Last fall, as Election Day approached, then-Sen. JD Vance lied about Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio. When he was pressed to explain why he said things that were untrue about a community in his own state, Vance said on Sept. 14, 2024, that he was willing “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”
Exactly one year to the day later, the Ohio Republican, now the vice president, is still creating stories in pursuit of his political goals.
Vance, guest-hosting Charlie Kirk’s podcast in the aftermath of the activist’s slaying, told listeners, “People on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.” Then he added that, as far as he’s concerned, the national scourge is not “a both-sides problem” because the left is worse than the right.
And then he went just a bit further.
“While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies,” he said, “it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left.”
I realize that many Republicans want this to be true. In fact, by some measures, they seem to need it to be true to justify a broader crackdown on the left, which helps explain why Donald Trump has incessantly repeated the claim in recent days.
The morning after Vance’s comments, a reporter asked the president about Utah Gov. Spener Cox’s message emphasizing the importance of nonviolence. “I agree with it 100%,” the president replied, “but most of the violence is on the left.”
That’s demonstrably untrue. Vance’s claim about the “statistical fact” is neither statistical nor a fact.
The available research from recent years makes clear that right-wing violence has been more dangerous in the U.S. than left-wing violence. As The New York Times’ David Leonhardt explained in 2022, the American right “has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left.”
The New Republic noted in response to Vance, “One study published by the libertarian Cato Institute found that since 2020, right-wingers have accounted for over half of terror-related deaths in the United States, with left-wingers at 22%.”
The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall also this week examined the latest evidence, pointing to the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies’ “Global Terrorist Threat Assessment 2024,” which found most of the U.S. terrorist attacks in recent years were committed by “violent far-right perpetrators, such as white supremacists, anti-government extremists and violent misogynists.”
Katarzyna Jasko, a professor of psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and lead author of a 2022 study, “A Comparison of Political Violence by Left-wing, Right-wing, and Islamist Extremists in the United States and the World,” also told Edsall that the White House’s claims “are not justifiable.”
In recent years, she added, “far-right extremists have been responsible for more cases of political violence than far-left extremists. As our research shows, their attacks are more violent than those by left-wing extremists.”
Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment’s program on democracy, conflict and governance, also told Edsall that since the early 1990s, “actual violence has risen, largely from the right.”
To the extent that research and statistical evidence have any bearing on the public conversation, there can be no doubt that Trump’s and Vance’s ideological campaign is based on demonstrable nonsense.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
