The Real Story Behind America's Political Violence Crisis

When Threats Become Deadly

It could have been a scene from Cape Fear: a quiet evening, an ordinary home, a sudden intrusion by a stranger convinced that the law has betrayed him. In early July 2022, Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and her husband were watching television at their Seattle home when men drove past their house screaming threats—vile, racialized, and unmistakably political. They called the police. The men left. Thirty minutes later, one returned, blasting music and approaching the porch. When officers arrived, they found him armed with a loaded handgun, a round already chambered. A neighbor heard him shout, “Go back to India. I am going to kill you.”

This wasn't an isolated incident. It was part of a larger pattern that has transformed American political life. Jayapal later described the episode not as an aberration but as evidence of a broader transformation in politics—a climate in which grievance increasingly functions as permission and intimidation is framed as justified political expression.

What happened to Jayapal isn't unique. For years, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia lived under constant threat as one of Donald Trump's most aggressive defenders in Congress. She reported hundreds of death threats, largely from ideological opponents. But when Greene publicly broke with Trump—over the Epstein files, Gaza, and what “America first” had come to mean—the direction of the threats shifted. After Trump labeled her “Marjorie Traitor Greene,” messages arrived threatening her son by name. One threatened her assassination. Another claimed that a plane ticket had already been purchased. In November 2025, Greene announced her resignation from Congress, citing threats to her family.

What Jayapal and Greene have in common is not ideology, temperament, or policy; it is exposure. Both became targets in an era in which political violence is no longer confined to the fringe, no longer clearly condemned by leaders, no longer monopolized by either the right or the left—and increasingly treated as a legitimate instrument of political pressure.

The Misunderstanding of Political Violence

Public disagreement about whether political violence is rising and who is responsible for it stems not from ideology alone but from competing definitions about what should be counted. The challenge is not just that we disagree on the numbers, but that we're looking at fundamentally different phenomena.

In scholarly literature, political violence is generally defined as the use or credible threat of physical force for political ends. Those ends may include coercion, intimidation, punishment, or symbolic signaling intended to influence public behavior, political outcomes, or institutional authority. Under this definition fall assassination attempts, armed assaults on public officials, bombings, arson attacks, violent intimidation, riots against buildings with explicit political aims, and organized plots to use force against political targets.

Just as important are the exclusions. Political violence does not include ordinary criminal activity lacking political motivation, interpersonal violence driven by private disputes, or lawful protest—even when protests are disruptive, angry, or unlawful. Nor does it include harsh rhetoric alone, however inflammatory, unless it is paired with a credible threat of force. These boundaries matter, because collapsing political violence into crime or protest obscures its distinct causes and consequences.

The hardest problem is determining intent. Political violence is defined not only by what happens but by why it happens—and intent is often ambiguous. When a crowd burns a police precinct, is the act political rebellion, criminal opportunism, or both? When a gunman attacks a synagogue, is the motive ideological antisemitism, personal grievance, or mental illness layered atop political belief? When an individual sends a death threat to a lawmaker, is it expressive rage, partisan trolling, or preparation for real-world violence?

Conflicting Narratives and Data Dissonance

Since 2016, Americans have argued fiercely not only about whether political violence is rising but about who is responsible. One dominant narrative attributes the problem primarily to the radical right: white nationalism, militias, election denial. A competing narrative insists that violence emanates just as strongly from the radical left, manifested in riots, assaults on police, and organized disruption in cities and on campuses.

These claims are not merely rhetorical; they shape public trust, elite behavior, law enforcement priorities, and—most dangerously—the willingness of partisans to condemn violence committed by those they regard as allies. But what does the evidence actually show?

America's political violence problem is neither one-sided nor symmetrical. Taken together, the evidence from federal threat assessments, terrorism databases, protest incident data, and congressional security records points toward the same conclusion. Political violence in the United States declined for nearly two decades after the 1990s and then rose sharply beginning around 2016.

For decades prior to that year, politically motivated violence was concentrated overwhelmingly on the far right. Today, violence associated with the right and left is closer to balance, even as it takes very different forms. Right-wing violence has been substantially more frequent and far deadlier than left-wing violence since 2016—aimed at elections, federal institutions, and public officials—while left-wing violence has been more common in mass protest settings, from the 2020 George Floyd unrest to clashes over immigration enforcement, typically involving property destruction and confrontations with police.

Although uncertainty remains at the margins, the evidence strongly suggests that since roughly 2016, political violence on both the right and the left has reached levels unseen in the United States since the upheavals of the 1960s. These patterns reflect not a single ideology but the deeper forces of violent populism: hardened identities, perceived existential threats, collapsing institutional trust, and elite rhetoric that frames politics as a struggle between enemies rather than fellow citizens.

