A new report from the Center for Strategic and International studies looked at 30 years of extremist political violence in America and analysed what motivated violence from the right and left extremes.

Washington

A recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has analyzed 30 years of extremist political violence in the United States. The findings indicate a significant shift in the nature of these attacks, with right-wing violence surging after 2008 and left-wing attacks increasing notably in recent years. For the first time in the period studied, left-wing attacks have outnumbered right-wing attacks in 2025, although their overall numbers remain smaller.

The report attributes the rise in left-wing violence to reactions against policies from the Trump administration, particularly on issues like immigration and trans rights. The study carefully categorizes attacks based on clear political motives, excluding incidents driven by personal grievances or unclear motivations. The report also notes the complexity of anti-Semitic violence, which can be linked to both opposition to Israel and broader conspiracy-driven hatred.

Breaking down report on 30 years of extremist political violence

In the wake of today's deadly attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England, Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowed to defeat the rise of anti-Semitism in England. The United States has seen a rise in anti-Jewish and other ideological extremism as well. A new report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies looked at 30 years of extremist political violence in America and analyzed what motivates the violence from the left and the right extremes. Daniel Byman is a director at CSIS and joins me now. Daniel, thank you so much for being with us. I want to get to Manchester in a minute, but first, can we just put it in context? Tell me what your report found. Our report has shown significant changes in the terrorism threat to the United States over the years. Of course, and understandably, the United States was focused on the jihadist threat after 9-11, but we saw extreme right-wing terrorism really surge in 2008 and remain high for many years. But at the same time, really starting around 2016, we also saw an increase in left-wing attacks, although not nearly as high. But 2025 showed a very dramatic change. So far in 2025, we've seen more left-wing attacks than we have right-wing attacks. And that's a shift for all the time we've been collecting data, which is around 30 years. And what do you think accounts for that left-wing increase first? And does it tie to any general principle about these ebbs and flows? So the left-wing increase seems to be tied to the Trump administration and its policies. The left-wing attacks start to grow from very small levels, starting really in about 10 years ago, and then they get bigger and bigger, and they're still pretty small compared to right-wing attacks. But we see a significant increase in recent months, in part inspired by immigration concerns, in part inspired by trans rights, a number of hot-button issues that the Trump administration has really pushed hard-line positions on. Is there a—help me understand how the categorization goes. Is it—what constitutes—well, let's start with what constitutes kind of left and right. So we categorize it based on the American political spectrum. So positions that are in favor of abortion rights for the LGBTQ community, that in general are pro-immigrant, we see as part of the political left. And the opposite, and I would add things like very strong belief in gun rights, criticism of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, we put that on the political right. I would stress, though, sometimes it's hard to tell. You have individuals who, frankly, are like most of us, which is they don't always believe everything consistently, and they take a little from one category and a little from another category. And in terms of sort of just hygiene, how should we, and more important, how did you take some of these acts of political violence that don't have a clear through-line or that might be driven by the idiosyncrasies and personal issues of the person committing the violence? We tried to be very careful with this. When an individual didn't have a clear political motive, we didn't count it as terrorism. So you might have an individual do an attack on a political target even, such as the first attempt to assassinate President Trump in 2020, where obviously it's a political target, but the individual in question seemed to be equally happy to try to kill President Joe Biden. Whereas President Trump happened to be going through his town. So sometimes you have individuals who just want to be someone big and don't really have a political purpose, and we avoid using terrorism for that type of attack. We have about 30 seconds left. The attack in Manchester and anti-Semitic violence, your thoughts? We see two kinds of anti-Semitic violence. Some are tied to Israel and opposition to Israel, and others tied to anger at Jews in general who are blamed for lots of conspiracies. As a result, we see a lot of attacks on Jewish targets.

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