Why People Fell for an Outlandish Charlie Kirk Theory

> The rarity of left-wing political violence is well established. Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute compiled a list that provides a helpful overview of the types of political killing that have occurred in the United States in the past 50 years.... Inevitably, the categorization of individual killers is debatable. (Was the Unabomber a leftist? ... “If we had been having a conversation about political violence in the 1960s or 1970s,” the political scientist Thomas Zeitzoff told me, “we would be talking about leftist political violence.” But in the early ’80s, the left-wing killers sat out a round, and the right-wingers ascended. The Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols ensured that, in the ’90s, the right had a kind of proprietary hold on political violence...

Individual categorizations are indeed difficult in many cases. If it's questionable to describe Kaczynski as leftist, it's also questionable to describe the OKC bombers as rightist. I'm inherently skeptical of any of the headline claims coming from studies on this. The data is thankfully scarce enough for any real trends to be dominated by noise. For that matter, it isn't even clear what metrics to use. As pointed out, if it's "number of deaths" than basically nothing matters next to 9/11.

The idea that the 50 years is a long time frame for this is hard to square with so many popular political insults hailing from longer ago than that.

> Logan... says that, recently, the left is much more associated with property crime and nonlethal violence.... “Lethal violence does occur, but to a much lower degree than among the right-wing or religious.”

Property crime, especially arson, can and does end up with deaths anyway. The George Floyd protests caused at least 19 deaths, along with the ten-figure property damage.

See https://archive.ph/2025.09.18-112545/https://www.theatlantic...