good to understand
You’ve probably heard this claim repeated often:“
Most extremist-related murders in the U.S. are committed by right-wing extremists.
”That claim comes primarily from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and it’s widely treated as a neutral, reality-based fact.
Here’s the problem: the issue is not fake data. The issue is how the data is defined, what is excluded, and how the conclusion is presented.1) What the ADL actually measures.
The ADL does not track all violence, or even all ideologically motivated violence. It tracks violence tied to a narrow, pre-selected set of ideologies that it chooses to monitor (primarily certain right-wing and antisemitic ideologies).
Other forms of ideological violence — including attacks on churches or Christian schools that are motivated by hostility toward Christianity — are often excluded or reclassified as “grievance,” “mental health,” or “non-ideological.”
2) This exclusion isn’t random. When entire categories of relevant violence are removed by definition, the dataset is structurally shaped to produce a particular outcome. In other words, right-wing violence doesn’t just “emerge” as dominant — it dominates by construction, because other ideologically relevant violence is definitionally filtered out.
3) The ADL does not publish a full incident-level dataset. We get aggregate conclusions, but not a transparent list of every incident included or excluded. That makes independent verification or reclassification impossible.
4) How the conclusions are presented. Statements like “most extremist-related murders are committed by right-wing extremists” are technically true only within the ADL’s narrow framework, but they are routinely presented — and understood — as describing extremist violence as a whole.
The ADL knows this. Journalists, policymakers, and the public consistently interpret these claims as comprehensive and reality-descriptive. Qualifiers buried in methodology sections don’t correct that misunderstanding.
An analogy:If I sell you a car and describe it as “accident-free,” while knowing it has collision damage — but I’ve defined those collisions as “intentional, so they don’t count” — I haven’t lied word-for-word, but I’ve materially misled you, because any reasonable person understands “accident-free” to mean no collisions, not collisions excluded by definition.
That’s what’s happening here.
The data is real.
The exclusions are intentional.
The misunderstanding is desired. When real data is selectively included, entire categories are omitted, and the result is presented as reality-descriptive, the outcome is a distorted understanding of the issue.
This isn’t about denying right-wing violence. It’s about honest measurement and honest presentation. Selective definitions + omitted context + headline conclusions = misleading analysis, not neutral truth.
The ADL is lying.
