Noah Rothman, Guy Who Counted to Seven and Called It a National Emergency
National Review: When You Need a Six-Year-Old Riot to Feel Relevant Again
Noah Rothman wrote a piece in National Review called “The Scourge of Left-Wing Violence,” and he wants you to believe the summer of 2020 was not a mass protest against police brutality but a nationwide left-wing terror campaign that the media and academia covered up (Rothman, 2026). He says institutions on the left spent years downplaying riots, smearing researchers who told the truth, and cooking the books on domestic terrorism data to make right-wingers look like the real threat. That is a lot of claims for one article. Let us see if they hold up.
When Your Source Says the Opposite
Rothman opens by citing a September 2020 study he says was “affiliated with Princeton University” and found that no fewer than 220 American towns and cities were convulsed by riots (Rothman, 2026). The actual source is the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, or ACLED, an independent nonprofit that partnered with Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative. ACLED did record fewer than 220 locations with violent demonstrations, not riots, and it defined “violent demonstrations” broadly enough to include demonstrators clashing with police. More importantly, the same report found that over 93 percent of Black Lives Matter demonstrations that summer were peaceful, and it specifically noted that white supremacist agitators, including the infamous “umbrella man” in Minneapolis, had been caught on camera smashing windows to spark violence (ACLED, 2020). Rothman skips that detail because it complicates his story about left-wing mobs.
He then mocks a portion of the ACLED report about Seattle’s Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, or CHOP. The report noted that while CHOP was later marred by criminal violence, the encampment itself coincided with a lull in violent demonstrations, and only peaceful protests were recorded during its specific lifespan. Rothman treats this as laughable academic denialism (Rothman, 2026). What he omits is that ACLED’s data showed violent demonstrations dropping during the CHOP period compared to the weeks immediately before and after. You can argue about whether CHOP was a good idea, but the report’s observation was factual, not partisan.
Seven Incidents vs. 42
Rothman leans heavily on a 2021 report by the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, or NCITE, about anarchist violent extremism. He correctly notes that the report says many researchers consider the topic a “third rail” because of professional backlash. What he does not mention is that NCITE found exactly seven significant anarchist violent extremist incidents between 2015 and 2019, compared to 42 by racially motivated violent extremists during the same period (National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center & Program on Extremism, 2021). Seven versus 42. The report also makes clear that researchers fear blowback from across the political spectrum, not just from the left. Rothman turns a study about relatively rare left-wing violence into evidence of a campus conspiracy.
Reading Comprehension Is Hard
To make his case feel human, Rothman cherry-picks two Minneapolis residents, Meredith Webb and Michelle Garvey, and presents them as liberals so terrorized by the mob that they “waged a war against common sense” and learned to love looting (Rothman, 2026). Read the actual Washington Post reporting and you find two neighbors on a mostly white, liberal block who were terrified not just by smashed windows but by the constant thrum of National Guard helicopters and the city’s false claims that white supremacists were causing the destruction. They formed citizen patrols because they did not trust the police. Webb read a Facebook post from a local restaurant owner whose building had burned, who wrote, “Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served.” Their quotes about understanding anger came from empathy with their community, not from some mass Stockholm syndrome (After killing of George Floyd, white liberals embrace ideas that once seemed radical, 2020). Rothman rips them out of context because he needs them as props.
Op-Ed Writers Are Not the Government
Rothman loves to treat commentators and cable news hosts as official spokespeople for the entire left. He quotes John Patrick Leary of The New Republic writing that “the demand to protest peacefully is a trap,” cites Chris Cuomo asking where it says protesters must be polite, and drags in Vicky Osterweil’s NPR interview about looting as evidence that the left celebrates violence (Leary, 2020; NPR, 2020; Rothman, 2026). These are commentators and authors with controversial opinions, not the Democratic Party, not the FBI, and not the organizers of the 2020 protests. Using them to tar millions of demonstrators is like using an Alex Jones rant to define the Republican Party.
