In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Donald Trump has declared virtual war on his political enemies, conflating political opposition with terrorism in a typical authoritarian effort to jail opponents and intimidate the majority of Americans who disapprove of his performance. The playbook he’s following closely resembles Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, but he’s moving much faster, and with far less public support, both of which could spell big trouble for him, as public opposition grows and stiffens.

On Monday, Sept. 22, Trump signed an executive order declaring antifa (which isn’t an organization) a “domestic terrorist organization” (which isn’t a legal definition under U.S. law). Then, on Thursday, Sept. 25, he issued a memorandum, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” while publicly naming two prominent, wealthy donors to liberal causes as targets for investigation for possibly funding domestic terrorism — George Soros and Reid Hoffman.

Soros, who has funded pro-democracy organizations and educational institutions since the late 1970s, has been the target of right-wing anti-semitic conspiracy theories across the globe since the 1990s, promoted both by Trump authoritarian allies Victor Orbán and Vladimir Putin abroad and by multiple Fox News and other right-wing media figures here in the U.S. He’s been painted as the shadowy puppet-master behind everything from Barack Obama to Black Lives Matter to the Color Revolutions of former Soviet and Yugoslav states like Ukraine, Georgia and Serbia. Hoffman, who is also Jewish, appears to be a warning shot that any number of other liberal donors could be open to the same sort of baseless prosecution.

Thus, Trump’s actions are predicated on a wholly false, paranoid, conspiratorial worldview. But that’s not the end of it. Two other falsehoods are also key. First, Charlie Kirk’s assassin wasn’t radicalized by any left-wing group. He had no record of any such contact. Rather, he was radicalized by Kirk’s own violent, hateful rhetoric. “I had enough of his [Kirk’s] hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” he explained in a private text.

And he’s not the only recent terrorist with no left-wing ties whose motivations have been falsely construed both by Trump and the corporate media.

Luigi Mangione, who murdered the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, had vaguely libertarian politics and was driven more by his own pain than any ideology. The recent ICE shooter, who killed detainees, not ICE agents, was “someone with a vaguely libertarian bent who despised both major parties and politicians generally (including Trump) but who didn’t engage with politics beyond that,” according to long-time friends interviewed by independent journalist Ken Klipperstein. Although he’d grown increasingly withdrawn from their lives for several years, none of them “believed that the ‘ANTI-ICE’ inscription [on one bullet casing] could possibly be sincere, feeling such a serious political statement was anathema” to who he was.

Second, right-wing violence has far overshadowed left-wing violence for more than a generation, and — unlike left-wing violence — is both connected to and encouraged by elected officials, most notably Trump himself, who played the leading role in mobilizing and encouraging the Jan. 6 insurrection that threatened the lives of Vice President Mike Pence, members of Congress and police officers, five of whom died within days of the assault.

But Trump’s wildly dishonest declaration of political war has gotten cover from corporate media in multiple ways. It begins with stenographically repeating his wild-eyed conspiracist lies and amplifying the false narratives he both relies on and feeds. It’s further supported by downplaying or ignoring contrary facts, and significantly distorting the overall picture of political violence to bring it more in line with Trump’s wild-eyed fantasy.

The basic real-world fact is that right-wing violence has overwhelmingly outstripped left-wing violence since at least the 1990s, as noted in a report Trump had removed from the Department of Justice website early this year:

“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”

Yet, despite this long-standing fact, well-known to experts in the field, on Tuesday, Sept. 23, the Atlantic published an article, “Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise,” which the author’s own data, in a report published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), shows to be false. What’s more, in the depths of the article, they frankly admit that “Left-wing attacks are overwhelmingly non-lethal and far less lethal compared with other ideological orientations.” They only cited two fatalities since 2020, and one was the false attribution of the libertarian Luigi Mangione as left-wing. Thus, even if such terrorism were on the rise, that wouldn’t necessarily mean a greater threat to life. But in fact, there is no such rise.

Instead, their own data shows that, since 2015, left-wing terrorist incidents have fluctuated continuously, bouncing up and down from between one per year in 2015, 2018, 2021, and 2023 to highs of seven in 2016 and eight in 2020 and 2022, with other years falling at three or four. Thus, there is no trend, just a fluctuation around an average of about three or four incidents a year. And this year’s total of five so far is not yet at the high end of these fluctuations, though of course it could end up going higher. And that’s assuming their data is good, which isn’t entirely true, as already noted about Mangione.

What is true is that right-wing terrorism has dropped dramatically this year, as the Trump administration has taken over for its grassroots supporters, terrorizing tens of millions of immigrant families and their friends, along with the LGBTQ community — particularly trans Americans — and the country as a whole. CSIS reported 29 incidents of rightwing terrorism in 2023, down to 14 in 2024 and just one this year, giving rise to the subhead of the Atlantic article: “For the first time in more than 30 years, attacks by the far left outnumber those by the far right.”

