The Deadly Arithmetic of Right-Wing Extremism: 2015–2025
Republicans Exploit Kirk’s Death While Ignoring a Decade of Far-Right Carnage
After Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump and Republican leaders thundered about “left-wing terrorists.” They want Americans to believe the left is waging a campaign of violence. But the evidence—the decade-long tally of extremist murders—shows the opposite.
For ten consecutive years, the far-right has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of extremist and ideologically motivated killings in the United States.
From Charleston to El Paso, from Pittsburgh to Buffalo, from Minnesota’s legislators to countless anonymous victims, the pattern is the same. The right radicalizes, the right arms, the right kills. And then the right lies about it.
2025 — 2 KILLED
A right-wing extremist assassinated Minnesota Democratic State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home, and shot State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, leaving them wounded. Prosecutors uncovered a list of dozens of other Democratic lawmakers targeted for execution, underscoring the explicitly political motive.
2024 — 13 KILLED
Every extremist murder that year was far-right: 8 by white supremacists, 5 by anti-government extremists. Victims included police ambushed in the line of duty and civilians gunned down in hate-driven attacks.
2023 — 20 KILLED
All tied to right-wing extremism. Among the dead were victims of the Jacksonville Dollar General shooting, where a white supremacist murdered three Black shoppers. Other incidents targeted immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and law enforcement.
2022 — 25 KILLED
A devastating year of far-right mass killings:
Buffalo supermarket massacre: 10 Black Americans murdered by a shooter radicalized online.
Club Q nightclub attack: 5 killed, dozens wounded in an anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime.
Additional shootings and assaults, all rooted in far-right ideology, drove the death toll to 25.
2021 — 29 KILLED
Nineteen separate incidents left 29 dead. All murders were committed by right-wing extremists. Targets included women murdered by misogynist “incel” extremists, police officers attacked in ambushes, and minorities singled out in hate crimes.
2020 — 17 KILLED
Despite the pandemic, extremist killings continued. Every murder was carried out by far-right extremists, including anti-government militants who attacked police and security personnel, and white supremacists targeting minorities.
2019 — 45 KILLED
The deadliest case: the El Paso Walmart massacre, where a white supremacist murdered 23 Latinos in an explicitly anti-immigrant attack. Other killings included synagogue and mosque plots and multiple far-right ambushes. 81% of extremist killings that year were committed by white supremacists.
2018 — 50 KILLED
The highest extremist death toll of the decade. Key incidents:
Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue: 11 Jewish worshippers murdered.
School shootings influenced by extremist ideology.
Additional attacks on Black, Muslim, and immigrant communities. Every single extremist murder was tied to the far-right.
2017 — 37 KILLED
A year defined by racist and anti-government violence. The most infamous attack: the Charlottesville car ramming, where Heather Heyer was murdered during an anti-racism rally. Other incidents included militia-style shootings and anti-Muslim murders.
2016 — 70 KILLED
The deadliest single extremist attack in modern U.S. history: the Pulse nightclub massacre, where 49 people were killed in an Islamist-inspired shooting targeting LGBTQ+ people. Beyond that outlier, all other extremist murders were committed by far-right extremists, including white supremacists.
2015 — 70 KILLED
Two defining tragedies:
Charleston church massacre: 9 Black parishioners murdered by a white supremacist.
San Bernardino terrorist attack: 14 killed by Islamist extremists. Even with jihadist attacks included, the ADL notes that the far-right was the most consistent source of extremist violence across the decade.
Other extremist attacks that year included the Chattanooga shootings of five U.S. servicemen, the Islamist-inspired assault at the Curtis Culwell Center in Texas, and a series of smaller but deadly incidents tied to far-right actors—together driving the year’s toll to a staggering 70 lives lost.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Republicans are weaponizing Charlie Kirk’s death as proof of a “violent left.” Trump bellows about “vengeance,” DeSantis warns of “radical Democrats,” Cruz rants about “Antifa assassins.” But their sudden moral outrage collapses under the weight of their own record. For ten years, when the killers were their own—white supremacists, militia fantasists, anti-government zealots—they looked away, they made excuses, or they flat-out endorsed the same poison that inspired the murders.
After the Charleston church massacre (2015), where nine Black worshippers were murdered in their pews, Republicans treated Confederate flags like sacred relics and vehemently fought to keep them. They mourned symbols of treason more than Black lives.
After Charlottesville (2017), when Heather Heyer was crushed to death by a neo-Nazi’s car, Trump gave the movement its rallying cry: “very fine people on both sides.” A young woman was murdered by fascists in the street, and the president all but blessed the killers.
