California Arson Revealed As More Left-Wing Destruction

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the deadly 2025 Palisades Wildfire was not the result of climate change, but a left-wing arsonist, according to prosecutors. Thirty-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht was reportedly fascinated by Luigi Mangione (the suspect in the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson) and was “ranting” to his Uber customers about capitalism and vigilantism before allegedly setting the blaze. That wildfire caused 12 deaths (and potentially hundreds of others), while contributing to an estimated $250 billion in damage from the Los Angeles-area fires.

It’s just the latest in the growing string of left-wing violence that is plaguing the country, violence that will not stop until the left is willing to confront the product of its own making.

But how can leftists confront this problem when the complicit propaganda press repeatedly reassures them — despite the assassination attempts against President Donald Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the attempted assassinations of Steve Scalise and of ICE agents in Texas, the arson at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home, and countless other examples — that the real culprits are Republicans?

As a prime example of this deceptive “reassurance,” The New York Times declared that “Republican commentators have argued, incorrectly, that political violence is largely a left-wing problem” just days after yet another attempted assassination of President Donald Trump. According to Times reporter Linda Qiu, while “far-left violence is rising,” “most political violence in recent decades has come from the far right.”

She goes on to cite a report by “extremism experts” — aka the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) — which claimed in 2022 that “right-wing extremists may be more likely to engage in politically motivated violence.” But as is commonly the case with research touted by legacy media, the study’s own methodology reveals how badly skewed the conclusions are.

The report includes two studies, Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) and Global Terrorism Database (GTD), and uses PIRUS data up to 2018 and GTD data up to 2017. PIRUS codes individuals based on “publicly available court documents, newspaper accounts, and published sources,” while GTD uses roughly 2 million news articles daily and then has analysts determine what counts as a “terrorist attack.”

In other words, the databases rely heavily on the biased corporate media: When the propaganda press frames something as right-wing extremism, it counts as right-wing extremism in the databases. But if the propaganda press or prosecutors frame left-wing violence as a protest, unrest, or not associated with an ideological crime, the databases do not consider the violence to be left-wing.

PIRUS also only includes data for individuals who were arrested or indicted for explicitly ideological crimes.

“To be included in the [PIRUS] database, individuals have to meet at least one of the following criteria: arrested or indicted for illegal ideologically motivated offenses, killed because of their ideological activities, identified as a current or former member of a designated terrorist organization, or associated with an organization whose leader or founder was indicted for violent ideologically motivated offenses. Individuals meeting one or more of these criteria must also have been radicalized (primarily or entirely) within the United States and have a clear link between their criminal behavior and their ideological motive,” the study says.

In other words, whether political violence enters the dataset often depends less on the violence itself and more on how prosecutors and so-called journalists choose to describe it.

The New York Times’ choice to rely on studies that don’t include data after 2018 means the violent Black Lives Matter riots are completely absent from the calculus (and, given the criteria above, the left-wing riots likely would have been ignored by the studies even if post-2018 data had been included). But the absence of those riots (which caused more than $1 billion in damage and more than 30 associated deaths) illustrates a catastrophic flaw in how leftist media and researchers approach the question of political violence.

During the BLM riots, hundreds were arrested for arson, assault, looting, destruction of property, and other crimes. These crimes took place during an explicitly left-wing ideological demonstration organized around a left-wing political movement. Yet, in September of 2020, the Department of Justice framed 300 federal charges filed for crimes during the George Floyd riots as “crimes committed adjacent to or under the guise of peaceful demonstrations,” not as ideologically motivated domestic terrorism.

That means those crimes would not have been counted toward left-wing violence despite the clear association.

The Associated Press inadvertently highlighted the same problem while trying to dismiss President Donald Trump’s criticisms of those riots. As KSAT reported, citing the AP’s research, “Very few of those charged appear to be affiliated with highly organized extremist groups, and many are young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods Trump vows to protect from the violence in his reelection push to win support from the suburbs.” FBI’s internal 2020 assessment asserted that “much of the violence and vandalism is perpetrated by opportunistic, individual actors acting without specific direction.” It’s categorizations like these that would have allowed the left-wing BLM riot perpetrators to avoid detection in the system used for the PNAS study.

But formal affiliation with an extremist group is not what makes violence political. A man who burns a building down during an explicitly ideological riot is still participating in ideological violence even if he wasn’t formally given an Antifa membership card, and even if leftist ideology wasn’t the driving force in particular crimes during the 2020 riots, left-wing ideology enabled them by creating a permission structure for violence and chaos.

The PNAS report itself effectively admits the flaw in its limitations sections. Yet the authors still use these incomplete datasets to reach sweeping conclusions about ideological violence in America.

The report also admits that cases are considered “nonviolent where it was clear from source documents that individuals did not intend to harm others, including acts of vandalism, illegal protest, fraud, and property destruction where the perpetrators took measures to ensure that no one was injured or killed,” conveniently side-stepping entire swaths of destrutive activity. Yet at the same time if a so-called “right-winger” plots an attack that is never executed, it is still counted as violence if there was intent to harm.

“Our main outcome variable was whether the act committed by an individual was violent. The dataset coded as violent cases where there was strong evidence that individuals were conspiring to kill or injure even if they failed to do so,” the report states.

This spin, peddled so readily by The New York Times, isn’t new. After each attempted assassination against the president, the left has tried to claim that the real political violence comes from the right. In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, The Economist claimed that while “extremists on both left and right commit violence … more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.” As The Federalist previously explained, the study The Economist cited was conducted by The Prosecution Project, whose executive director is “openly anarchist Antifa-affiliated” as The Federalist had reported in 2023.

The study, much like the PNAS research, is flawed. For example, The Prosecution Project cites a charge against John Reardon, who made antisemitic threats. The study noted: “Influenced by events in Gaza, he also said, ‘you do realize that by supporting genocide that means it’s ok for people to commit genocide against you.’” As The Federalist noted, “The Department of Justice never identified Reardon’s political affiliation, but The Prosecution Project’s own account seems to indicate he was a pro-Palestine fanatic, a cause typically associated with Democrats. Yet The Prosecution Project identifies Reardon’s crimes as ‘rightist’ because they’re ‘identity-focused.’”

In another example of debunked leftist research, Ryan James Girdusky took a deep dive into a study of political violence by the Anti-Defamation League and found the study did not include the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The suspect, Mangione, purportedly left behind a manifesto espousing left-wing ideas about health care and elites.

Bruce Gilley reported in these pages on a separate list the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh put together. It counted “12 lethal political attackers since 2020 from the right but only nine from the left.”

But, as Gilley observed, “[Nowrasteh’s] list of the Right mistakenly includes at least four cases: the Melissa Hortman killing … a confused black teenager who killed one student at Antioch High School in Tennessee [in 2024] (laughably called a ‘white supremacist’ by the media), a Hispanic man also labelled a ‘white supremacist’ who shot up a shopping mall in Texas in 2023, and a man who became addicted to prostitutes and shot up a brothel in 2021 (again, laughably called a political crime because the sex-workers were Asians),” Gilley reported.

Notably, Nowrasteh’s list of left-wing violence excluded the murder of Iryna Zarutska, whose alleged killer said, “I got that white girl,” as well as “the six whites killed (and 60 injured) by the virulent black supremacist who ploughed his car into a Christmas parade in Wisconsin in 2021,” Gilley pointed out.

The propaganda press has touted all of these “studies” and “experts” to downplay left-wing violence while deflecting blame. But the real data doesn’t lie: America has a political violence problem, and it’s not coming from the right.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2