The political left was devastated by the assassination of Charlie Kirk for all the wrong reasons. An innocent man was gunned down in broad daylight simply for talking about policy. It was a terrible look for them, so they initially claimed the shooter was a MAGA Republican. That backfired spectacularly. Since then, they’ve pushed the narrative that political violence is overwhelmingly a right-wing problem. Well, the past couple of days have been devastating to that narrative.
In Sacramento, a retired teachers union operative decided to turn his politics into bullets. Anibal Hernandez-Santana, a 64-year-old former legislative director for the California Federation of Teachers, committed a drive-by shooting at the local ABC station on Friday. He squeezed off at least three shots into the lobby in broad daylight, just one day after protesters had gathered there to complain about Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension. Those protesters carried the usual signs—you know, Trump is “Hitler,” his supporters are “fascist enablers,” all the greatest hits from the left’s tired playbook. Hernandez-Santana apparently absorbed that mood of righteous fury, posted calls for Trump’s demise on social media, and then decided to carry his left-wing politics into the realm of political violence.
ICYMI: Barack Obama Is the Last Person Who Should Lecture America on Censorship
And that wasn’t the only eruption of violence shredding the left’s carefully polished narrative. Saturday night at the Sky Meadow Country Club in Nashua, New Hampshire, a 23-year-old man opened fire, killing one and injuring at least two others. Witnesses say the shooter, Hunter Nadeau, shouted “Free Palestine” and “The children are safe” while carrying out the attack.
The truth is unavoidable: the left doesn’t just tolerate political violence, it cultivates it. We keep hearing lectures about “rising extremism on the right,” but the last week alone shows exactly where the threat is coming from. A popular conservative leader is assassinated, a leftist union man shoots up a television station, an anti-Israel radical sprays gunfire into a country club—and somehow the left still thinks it can wag its finger at conservatives for violent tendencies. They can’t control their own side, and yet they want the moral high ground As I previously pointed out, the left is citing a recent Cato Institute by Alex Nowrasteh that claims that political violence, while rare, is overwhelmingly right-wing. But a closer look shows this is more propaganda than research.
I reviewed the analysis, and found that many of the examples of “right-wing” violence weren’t actually right-wing at all. For example, Timothy McVeigh, the man behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, is labeled right-wing despite his ideology not adhering to the traditional right/left paradigm. McVeigh was an anti-government extremist whose rage stemmed from anger over the 1993 Waco siege and the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, not from conservative ideology.
Other examples of political violence wrongly labeled “right-wing” include the 2022 Club Q shooting. Nowrasteh labeled shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich as "right-wing" despite Aldrich identifying as non-binary and suffering from documented mental illness before killing five people.
Similarly problematic is Peyton Gendron, who murdered ten people at a Buffalo supermarket. Nowrasteh branded him "right-wing" even though his own manifesto explicitly identified him as an "eco-fascist national socialist"—hardly traditional conservative ideology. Patrick Crusius, the El Paso Walmart shooter who killed twenty people, also received the same "right-wing" label despite his writings revealing an eco-fascist worldview nearly identical to Gendron's.
Nowrasteh also classified a couple who killed a sex offender and his wife as perpetrators of "right-wing" violence—a personal vendetta with no apparent political motivation. These glaring misclassifications expose fundamental flaws in CATO's analytical framework and raise serious questions about the study's credibility.
Then there’s what the study conveniently ignores: the 2020 George Floyd riots, in which at least 19 people died, and the Waukesha Christmas parade attacker, who killed six people in 2021. But Nowrasteh left all that out.
Related: That CATO Study on Political Violence Is Hot Garbage
The left’s entire mythology about political violence just collapsed under the weight of reality. No amount of academic sleight-of-hand or media spin can hide the fact that their side continues to demonstrate that they believe they have a moral obligation to commit political violence. They can hide behind fake studies and bogus narratives all they want, but the truth is what really matters.