After the Pittsburgh synagogue slaughter (2018), Republicans mouthed platitudes for the cameras, then turned around and pushed the same anti-immigrant, anti-“globalist” rhetoric that the gunman himself echoed in his screeds. Their crocodile tears dried before the blood did.
After El Paso (2019), where 23 Latinos were gunned down by a man who cited “invasion” rhetoric, Republicans didn’t abandon the language—they embraced it. They aired campaign ads using the very words the murderer used to justify mass slaughter. They turned his manifesto into their anti-immigration script.
After Buffalo (2022), where ten Black Americans were murdered by a man obsessed with “replacement theory,” the right-wing media machine kept blasting that exact conspiracy into millions of homes. Fox News and GOP politicians cashed checks off the same ideology that radicalized the killer.
After the Club Q shooting (2022), where five people were killed in an LGBTQ+ nightclub, Republicans offered “thoughts and prayers” while simultaneously pushing anti-trans legislation and demonizing drag shows. Their words helped paint a target on queer spaces even as victims were being buried.
After countless militia-style killings, Republicans looked the other way, even praising vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two people at a racial justice protest in 2020 and was lionized as a conservative hero. The celebration of killers became part of the culture.
Again and again, Republicans had a choice: confront the hate, or feed it. And every time, they chose to feed it. They minimized the crimes, they deflected blame, they disrespected the victims by recycling the very propaganda that got them killed.
Now, with Kirk’s assassination, they scream about left-wing terror, as though the last decade of far-right bloodbaths never happened. They ignored the slaughter of Black parishioners, non-Christian adherents, of Latino families, of LGBTQ+ Americans—and yet they demand national mourning when one of their own falls.
The truth is merciless: for ten years, far-right extremists have been the killers, and Republicans have been their enablers. Not protectors of life. Not defenders of democracy. But apologists, propagandists, and profiteers of hate.
This is not “both sides.” It is one side arming the killers, shielding their ideology, spitting on the graves of their victims, and now daring to cry foul when the violence they normalized comes home. It is hypocrisy weaponized. It is complicity sanctified. It is blood on their hands—and no amount of shouting about Charlie Kirk can wash it off.
Sources: ADL, AP News, Axios, BBC, Brennan Center for Justice, Buffalo News, Charleston Post and Courier, CNN, Congress.gov, CSIS, El Paso Times, FBI/DHS, GAO, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, NPR, Orlando Sentinel, PBS NewsHour, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ProPublica, Reuters, SPLC, START/Global Terrorism Database, Washington Post, WaterISAC
THE DEATH OF CHARLIE KIRK: A POISONED VOICE FALLS SILENT
Why we don’t mourn the loss of men who built their lives on hate, even as we condemn the violence that ended them
When a man devotes his life to poisoning young minds, normalizing cruelty, and undermining democracy, his absence brings relief. Relief that his megaphone of resentment has gone silent. Relief that his daily labor—turning classrooms into battlegrounds, neighbors into enemies, and children into cannon fodder for his movement—is over. That relief is not celebration of violence, and it is certainly not condoning murder.
Murder is wrong. Assassination corrodes the very democracy we are fighting to save. But honesty demands clarity: we are under no obligation to mourn the passing of those who made their careers out of degrading the vulnerable. Authoritarians like Kirk demand sanctity for their own lives while denying it to the trans kids, immigrants, and citizens they demonized and targeted. To refuse that charade is not cruelty—it is truth.
And what is gone is not merely a man, but his voice. His empire of lies—the rallies of rage, the toxic podcasts, the organized harassment campaigns, the pulpit of division—still lumbers on. But it does so without its architect, without its daily ringleader. That is the exhale: not the end of bigotry itself, but the silencing of one of its loudest and most relentless engines.
The mature moral stance is to hold paradox. Violence is wrong. Relief at the end of cruelty is real. Both truths coexist. Only the authoritarian mind insists that relief is the same as condoning murder.
So no, we do not celebrate death. What we acknowledge is the sudden absence of a man who thrived on domination and dehumanization. What we recognize is a rare pause in the noise of his poison.
Take this pause and turn it outward. Remind your community that while one poisonous voice is gone, the larger project of hate persists—and so does our duty to resist it. Write, march, speak, and organize. Every act of courage is another crack in their empire of lies.
Martyrs Made of Monsters
Authoritarians never waste a corpse. For them, death is not an end but a stage. A coffin is not a vessel of mourning but a prop. And no regime understood this better than the Nazis, who turned sleaze into sainthood with such efficiency that it became a template for every authoritarian movement drunk on blood and power that followed.
Excellent reporting … but when have facts ever interfered with right wing condemnation?
Thank you for this! When one sees these numbers it’s hard to argue what is true and what is propaganda.