Announcing new visa restrictions on foreigners tied to what he called 'Far-Left Terrorists,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio described a threat he said the United States has long overlooked. 'For far too long,' he said in a July 16 statement, 'our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left' [1]. The government's own record points the other way.
Measured by who has actually been killed, left-wing violence is the smaller share by a wide margin. Over roughly the past decade, right-wing attacks killed 112 people in the United States and jihadist attacks 82, against 13 for the far left, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies [2]. Far-right incidents averaged about 20 a year from 2011 to 2024; far-left incidents about four [2].
Data
| Right-wing | 112 deaths, ~past decade (CSIS) |
|---|---|
| Jihadist | 82 deaths, ~past decade (CSIS) |
| Left-wing | 13 deaths, ~past decade (CSIS) |
This is not only outside analysts' count; it is the government's own. Congressionally mandated FBI and DHS reports from 2017 to 2023 repeatedly named white supremacists the most lethal domestic-terrorism threat [3]. A 2024 National Institute of Justice report finding that 'far-right attacks continue to outpace all other types of terrorism' was removed from the Justice Department's website in September 2025 [3]. A Cato Institute tally of political murders since 2020 put them at 54 percent right-wing, 22 percent left-wing, and 21 percent Islamist [3].
One trend is real, and worth stating plainly: in the first half of 2025, left-wing attacks outnumbered far-right ones for the first time in more than three decades, five to one [2]. That is a genuine shift, and it belongs in any honest accounting. It is also a shift in the number of incidents, not in lethality - left-wing attacks remained far less deadly, and well below the historical levels of right-wing and jihadist violence [2]. A rising count is not the same as the deadliest threat.
The doctrine's foreign predicate is thin as well. The four groups designated to support it - one in Germany, one in Italy, two in Greece - are, by a Just Security analysis, too disconnected and too low in casualties to support the claim that they pose an existential threat to Americans [4]. The 'blind spot' Rubio describes is not what the record shows. By the government's own data, the deadliest political violence of the past decade has come overwhelmingly from the right and from jihadists - and casting the left as the neglected threat inverts the picture the FBI, DHS, and the Justice Department's own research have drawn [1][2][3].
