Former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf’s Senate testimony this week exposed the lengths to which Republicans are willing to bend the facts to fit a partisan narrative. Once clear-eyed about the threat of white supremacist violence, Wolf now paints political violence as a problem driven almost entirely by the left.
In 2020, under Wolf’s watch at DHS, he testified that “white supremacist extremists… are certainly the most persistent and lethal threat” among domestic violent extremists. That statement came in the context of a string of horrific attacks: Patrick Crusius’ massacre of 23 people at an El Paso Walmart, Robert Bowers’ killing of 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue, and other white supremacist-inspired killings in the U.S. and abroad. These attacks were directly tied to far-right ideology and, in many cases, echoing Donald Trump’s own rhetoric about immigrants.
Fast forward to Tuesday, and Wolf, now executive vice president of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, offered a sharply different story. Before the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, he claimed that recent political violence is “driven largely by radical, left-wing extremist groups,” citing attacks like the assassination attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and threats against pro-life centers. He downplayed or ignored white supremacist attacks entirely, despite clear evidence that far-right violence remains a persistent and deadly problem.
Wolf’s selective recounting conveniently omits major incidents: the murder of Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband by an abortion opponent, the bludgeoning of Paul Pelosi by a QAnon supporter, and thousands of Jan. 6 rioters pardoned by Trump. It also ignores the broader data showing that far-right extremists have killed hundreds over the last quarter-century, while deaths linked to left-wing protests are far rarer and often misattributed.
Meanwhile, William Braniff, former director of DHS’ Center for Prevention Programs, stressed that violent incidents do not “fit neatly into any one ideological category” and highlighted a 150% rise in fatalities across a spectrum of ideological violence—from ISIS-inspired attacks to far-right and nihilistic crimes. Braniff also noted that funding for a global terrorism database, crucial to tracking these trends, was canceled under the Trump administration.
Yet Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Eric Schmitt pushed the familiar narrative of an “epidemic of left-wing violence,” invoking Black Lives Matter and antifa protests. Conservative media voices amplified the claim, portraying 2020’s racial justice unrest as proof of left-wing danger—ignoring that in many cases, fatalities were caused by opportunistic criminals, far-right actors, or law enforcement, not BLM or antifa supporters.
Data tells a very different story than Wolf’s new talking points. During the 2020 protests, only one politically motivated homicide in the U.S. could be credibly linked to an antifascist activist in the last 25 years. Meanwhile, white supremacists and right-wing extremists killed at least 329 people between 1994 and 2020. Even high-profile incidents of unrest often involved far-right opportunists, like Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha or Steven Carillo, a Boogaloo extremist who exploited racial justice protests to murder law enforcement officers.
Wolf’s flip-flopping is not just an individual failing; it reflects a broader GOP strategy: recast America’s most lethal domestic threat as a problem of the left, erase inconvenient facts about Trump’s own role in emboldening far-right extremists, and weaponize selective outrage to score political points. In doing so, Republicans are not confronting violence—they are rewriting history to fit a partisan agenda.
If political violence is truly rising, the solution is not to mislabel the perpetrators for political gain. The solution is to confront the data honestly, hold extremists accountable, and stop giving a platform to those who insist the problem only exists on one side of the aisle. Chad Wolf’s Senate testimony this week is a stark reminder: facts are malleable when politics demand it—but the threat of far-right violence remains stubbornly real.
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