable trend of left-wing political violence. They seem to have found a new favorite talking point in a supposed “statistical analysis” from a libertarian think tank that purports to show that most political violence in the United States comes from the right. However, it doesn’t take much digging to unearth serious questions about the accuracy and legitimacy of that claim.

The rapid proliferation of this dubious data point throughout the liberal echo chamber and corporate media ecosystem provides a case study in how the left legitimizes unreliable, biased, or downright false statistics to assert authority on certain topics. As such, it’s worth examining in detail – both for the purposes of debunking this specific accusation and for exposing the left’s common refrain that the “experts” agree with them.

On September 11, just hours after Kirk’s death, Alex Nowrasteh authored a blog post which declared that “politically motivated violence is rare in the United States.” Nowrasteh is the Vice President for Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that has been particularly critical of the new direction of the Republican Party under President Donald Trump.

While not an expressly left-wing organization, Cato has found itself increasingly siding with Democrats on one issue after another in recent years. The organization has, for instance, routinely provided a platform to self-described “Never-Trumpers,” opposed Trump’s tariffs, opposed efforts to restrict abortion, and criticized Trump’s executive actions like the dissolution of the U.S. Agency for International Development – despite claiming to support the cause of shrinking the federal government.

Nowrasteh has himself been even more explicitly hostile toward conservatives. On his X account, he has variously referred to Vice President JD Vance as the “Scoldy Schoolmarm in Chief,” reshared a post suggesting that a Kamala Harris administration would have been better for free speech, and opposed Trump’s decision to use the military to eliminate a drug cartel boat off the coast of Venezuela.

All of this provides important context, as Cato and Nowrasteh want us to believe that they are providing us with unbiased data showing that the right is really responsible for most political violence in the United States. But Nowrasteh has vociferously opposed President Trump’s strong denunciation of left-wing political violence, leaving plenty of reason to be skeptical that his analysis of what counts as “left-wing” vs. “right-wing” violence is unbiased.

In his September 11 piece, Nowrasteh asserts that “A total of 3,599 people have been murdered in politically motivated terrorist attacks in the United States from January 1, 1975, through September 10, 2025.” Excluding the 9/11 attacks – 83 percent of that total – leaves 620 deaths associated with politically motivated terrorism. Of that number, Nowrasteh ascribes the following body counts to these ideologies: separatism (4); unknown/other (9); foreign nationalism (8); left-wing (65); Islamism (143); and finally right-wing (391).

Predictably, the corporate media seized on this statistic as “proof” that conservatives are the real political violence threat in the United States. On September 16, Time Magazine repackaged the data in a nifty pie chart, proclaiming that “terrorists inspired by right-wing ideology are responsible for 63 percent of deaths from political violence during that time [1975-2025], compared to 10 percent for left-wing attacks.”

That talking point has since been shared countless times online and by the corporate media, along with being parroted by elected Democrats. The Atlantic, PBS NewsHour, The Economist, and The Independent were just a few of the other major news outlets who covered the study.

But those same liberal voices smugly reporting that left-wing ideology only accounts for 10 percent of all politically motivated murders have shown a stunning lack of curiosity in where that data actually comes from, or whether we can trust it.

Returning to Nowrasteh’s blog, we see that none of his tables or charts have links to any actual data. When a user clicks on “get the data” below each chart, it just redirects to a downloadable Excel document of the same chart.

Another link, which Nowrasteh says contains his “methodology and sources,” takes readers to a much longer statistical study published in March of this year. But that article specifically focuses on “50 Years of Foreign-Born Terrorism on US Soil.”

What about politically motivated killers born in the United States? Why does Nowrasteh tell us that 63 percent of all deaths from political violence come from the right and then link to a study that only talks about deaths from foreign-born terrorists? Better yet, why did no one in the corporate media bother to check whether his numbers were reliable? Or did they, and then decide to publish his claims anyway?

After some digging, I finally came across a Substack piece from Nowrasteh in which he provides a full breakdown of the names and body counts of all politically motivated terrorists included in his data. Immediately, suspicions about Nowrasteh’s methodology proved justified.

Once you actually examine the 391 so-called “right-wing” murders in Nowrasteh’s dataset, a striking pattern emerges. The overwhelming majority are not committed by conservatives, Republicans, or even self-identified “right-wing” activists in any recognizable sense of the term. They are carried out by neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other fringe extremists who openly reject the very principles conservatives stand for.

Lumping these deranged killers in with everyday Republicans or Trump supporters is not just sloppy – it is intentionally misleading. The narrative that “the right” is responsible for political violence only works if you pretend that neo-Nazis and mainstream conservatives belong to the same movement. They don’t.

In fact, they are as diametrically opposed to conservative principles as the far left is. Conservatives believe in equal justice under the law, ordered liberty, and the dignity of the individual. White supremacists believe in tearing those values down and replacing them with racial tribalism and authoritarianism – just like the far left. That ideology is not “conserving” anything. It is destroying every traditional American value that conservatives strive to protect.

This is why no serious conservative figure tolerates neo-Nazis or white supremacists. They are universally denounced and driven out of the movement whenever they try to co-opt the conservative label. Charlie Kirk himself went out of his way to confront anyone at his events who tried to spout racist rhetoric, telling them they had no place in conservatism.

By contrast, the radical left fringe, from Antifa to BLM extremists and militant LGBTQ activists, is not shunned by the Democratic Party. It is embraced, legitimized, or at the very least tolerated. That is the crucial distinction.

It is profoundly dishonest to equate the assassination of Kirk with the violence of a lone neo-Nazi acting on a worldview that no mainstream figure endorses. While details are still emerging, it now seems evident that Tyler Robinson was motivated by his hatred of Kirk’s statements on LGBTQ ideology. Unlike actual conservatives, who share no ideological bonds to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, Robinson’s position on LGBTQ issues that drove him to assassinate Charlie Kirk is the same as the one advanced by the Democrat Party.

It is the corporate media and the Democrat Party establishment that has sought to associate conservatives with neo-Nazis and other fringe groups incorrectly labeled as “far right.” In reality, these groups do not fit on any logically coherent political spectrum because they reject the very foundations of American civic life and government.

But the same cannot be said for far-left ideologies and their close association with the Democrat Party. While conservatives constantly disassociate themselves with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, Democrats add fuel to the fire of far-left individuals by labeling individuals like Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump “fascist” and a “threat to democracy.”

This sort of data manipulation through redefinition of terms is hardly an isolated tactic from the left. It is the same trick liberals and the press use in countless other contexts: claim crime is down in Washington, D.C., while ignoring that residents remain far more likely to be victimized there than in most of the country; claim illegal immigration is down only after redefining hundreds of thousands of illegal crossers as “asylum seekers.” When you look under the hood, the numbers don’t hold up – but the headlines serve their political purpose.

That’s the game. The statistics are not meant to inform. They are meant to smear, to delegitimize, and to distract from the real and growing problem that the left would rather we all ignore.

Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.