Why Definitions Matter

Reasonable scholars answer these questions differently, often using dissimilar evidentiary thresholds. Some datasets require explicit ideological statements; others infer political intent from targets, symbols, or timing. Some classify riots as political violence only when their organizers articulate political goals; others focus on behavior rather than rhetoric. None of these choices is neutral, and each shapes the resulting picture.

These definitional choices explain why prominent datasets sometimes appear to disagree. Federal law enforcement datasets emphasize lethality, capability, and threats to national institutions. Protest-oriented datasets capture frequency and geographic spread. Terrorism databases prioritize ideological framing and tactical similarity to global movements. Each captures something real—and each misses something important.

For this reason, no single dataset can settle the debate. Accordingly, my work triangulates across several sources, combining federal threat assessments, incident-level databases, congressional security data, and survey research. The goal is not to produce a definitive body count but to identify patterns that recur across independent measures: who is targeted, how violence is carried out, how lethal it is, and how those patterns have changed since 2016.

The Role of Federal Agencies

The most authoritative window into political violence in the United States comes not from media tallies or advocacy groups but from the federal agencies charged with tracking national security threats—above all, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Yet even here, readers encounter a fundamental problem: There is no single, formal US government definition of “political violence.”

Instead, federal agencies operate with overlapping categories—domestic terrorism, domestic violent extremism, hate crimes, threats against officials, and antigovernment violence—each shaped by legal constraints, investigative mandates, and statutory language rather than a unified conceptual framework.

This definitional fragmentation matters. Unlike many countries, the United States does not criminalize “domestic terrorism” as a stand-alone offense; the relevant statute (18 U.S.C., § 2331) defines “international terrorism” and “domestic terrorism” descriptively but does not by itself create a prosecutable offense. As a result, the FBI does not report a simple annual count of domestic terrorism incidents. Instead, the statistics reflect investigations, disrupted plots, arrests, and threat assessments organized around ideological motivation.

The absence of a single metric has fueled public confusion and partisan cherry-picking, with critics on all sides accusing the FBI of either exaggerating or minimizing particular threats. Despite these constraints, a consistent picture emerges from FBI testimony, annual threat assessments, and congressional reporting since 2016.

Across political administrations, FBI directors have warned that domestic violent extremism is a persistent and elevated threat, with particular emphasis on right-wing ideologies—especially white supremacist and ethno-nationalist violence—as the most lethal category among domestic violent threats. This assessment is grounded not in ideology per se but in outcomes: The majority of fatal attacks tied to political or ideological motives in recent years have originated in right-wing ecosystems, often carried out by lone actors inspired by online propaganda rather than formal organizations.

The Other Side of the Equation

At the same time, federal reporting makes clear that political violence is not monopolized by the right. The FBI and DHS have also documented significant spikes in violence associated with mass protest movements, assaults on law enforcement, arson, and attacks on government facilities during periods of intense unrest—most notably in 2020, when protests following the killing of George Floyd were accompanied by substantial violent confrontations in many cities.

These events are more commonly linked to left-wing or anti-authority contexts, tend to cluster geographically, and are far less likely to result in mass casualties. The distinction federal agencies draw is therefore not between “violent” and “nonviolent” sides but between forms of violence that differ in frequency, lethality, and strategic orientation.

A further frustration is temporal. Much of the FBI's publicly accessible data lags behind current events. Detailed breakdowns often stop several years short of the present, while ongoing investigations limit transparency about more recent trends. As a result, scholars and policymakers must rely on testimony, qualitative assessments, and partial datasets to infer patterns after 2021—a gap that has widened in the wake of intensified threats against public officials and institutions.

A Systemic Challenge

These limitations should not be mistaken for insignificance. On the contrary, the persistence of the same core warnings across multiple administrations, political contexts, and leadership teams suggests institutional continuity rather than partisan distortion. While the FBI cannot provide a clean annual count of “political violence,” its threat assessments provide something arguably more important: a comparative judgment about which forms of violence are most likely to kill, destabilize institutions, and undermine democratic governance.

When federal threat assessments are read alongside terrorism databases, incident-level coding, congressional security data, and survey research, the contours of political violence since 2016 come into focus—even if the exact numbers remain contested. The challenge is not the absence of evidence but the difficulty of integrating imperfect sources into an honest and comprehensive account.

The real crisis isn't just about the violence itself—it's about how we define it, how we measure it, and how we interpret it. Without shared understanding, we can't begin to address the root causes of political extremism and its deadly consequences.