DOJ no longer highlighting flawed study insinuating right-wing violence is on the rise

As President Donald Trump explained in the wake of the political assassination of Charlie Kirk last week, many of the loudest voices in politics and media have consistently appealed to the rising danger of “far-right extremism.” Some, including the president, have connected this rhetoric to a left-wing justification for violence, and the administration is cracking down on those who have contributed to the problem.

404 Media reported that the DOJ quietly removed a flawed National Institute of Justice study entitled “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism.” The removal was first noted by Daniel Malmer, a Ph.D. student studying online extremism at UNC-Chapel Hill.

‘My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.’

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said in a speech following Kirk’s death. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”

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The study explains that “militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

The study explains this “trend” in more detail: “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”

In 2023 congressional testimony, Heidi L. Beirich, co-founder and executive vice president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, echoed the findings of the June 2024 study:

Data on acts of political violence clearly shows that it is the far right that is driving terrorism in the U.S., including targeting and, in certain cases, murdering law enforcement. That is not to say there is no violence from far-left actors, it is just simply not on the scale or as deadly as what is coming from far-right actors.

The Biden-era study is no longer available on the DOJ website, but Blaze News was able to locate the document off-site.

Kyle Shideler, the director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, told Blaze News, “This is typical of the countering violent extremism approach that has predominated the response to terrorist threats and also the Biden administration’s effort to make hate crimes and hate speech as equivalent to terrorism.”

Shideler continued, “The problem with these kinds of studies is they rely on slanted or biased databases which poorly categoriz[e] or refus[e] to categorize or underreport[] far-left extremism. This has even included things like coding black supremacists as white supremacists, counting drug deals gone wrong as hate crimes, and the like.”

“The Trump administration recently canceled funding for one such database,” Shideler added, referring to the government’s July revocation of funding for the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism program.

“We don’t live in 1975. We don’t live in 1995. We don’t live in 2001, or even 2015,” National Journalism Center Director Geoff Ingersoll explained in an X thread about a similar study out of the libertarian-left Cato Institute. The researcher, he wrote: “cooked the books and muddied the water. Any suggestion that the problem we face RIGHT NOW is something other than political violence on the left is being dangerously dishonest. More than a quarter of college students believe violence is justified to silence a speaker. Self identified ‘very liberals’ think political violence is justified at 6x the rate of ‘very conservatives.'”

A significant section of the study explores extremism tied to “white supremacist” groups. A footnote says: “The project included three human rights groups (Anti Defamation League, Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Southern Poverty Law Center) and Life After Hate, an organization that assists white supremacists in exiting the movement.”

This marks another of the Trump administration’s decisive steps toward quelling the justification for left-wing violence since these flawed studies are used to back up their arguments. This is also an opportunity for the government to continue investigating the federal funding of these studies and institutes.

The Department of Justice and Steven Chermak, one of the co-authors of the study, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

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