MAGA influencer flips when called out on false claim: ‘I refuse to acknowledge that data!'
Conservative commentator and media personality Benny Johnson got into a heated exchange with Rep. Ro Khanna Wednesday after being called out on his false claim that the “vast majority” of recent political violence was perpetrated by “the left.”
Khanna was appearing on Johnson’s show Wednesday when the topic of political violence was brought up, something Johnson blamed almost entirely on “the left,” a claim he also said last week where he blamed recent political violence almost entirely on the Democratic Party.
“Come on, we both have functional brain stems and eyeballs, you can see that the vast majority of the modern political violence is on the left, and that's what all available data shows,” Johnson said.
Khanna pushed back, citing reporting from the Anti-Defamation League that noted “all extremist-related murders in 2024 were committed by right-wing extremists,” the third year in a row in which right-wing extremists had been “connected to all identified extremist-related killings.”
Having been directly rebuked, Johnson fired off at the ADL as being unreliable, and questioned the accuracy of its data.
“You can't use the ADL! The ADL uses prison violence and ascribes right-wing – uh – white nationalist prison violence as right-wing hate,” Johnson said. “We disavow that entirely, that's not part of our movement, you can't bundle that data together. I refuse to acknowledge that data on this program!”
Despite Johnson’s assertions, the ADL’s report is supported by a number of other studies, including a study published last month by the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. That study found that terrorist attacks propagated by “right-wingers” accounted for 11% of politically motivated murders since 1975, whereas “left-wing terrorists” were responsible for 2% during that same time period.
The ADL does track prison-based white supremacist gangs as Johnson asserted, though its inclusion does not undermine the underlying claim, nor does it account for studies on right-wing violence from other research organizations.