Right-wing extremism is on the rise, but ideological killings dropped significantly last year
- Right-wing extremism is on the rise in the US.
- In 2020, though, there was a sharp drop in the number of killings committed by extremists.
- Of the at least 17 extremist killings, 16 were linked to right-wing movements, the ADL found.
Right-wing extremism is on the rise in the US, and was linked to at least 16 killings last year, the Anti-Defamation League found.
Every year the ADL tracks murders associated with ideological extremism, and for the last three decades, extremist killings in the US have been overwhelmingly associated with right-wing movements, according to the ADL.
In 2020 an overlapping pandemic, far-reaching anti-racism protests and contested election contributed to political tension and division in the US.
The beliefs and organization of extremist groups and conspiracy movements like the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Oath Keepers, and QAnon became widely known.
While right-wing extremism was spreading rapidly, and documented through the dissemination of white-supremacist propaganda, the overall number of extremism-related killings dropped significantly from previous years, the ADL found.
In total, there were 17 victims of fatal extremism last year - 16 associated with right-wing movements and one, the killing of Patriot Prayer's Aaron Danielson, was associated with a left-wing movement. It's the lowest number of ideological killings since 2004, the ADL reported.
In 2019, there were 45 extremist-related murders. In 2018, there were 54 killings, according to the ADL.
"There is one main reason for lower death totals in 2020: the absence of high casualty shooting sprees or other mass killings," the ADL said in its report. "Most extremist-related killing incidents have just one victim; occasionally two or three are killed in a single event."
All but two of the killings were committed with guns.
If there was just one mass shooting with fatalities similar to that the attack at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart last year, the numbers of deaths would have doubled, ADL noted.
Killings are down, but right-wing terrorist attacks and plots are up
In addition to tracking killings, the ADL also has a "HEAT" map - it stands for Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism and Terrorism - that tracks extremist-related terrorist attacks.
In 2020, there were 16 right-wing related attacks or plots, up from 13 the year before.
The organization also documented more than 4,500 incidents of white supremacist propaganda, which is up from 2,724 in 2019.
White supremacists were responsible for more than half of all extremist killings in 2020. Anti-government extremism (including the Boogaloo movement) landed at 29%.
Last year was the second year in a row that no killings linked to domestic Islamist extremism occurred.
"Extremist-related killings are rare compared to the total homicides in the U.S. each year. However, extremist killings can have a disproportionate effect on communities, especially when they take the form of a hate crime or a terrorist attack," the ADL said in their report. "Such attacks are often intended to strike fear more widely throughout vulnerable communities and, indeed, have that effect."
The numbers collected in this year's survey include several killings that happened at or near protest activity, but most deaths that happened at or near protests weren't included because they remain under investigation by local law enforcement.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old from Illinois, charged with shooting three people - two of them fatally - during racial unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was not included in the data.
The ADL found that there was no evidence that Rittenhouse was involved with the Kenosha Guard extremism group or showed up as a result of their call to action. It wasn't until after the shootings that Rittenhouse started to publicly align with groups like the Proud Boys, ADL found.
The widely reported killing of Ahmaud Arbery - a Black man shot to death by three white men all known to have shared racist content and beliefs - was also not included in the statistics, but might be in the future, ADL noted.
The 2020 numbers also excluded the deaths that resulted from the pro-Trump Capitol insurrection this January.