The US justice department has scrubbed a study from its website concluding that far-right extremists have killed far more Americans than any other domestic terrorist group, just days after a gunman fatally shot the prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The report, now archived, titled What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism, vanished from the Department of Justice website between 11 and 12 September, according to Jason Paladino, an independent investigative reporter who first wrote the story. Kirk, the 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder and Trump ally, was gunned down while speaking at Utah Valley University on 10 September.
The vanished study opened with: “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.”
Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged with Kirk’s murder and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. In the aftermath of the shooting, Donald Trump and other Republican leaders have blamed “radical left” elements for the attack.
The National Institute of Justice study, which was based on research spanning three decades, represented one of the most comprehensive government assessments of domestic terrorism patterns. It found that “militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States” and that “the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism”.
Where the report once appeared, the justice department wrote it was “reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent executive orders”, according to 404Media, though the page is now unavailable.
But the findings align with independent research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which analyzed 893 terrorist plots between 1994 and 2020. That study concluded: “Rightwing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994.”
Unfortunately for MAGA nothing disappears from the Internet.