A recent study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reports that left-wing terrorism in the United States has surpassed right-wing attacks for the first time in three decades. The findings suggest a shift in patterns of political violence, with an increase in leftist activity and a decline in right-wing incidents.
The CSIS study, released on September 25, examined domestic terrorism as “the deliberate use or threat of premeditated violence by nonstate actors with the intent to achieve political goals by creating a broad psychological impact.” Researchers analyzed 750 acts and attempted acts of terrorism in the U.S. between January 1994 and July 2025.
According to the report, left-wing incidents were motivated by factors such as resistance to capitalism, support for LGBTQ rights, black nationalism, and anti-fascist rhetoric. Right-wing incidents were linked to racial supremacy, misogyny, or opposition to liberal agendas. However, researchers acknowledged difficulties in classifying some events due to perpetrators’ mixed beliefs—a challenge described by former FBI Director Christopher Wray as “a salad bar of ideologies.”
In the first half of 2025 alone, five left-wing attacks were recorded—excluding the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk—which continues a trend that could make this year the most violent for such incidents since at least 1994. Left-wing attacks averaged just 0.6 per year between 1994 and 2000 but rose to an average of four annually from 2016 through 2024.
The report attributes part of this rise to opposition against policies enacted during Donald Trump’s presidency, particularly those targeting illegal immigration.
Meanwhile, only one right-wing terrorist incident—the killing of Minnesota state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband—was documented during the first six months of 2025. This marks a significant decrease compared to previous years: from an average of 21 right-wing plots or attacks per year between 1994 and 2000 down to seven annually over the next decade before rising again to about 20 per year from 2011 through 2024.
CSIS researchers described this abrupt change as “striking and harder to explain.” They suggested that stricter measures against right-wing extremism under President Joe Biden may have contributed or that some extremists feel less compelled toward violence when their concerns are addressed politically after Trump’s election victory.
Political violence experts offered differing views on these findings. Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies political violence, told McClatchy News: “Far-left violence is rising slightly: not from Democrats, but a fringe on the far-left that also disavows the Democratic Party.” She added: “But the real story is that right-wing violence has plummeted since the Trump Administration took power, and that is why the far-left numbers are higher even though they have not risen by much.”
Kleinfeld said these results align with existing research: “When your ideological side is in power, there is less need to resort to violence,” she explained. “Meanwhile, when a group feels the government is not providing equal justice, fringes start to take what they see as justice into their own hands.”
Sean Westwood, professor at Dartmouth College and director of its Polarization Research Lab, criticized aspects of CSIS’s approach: “This report’s analysis is fundamentally flawed,” he told McClatchy News. “The authors’ ideological categorization is overly simplistic and often indefensible,” Westwood said. “They problematically force a broad set of motivations into a rigid right-wing versus left-wing framework. For instance, bombing a Black church is a crime of racism, and murdering a Jewish person is a crime of antisemitism. To label these acts with a simple political descriptor is a categorical error.”
Westwood also noted limitations in methodology: starting analysis at 1994 omits earlier periods marked by intense political violence like those seen during the civil rights era; further complicating matters are unclear motives inferred from sources such as social media histories or circumstantial evidence rather than direct statements.
Both Kleinfeld and Westwood emphasized that neither end of America’s political spectrum holds exclusive claim over politically motivated violence; mental illness and social isolation often play more central roles.
