Right-Wing Violence Is Not a Fringe Issue
A vigil in Minnesota for Melissa and Mark Hortman. Credit: Galen Fletcher for The New York Times
by Jamelle Bouie
June 21, 2025
New York Times
It is simply a fact that the far right has been responsible for most of the political violence committed in the United States since the start of the 21st century, with particular emphasis on the past 10 years of American political life.
There was the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where a far-right extremist killed a counterdemonstrator. There was the 2018 Tree of Life attack in Pittsburgh, where a shooter killed 11 people (all of whom were Jewish) and wounded six others at a synagogue. Echoing the so-called great replacement conspiracy theory, the perpetrator blamed Jewish people for bringing migrant “invaders” into the United States. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he posted on the social media website Gab, a haven for online white supremacists. “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
There was also the 2019 slaughter in El Paso, where a shooter targeted Latinos — killing 23 people and injuring 22 others — after posting a manifesto in which he condemned “cultural and ethnic replacement” and a “Hispanic invasion” of the United States. Nor should we forget the 2022 Buffalo supermarket attack, in which still another shooter citing the great replacement conspiracy theory targeted members of a minority group, killing 10 people (all of whom were Black) and wounding three others.
In a piece written just after the Buffalo shooting, my colleague David Leonhardt, citing data from the Anti-Defamation League, observed that out of 450 killings committed by political extremists from 2012 to 2022, about 75 percent were committed by right-wing extremists, with more than half connected to white supremacists. “As this data shows,” he concluded, “the American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left.”
What’s critical for us to understand that this isn’t a problem of the fringe. Not only was President Trump permissive of right-wing violence throughout his first term — consider his reaction to the violence in Charlottesville — but after losing his bid for re-election, he also led an organized effort to overturn the results, culminating in a riot in the Capitol. And what was one of his first acts back in office? He pardoned the rioters, in as clear an endorsement of violence on his behalf as one can imagine.
In the years since the Jan. 6 attack, supporters of Trump, honoring his demands to “stop the steal,” engaged in a campaign of intimidation and harassment toward election workers. Trump himself used one of the attacks — the assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of a former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi — as fodder for jokes and entertainment. Speaking of entertainment: There is also much to be said about the right-wing media ecosystem, where prominent voices indulge and even endorse violence against their political opponents.
None of this is to say that political violence can’t come from the political left. We have seen two instances over the past month of violence with a left-wing valence: In Washington, D.C., a man gunned down two Israeli Embassy staff members, and in Boulder, Colo., a man threw Molotov cocktails at demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza, injuring twelve people.
Even so, the point is that the preponderance of political violence in the United States comes from extremists on the right, one of whom has been charged with attacking two Minnesota state lawmakers last week — State Representative Melissa Hortman and State Senator John Hoffman, both Democrats — killing Hortman, her husband and her dog and wounding Hoffman and his wife.
The man accused of the shootings, Vance Boelter, has been identified as a Trump supporter and an adherent of a far-right Christian movement. He was motivated, it appears, by his opposition to abortion, which makes him one of many men in recent memory who have killed in the name of “life.”
All of this taken together shows us why it is important to not treat this bout of political violence as a generalized problem of American political life. It is, instead, a specific problem of a specific ideological tendency: one obsessed with the maintenance of rigid hierarchies of race and gender and willing to defend them by any means necessary.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