But that subhead is misleading, if not outright false. It’s based on just six months of data, the count is off, and subsequent incidents add even more. The only incident it counts is “the June assassination of the Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband,” but this ignores the shooting of Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, who survived a second incident that same night. It also ignores the following cases, which may lack the sort of specific motives needed for some criminal charges, but whose political motivation is unmistakable:

• On Jan. 22, 2025, a student at at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, opened fire inside the school’s cafeteria, killing one student and injuring another before committing suicide. His writings praised various mass killers, along with sharing antisemitic, racist, and neo-Nazi views. He described himself as a Black man who was angry at members of his own race and had an account on the gore forum WatchPeopleDie.
• On April 17, 2025, a mass shooting by a student on the campus of Florida State University in Tallahassee left two dead and seven injured. The shooter’s politics were unmistakably right-wing. He espoused white supremacist, far-right and homophobic views, causing him to be kicked out of a political group at the school he attended before FSU. “He repeatedly espoused white supremacist, alt-right views to the point where people were uncomfortable, and we had to ask him to leave,” one student told the New York Times. “He said Rosa Parks was in the wrong,” another said. He also “held a fascination with Hitler, Nazis and other hate groups, according to screenshots of his online activity captured by the Anti-Defamation League,” according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
• On June 12, the Archuleta, Colorado County Clerk’s office was firebombed, apparently targeting the room where the county’s Dominion voting machines are stored. The accused suspect once ran for sheriff in the county and had a history of espousing conspiracy theories that Dominion equipment was used to steal the 2020 election.
• On June 29, two firefighters in rural Idaho were fatally ambushed. USA Today reported he “had ‘Nazi tendencies’ in school, sketched pictures of guns and swastikas in a notebook and was ‘obsessed with guns,’” according to three former classmates.

All these events occurred during the period covered by the CSIS report, but were ignored. Had they been counted, it would not be true that left-wing incidents outnumbered right-wing ones this year. And since then, there have been at least two more incidents of right-wing terrorism:

• On Aug. 8, a gunman who blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for his mental-health problems fired almost 500 rounds at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, amazingly killing only one security guard before committing suicide. Fired But Fighting, a group self-described as “a coalition of fired HHS employees and allies,” said that RFK Jr., “is directly responsible for the villainization of CDC’s workforce through his continuous lies about science and vaccine safety, which have fueled a climate of hostility and mistrust.”
• On Sept. 10, almost at the same time as Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a 16-year-old student opened fire at Evergreen High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, wounding two students before shooting himself. The next day, a sheriff’s spokesperson shared that investigators had learned the shooter had been “radicalized by some extremist network.” The ADL later provided details: he had “an account on the gore forum WatchPeopleDie, where he had commented on posts about shootings in Parkland (2018), Buffalo (2022), and at a Quebec City mosque (2017).” ADL also noted that his TikTok accounts “were filled with white supremacist symbolism.”

All this shows that while right-wing violent incidents outside of government may be down with Trump in the White House, that still doesn’t mean that there are more left-wing incidents, much less that they are more dangerous.

But there’s a deeper problem with the CSIS data: it doesn’t tell us anything about organized violence, which is what Trump claims to be going after. To gain a better understanding of this, we need to examine broader measures of political activity, including protest events and political violence, as well as those collected worldwide by the nonprofit ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data). In their September 2025 monthly report for the U.S. and Canada, the U.S. headline was “Extremist activity reaches five-year low,” which they explained thus:

Last month saw extremist group activity drop by over a third compared to the month prior. As a result, August saw the lowest number of events involving extremist groups in over five years. This nadir in extremist activity represents a steady decline since 2023. Multiple factors could explain this decline in extremist group activity, from a possible shift to more clandestine organizational tactics to failures of group leaders to mobilize and recruit. Others have suggested that extremist groups may feel less urgency to organize as they see their beliefs reflected in mainstream politics.

In stark numbers, right-wing white nationalist extremism remained dominant. They counted 29 events, of which 21 involve white nationalist groups, and 12 radical groups are active, of which seven are white nationalist. More specifically, they wrote:

Amid this decline, some groups have remained conspicuously active. The brazen neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe organized demonstrations in two state capitals last month, performing Nazi salutes and parading with Swastika flags through the streets of Concord, New Hampshire, and Indianapolis, Indiana. In Concord, members of the group brawled with a bystander who approached them, hitting him with pepper spray and punching him, before fleeing. This marks the group’s first recorded use of violence since their first public demonstration on 11 March 2023.

This violence, while troubling, is dramatically overshadowed by ICE violence on a daily basis. That’s where the real center of rightwing terrorism can be found today. And Trump is dead set on expanding that terrorism as far as he possibly can. That is the real number one terrorist threat facing America today. We are quickly becoming a right-wing authoritarian state. Everything else is just gaslighting.