Databases claiming the political right is more violent than the left are skewing reality by omitting key incidents, reclassifying left-wing violence, and inflating minor right-wing offenses, journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon argued in a recent article.
To discover how deep the data skewing goes, Ungar-Sargon analyzed the Persecution Project — a University of Cincinnati initiative that provides much of the information supporting polls that say the right is likely to be politically violent.
Citing The Economist, Ungar-Sargon said that the initiative purports to examine “criminal complaints, indictments and court records, looking for crimes that seek ‘a socio-political change or to communicate’ to outside audiences.”
Data reported on by The Economist found that political violent extremism tended to come more from the right than from the left. However, Ungar-Sargon said that the data is “deeply flawed,” leaving out major politically violent events carried out by the left.
She wrote that a search of the Persecution Project’s database returned no records of two assassination attempts on President Donald Trump in 2024, and did not mention Tyler Robinson, the man who killed Charlie Kirk last September. The database also did not include Elias Rodriguez, who killed two people outside Washington, D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum in May 2025.
Ungar-Sargon also found hardly any records of Black Lives Matter riots from 2020. The database mentions only three instances of left-wing violence related to George Floyd; by comparison, Forbes released a list in June 2020 of 19 people who were killed in the first two weeks of the riots — incidents that are not counted as “political violence” by the Persecution Project.
“It’s pretty easy to say that the violence is coming overwhelmingly from the Right if you overwhelmingly edit out any political violence from the Left,” Ungar-Sargon wrote.
She discovered that several instances of “right-wing political violence” turned out to be meth-dealing by an Aryan Brotherhood gang, a vandalization of an LGBT crosswalk, or blocking access to an abortion facility.
“You may not agree with blocking access to an abortion clinic, but a tally of political violence that counts those instances and not Charlie Kirk’s assassination is deeply, deeply flawed,” she added.
Finally, the database limits the amount of violent incidents tied to the left by reclassifying pro-Palestinian violence as “ethnonationalist incidents rather than left-wing ones.” Anti-ICE political violence and anti-Tesla attacks have also been excluded since those incidents reportedly “did not reach a level of violence” that satisfies the project’s criteria, Ungar-Sargon noted.
“Suffice it to say, it’s enough to make any honest broker truly suspicious of what they’re seeing out there as ‘data,’” she concluded. “The truth is obvious to anyone without an agenda: The bullets are only flying in one direction, and it’s Left to Right.”