This year, Minnesota Democratic State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered at their house, while prominent conservative spokesperson Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking on a college campus.

   Hortman’s murderer had a list of Democratic officials he intended to assassinate, but Kirk’s killer wanted to stop the conservative activist from spreading hate. According to law enforcement, both murders were politically motivated. Instead of condemning political extremism, pundits argued whether “the right” or “the left” was more violent.

   The think tank data confirmed what fair-minded observers suspected: over the last four decades, political violence driven by “the right” resulted in the most deaths, but political violence inspired by “the left” has recently increased.

   “The right” insisted that the data was misleading.

Counting dead bodies to determine who is more violent, rather than the number of violent incidents, made the right appear more violent. “The right” has a considerably greater body count than “the left” because of a single incident: the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people.

“The right” believes “the left” was involved in more violent incidents after adding all of the clashes the demonstrators had with law enforcement to each act of property destruction during the 2020 George Floyd riots. There were dozens of instances in at least 200 American cities, resulting in the injuries of almost 2,000 law enforcement officers and billions of dollars in property damage.

   “The right” has a point, even if assessing which side is more violent is meaningless because politically motivated violence should be denounced by both sides. “The left,” on the other hand, rejects that political violence inspired by left-wing ideology is on the rise, and this denial has begun at the top.

   In 2017, right-wing extremists held the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. They were met by left-wing antifa (anti-fascist) counter-protesters, who engaged in violent confrontations with right-wing extremists. A self-identified White supremacist finally rammed his vehicle into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring 35 others.
Republican President Donald Trump gave a press conference. He denounced right-wing extremist groups, stating that such displays of “hatred, bigotry, and violence” have no place in America. After reporters continued to blame all of the violence on right-wing extremists, Trump remarked that left-wing radicals who initiated skirmishes were also responsible for the mayhem.

   A reporter inquired whether Trump was putting “the left” on the same “moral plane” as White supremacists. Trump stated, “Yes, there was blame on both sides.” Trump made it plain that his administration will not accept political violence, whether from right-wing fanatics or antifa.

   That same year, historian Mark Bray wrote Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. Bray described antifa as an umbrella term for far-left militant groups that resist far-right extremism, authoritarianism, homophobia, xenophobia, and racism and oppose capitalism.

   Fast forward to 2020: the riots over George Floyd’s police killing occurred just before the presidential debate between Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden. During the debate, the moderator reminded Trump that he had chastised Biden for not “calling out” Antifa and other left-wing radicals for their violent behavior.  Then he questioned whether Trump would condemn White supremacists and other right-wing radicals and insist that they refrain from violence. Trump stated that he will condemn them, but something has to be done about Antifa and “the left” since this is a left-wing problem.

   Biden replied that Trump’s own FBI director said that Antifa is an idea, not an organization.

Trump said that the FBI director was wrong.

Biden could have condemned the extremist groups that endorse the idea, but he acted as if they didn’t exist. However, when Biden was president, he declared that MAGA was a threat to democracy.  MAGA’s not even an idea; it’s an acronym for a campaign slogan, but Biden expected the American people to believe that “MAGA” represents an organized threat while antifa poses no threat at all. 

 Recently, The Atlantic, a left-of-center magazine, published an article titled “Left-Wing Terrorism on the Rise: For the first time in more than 30 years, attacks by the far left outnumber those by the far right.”

Now, “the left” acts as if The Atlantic doesn’t exist.