He also cites a Jacobin article by Robert Greene II comparing the 2020 uprisings to the Red Summer of 1919, and a Nation piece by Joshua Holland saying the extreme right has held a near-monopoly on political violence since the 1980s (Rothman, 2026). Rothman uses the Jacobin quote to prove leftists saw the riots as revolutionary. One assistant professor writing in a socialist magazine does not represent the mainstream left any more than a random National Review columnist represents all conservatives. As for Holland’s observation, it aligns with what the FBI and independent researchers have repeatedly found: right-wing violence has been more frequent and more deadly than left-wing violence for decades.
Counting Crimes, Except When We Do Not
When Rothman turns to the data on domestic terrorism, he manages to land one partially valid hit. He notes that the Anti-Defamation League’s widely cited statistics include non-ideological violence, such as prison murders by white supremacist gangs and domestic disputes among extremists, in its overall counts. A Business Insider investigation confirmed this methodological choice does inflate the numbers (Fisher, 2020). But here is the problem: even when you strip out those non-ideological incidents, violence actually motivated by right-wing extremist ideology still dwarfs comparable left-wing violence. The NCITE report, the FBI’s own assessments, and multiple independent analyses confirm this trend. Pointing out that a dataset is imperfect does not erase the trend it documents.
Rothman also claims that the Prosecution Project, a University of Cincinnati database, codes obvious non-right-wing incidents as right-wing terrorism, such as a homeless man attacking a hotelier or a woman spray-painting a church (Rothman, 2026). He provides no citations for these specific examples, and I could not verify them through independent research. If you are going to accuse academics of falsifying data, you need to show the receipts. Rothman does not.
Newsweek Said What?
Rothman repeats a claim from a 2023 Newsweek article that the FBI “created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers” (Rothman, 2026). The Washington Post investigated this story and found it was bunk. The category in question was AGAAVE, anti-government and anti-authority violent extremism, a classification that existed long before Trump and that covers a wide range of ideologies (Bump, 2023). There was no special “MAGA” tag. Rothman either did not bother to verify the claim or chose to repeat it because it sounded scary.
Blood and Progress, Mostly Fiction
Rothman is right about one thing: political violence is a serious subject that deserves honest accounting. But his article is doing exactly what he accuses the left of doing. He cherry-picks data, strips away context, smears researchers with accusations he cannot prove, and waves around op-ed quotes as if they were government policy. The 2020 protests were messy, destructive in places, and absolutely open to criticism. Honest criticism, though, requires looking at the full picture, including the white supremacists who instigated violence, the overwhelming majority of peaceful protesters, and the police response that often escalated rather than calmed the streets. Rothman is not interested in that picture. He is selling a book, and he needs you angry enough to buy it.
If you want to see what happens when a Wikipedia article on "cherry-picking" gets trapped in a feedback loop with a thesaurus and a book advance, read Rothman's absolute crap here: (PAYWALL WARNING) https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2026/07/the-scourge-of-left-wing-violence/
Works Cited
ACLED. (2020, September 3). Demonstrations and political violence in America: New data for summer 2020. https://acleddata.com/report/demonstrations-and-political-violence-america-new-data-summer-2020
After killing of George Floyd, white liberals embrace ideas that once seemed radical. (2020, June 9). The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/after-killing-of-george-floyd-looting-and-rage-leads-white-liberals-to-embrace-ideas-that-once-seemed-radical/2020/06/09/63382090-a720-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html
Bump, P. (2023, October 6). The obvious holes in the ‘FBI targets Trump supporters’ story. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/06/maga-fbi-newsweek-trump/
Fisher, A. L. (2020, April 24). The ADL’s extremism statistics make it seem like ultraright-wing violence in the US is more common than it actually is. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/adl-extremism-ultraright-wing-violence-statistics-anti-defamation-league-2020-4
Leary, J. P. (2020, June 10). Freeing protest from the language police. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/158112/george-floyd-peaceful-protest-media
National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center & Program on Extremism. (2021). Anarchist/left-wing violent extremism in America: Trends in radicalization, recruitment, and mobilization. University of Nebraska Omaha Digital Commons. https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/ncitereportsresearch/21
NPR. (2020, August 27). One author’s controversial view: ‘In defense of looting.’ https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting
Rothman, N. (2026, May 14). The scourge of left-wing violence. National Review. https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2026/07/the-scourge-of-left-wing-violence/