A report claims left-wing terrorism is rising. The data paints a complicated picture

toggle caption Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has turbocharged the conversation — and fears — around political violence in the U.S. And, more than perhaps any other recent high-profile incident, it has fed claims that far-left extremists are primarily responsible for the worsening environment.

"From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives," President Trump said, just hours after Kirk was killed.

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So far, no information has been disclosed that clearly links the man charged with Kirk's killing to leftist groups or movements.

Still, the Trump administration's claim that domestic terrorism largely comes from the left has flown in the face of data. Federal law enforcement authorities and non-governmental researchers have, for years, found the far right to be the most "lethal and persistent" domestic terrorist threat. Among examples they cite are racially motivated mass killings at an African American church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, and a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2022; and the 2018 massacre at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh.

But a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) posits that a reversal took place in the first half of 2025. It analyzed roughly 30 years of data and found that between Jan. 1 and July 4 of this year, the number of far-left terrorist plots and attacks outnumbered those from the far right.

"My hope was to bring some data to the discussion and to try to use the data to understand possible reasons left wing terrorism might be increasing and right wing terrorism might be decreasing," said Daniel Byman, director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats and Terrorism Program at CSIS. Byman co-authored the study with Riley McCabe, an associate fellow in the same program.

But the report itself has