AILSA CHANG, HOST:
For many years, the far right has been the most lethal and persistent source of domestic terrorism in the U.S., but a new study says violence from the far left has been the greater threat, at least so far this year. NPR domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef looks into this claim.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: President Trump's insistence that the far left has been the primary culprit for domestic terrorism goes back years at this point.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: 'Cause this is not a right-wing problem.
JOE BIDEN: His own FBI director said...
TRUMP: This is a left-wing problem.
BIDEN: ...The threat comes from white supremacists.
YOUSEF: That was a 2020 presidential debate when Trump was asked if he would condemn far-right extremist groups. It was also just days after his acting head at the Department of Homeland Security told congressmen that white supremacist extremists were responsible for the most lethal extremist violence. Still, five years later, there is a sense that something is shifting. The nation has seen the killing of Charlie Kirk, the apparent attempted assassinations of Trump, the gunning down of a health insurance executive in New York and more. These events are not clearly coded as right-wing. And so has the violence, in fact, pivoted to the left?
DANIEL BYMAN: My hope was to bring some data to the discussion.
YOUSEF: Daniel Byman is director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. Data on domestic terrorism is surprisingly hard to come by. There is no public, official, unified and comprehensive database, so researchers like Byman are assembling databases on their own. He looked at incidents between 1994 and July 4 of 2025.
BYMAN: We're seeing, you know, from a low baseline, an increase in left-wing attacks, and we're seeing a decrease in right-wing attacks from much higher numbers.
YOUSEF: Byman and his co-author found something remarkable. Their tally showed that in the first half of 2025, far-left terrorist activity had overtaken that from the far right. It's a departure from the pattern of the last 30 years. News outlets ran with that headline. But among many professionals in Byman's field, the surprise has been for a different reason.
AMY COOTER: Five is a really low case number to try to make any kinds of inference from and try to say that we're having a major increase in any kind of problem.
YOUSEF: Amy Cooter is deputy director at the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism. Five is the number of far-left terrorist plots and incidents that Byman's study tallied during the first half of 2025. It's a small number, but it's bigger than previous time periods, and Cooter says that is exactly what can distort conclusions.
COOTER: Compared to historical data, almost any increase in left-wing violence is going to look like a big jump.
YOUSEF: Byman acknowledges this. Still, he says the trends are what matter. But Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says there are more questions.
JACOB WARE: There have been methodological concerns that have been aired with that product.
YOUSEF: This is where the real mess starts. There are a host of subjective calls when it comes to analyzing domestic terrorism. How destructive was the crime? Did people die? Was that by intent? If not, could people have gotten hurt? What was the perpetrator's politics or ideology? Did that motivate the violence? How much fear did the act create? And to what extent did mental health issues factor into the attack? And so some incidents that the CSIS study included and left out have been disputed. Again, Jacob Ware.
WARE: Early this year, for example, there were a number of fire bombings at Tesla stores or other Tesla infrastructure. To me, that might qualify as an act of terrorism if somebody is using incendiary devices against civilian targets for political purposes. Those don't seem to be counted.
YOUSEF: But the study does count the burning of 11 NYPD squad cars among its five left-wing terrorist incidents of 2025. Ware says that one wouldn't make his cut. Another instance that raises questions involved an individual arrested by U.S. Capitol Police earlier this year for allegedly plotting to kill Trump cabinet members. The individual reportedly turned herself in to law enforcement before following through. Should that count? Some might say no, but this study included it. What about the killings of two Israeli embassy staffers in May? Those are left off this list. Byman says he understands if others arrive at different conclusions on these, as he calls them, edge cases, but 2 or 3 out of 5 can change whether there is, in fact, a trend.
Taking a step back, researchers in this field largely agree that something is shifting. Political violence has increased. There is concern that more may be coming from the left, though many told NPR it's just too early still to know. For Jacob Ware, the left/right framework isn't the best way to understand the change.
WARE: Terrorism is getting more personal.
YOUSEF: Whether it's the killings of a health care CEO, a Minnesota state lawmaker, Charlie Kirk, Israeli embassy staffers, the arson at the Pennsylvania governor's mansion, attempted assassinations of Trump, Ware says this is different from the past. Historically, domestic terrorists in the U.S. have sought a large body count. But in recent cases, Ware says perpetrators or suspects haven't done that even in situations where they could have killed more people. And he says the question of whether their violence stemmed from far-left or far-right tendencies is, more often than not, unclear.
WARE: We really need to get statements or justifications, motivations from perpetrators. And I don't think we have that in the Charlie Kirk assassination or the Minnesota assassination, and so I would argue there's a world in which neither of those people should be coded as terrorists. I mean, they're clearly assassins, but I just don't think we have the information yet that would allow us to code them as terrorists.
YOUSEF: Ideally, a data-based understanding of who is committing domestic terrorism, how and against whom would help law enforcement allocate resources toward the greatest threats. But as the Trump administration continues to ramp up its efforts against its political opposition, Ware and Byman both say any data are unlikely to shift that agenda. Odette Yousef, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLIPSE, ET AL. SONG, "ALL THINGS CONSIDERED") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
