The Justice Department has removed a report by the National Institute of Justice from its website after it concluded that far-right extremists have committed more violent acts in the US. While that would usually be a helpful piece of information for the authorities to have, it contradicts a disturbing claim Donald Trump made that effectively sanitized far-right radicals.
Per The Guardian, the report, titled What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism, was pulled from the DOJ’s website around Sept. 13. The report still exists in archives and opens with the clincher: “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.”
However, in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk murder and the subsequent arrest of Tyler Robinson, Trump claimed the opposite was true. In an interview on Fox News, where the hosts pressed him to explain what his administration planned to do about radicals on both the far left and far right, Trump insisted that only the far left were “the problem.” He went further, claiming that far-right radicals merely want to see the US free of crime.
EARHARDT: We have radicals on the right as well. How do we fix this country?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 12, 2025
TRUMP: I'll tell you something that's gonna get me in trouble but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. The radicals on the left… pic.twitter.com/snOESz3x5a
Certainly, Trump has made a crackdown on crime his second most prominent agenda item after mass deportation. Furthermore, in his focus on Washington, DC, he accused the police department of fuzzing up numbers to make it appear there was less crime in the area. With the revelation of the NIJ report’s removal, it seems Trump is more concerned with who hides findings rather than the act of hiding findings itself. Because as soon as Trump made a demonstrably false claim about radicalism, his administration eliminated proof that contradicted him.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies backed the NIJ’s conclusions in an independent analysis of 893 domestic terrorist plots. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism also affirmed the findings. So this is not about one institution the administration can cast doubt on, as it has done with the CDC. Still, Heidi Beirich, an executive at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, acknowledged, “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.”
There are no political groups without extremists and bad actors. Situations like this require leadership that is poised and focused on messaging that fosters unity. Instead, Trump has chosen to sow deeper division. And it is not simply a matter of the far right being more violent than the far left. The findings reveal a faction of the political landscape that has felt unheard for a very long time. They need to understand that they don’t have to turn to violence.
This is not the time to argue over whose radicalism is more justified or to pick sides. This is the time to offer unheard pockets of society a message of unity and peace.
Published: Sep 17, 2025 02:40 pm