There's a line usually hung on Stalin, probably wrongly, that it doesn't matter who votes, only who counts the votes. Whoever said it, it describes the political violence debate perfectly. The question of which side is violent gets settled by who does the sorting, and for thirty years the people sorting have worked out of newsrooms and think tanks where the Democrats are the home team.
The sorting goes like this. If a man reads the Communist Manifesto and shoots a congressman, the coverage says he's troubled, his motive is murky, and we shouldn't rush to judgment. If a man reads a racist manifesto and shoots up a supermarket, he's right-wing, no qualifier, filed in the same drawer as your uncle who votes Republican and goes to Rotary. That drawer holds Klansmen, neo-Nazis, militia cranks, and QAnon screamers, every one of whom would be tossed out of a church potluck, a county GOP meeting, or a Rotary breakfast within five minutes of opening his mouth. Nobody asks whether the "right" in "right-wing" has anything to do with the people who actually vote Republican. The label works like a rental truck. You load whatever you want in the back and drive it up to the conservative's front door.
Now look at the other drawer, and at who sits at the table. The Democratic Socialists of America won primary after primary this year, and Hakeem Jeffries says any of them who win in November are welcome in the House Democratic caucus. In Virginia last fall, Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for attorney general, had texts surface from 2022 in which he wrote that the Republican House Speaker should get two bullets to the head. It went further than that. He mused about the man's wife watching her own child die in her arms. Democrats condemned the texts and stopped short of asking him to drop out, and Virginia elected him its chief law enforcement officer. The bullet-in-the-head guy got the gavel.
That is the difference between the two sides, and it's the whole difference. The right's lunatics are shown the door. The left's get a seat, a committee assignment, and a talking-points memo explaining why it was all taken out of context.
It isn't only the officeholders. After the first attempt on Trump's life, the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers surveyed ordinary Americans, and 55 percent of those left of center said murdering Trump would be at least somewhat justified. These weren't anonymous trolls. They were your neighbors, polled to census standards, calmly explaining that assassination was understandable. When Charlie Kirk was shot dead in front of a crowd of college kids, the celebrating on social media came from teachers, nurses, and people with blue checkmarks who didn't bother to hide it. You don't get that kind of comfort with murder from a few lone wolves. You get it from a decade of calling half the country Nazis, after which somebody always decides to treat them like Nazis.
Look at the order of events, because the order is the argument. The cheering for the UnitedHealthcare killer came first, in December 2024. The poll showing half the left comfortable with assassinating a president came in April 2025. Charlie Kirk was shot in September, and the WHCA dinner gunman came the next spring. The disavowals came afterward, right on schedule, and the disavowals aren't the point. The permission was handed out before anybody pulled a trigger. A party that spends years telling its people the other side are fascists, then shrugs when its candidate texts about head shots, doesn't get to act surprised when somebody takes it literally and then send flowers.
The bodies have followed the rhetoric. In the first half of 2025, CSIS counted more left-wing attacks than right-wing ones for the first time in thirty years, and that count stopped before Kirk was killed. Then came the Dallas ICE office, where the FBI said the shooter meant specifically to kill agents, and the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where a gunman was charged with trying to assassinate the President. This year's tally of plots and attacks against politicians runs two to one against Republicans. The side being shot at keeps getting told to tone down its rhetoric.
The defenders' last fallback is lethality, and it's worth looking at. CSIS found left-wing attacks far less deadly, and the explanation it gave is that many of the attackers just aren't very good at violence. That's the argument: they're no gentler, only worse shots. If your moral standing depends on the other guy's marksmanship, you don't have moral standing.
And that's only what they choose to count. The incident databases track plots and attacks, not riots, so the summer of 2020 never appears on the left's tab. Arson, vandalism, and looting in the first two weeks after George Floyd's death caused an estimated $1 to $2 billion in insured damage, the costliest civil disorder in American history, worse than Los Angeles in 1992. In the Twin Cities alone, officials put the damage at about $550 million across some 1,500 locations. If a crowd of Trump supporters had burned a police precinct and two weeks of storefronts across twenty states, nobody would be filing it under "unrest." It would be the right-wing violence chapter of every textbook for the next fifty years. One day in January gets its own chapter in the history books and a seat in the terrorism data, while a summer of fires gets filed under "mostly peaceful." Same kind of event, different drawer, decided by the same people doing the counting.
Fair is fair, and I'll name our side's sins before anyone does it for me. The people who broke into the Capitol on January 6 and shoved cops around were wrong, and some went to prison for it. Vance Boelter, who murdered Minnesota representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, was a Trump voter by his best friend's account. The online chatter that tried to make him a Walz man because he once sat on a state advisory board was nonsense, and we should say so. The Whitmer kidnapping plot was real, even if the FBI had so many informants in it that juries acquitted some of the defendants. When Trump sat down to dinner with Nick Fuentes, conservatives spent weeks tearing into each other over it. Notice that we argued about whether to throw the man out. On the other side, nobody argued about whether to seat Jay Jones. They just counted his votes.
That's the whole game. Political violence has a label, the label has an owner, and the owner decides which drawer every shooter goes in. As long as Klansmen count as "right-wing" and DSA members count as "Democrats," the numbers will say whatever the people counting want them to say.
Stalin, or whoever it was, would have recognized the setup.