There is a story being told in certain corners of American media, and it goes something like this: the Left is violent, the Right is not, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a propagandist or a fool.

Let us test that story against the facts.

Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States in January 2009. He was the first African American to hold the office. The Secret Service began protecting him before any other presidential candidate in modern history, extending that protection earlier than the law technically required.

They knew something was coming.

The Obama Years

Within months of his 2008 campaign, three men — Shawn Robert Adolf, Tharin Gartrell, and Nathan Johnson — allegedly traveled to Denver with a high-powered rifle and a plan to shoot Obama during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. The stated motive: a white supremacist belief that a Black man should not be elected president. Adolf allegedly said he “didn’t believe a Black should be the leader of this country.” He was already a wanted man. He said it “wouldn’t matter” if he killed Obama.

Federal prosecutors ultimately said they had insufficient evidence to prove the conspiracy to a jury’s satisfaction. The case dissolved into legal ambiguity.

The intent did not.

In November 2011, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez fired a Romanian Cugir semiautomatic rifle from a car parked on Constitution Avenue. At least seven rounds struck the White House. Writings and testimony from those who knew him showed that Hernandez believed Obama was the Antichrist and the Devil.

In 2012, the far-right militia organization known as FEAR plotted a series of domestic attacks that included the assassination of the president.

In April 2013, a letter laced with ricin was intercepted before it reached Obama. The sender, James Everett Dutschke, was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison after pleading guilty.

Also in 2013, a man named Everett Crawford — affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan — plotted to kill Obama using a radiation device. Crawford was convicted and sentenced to 30 years.

In 2019, militia leader Larry Mitchell Hopkins confessed that his group had trained specifically for the planned assassinations of Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In 2023, Taylor Taranto — connected to the January 6 Capitol attack — was arrested near Obama’s Washington residence carrying weapons and explosive materials.

White supremacists. Klansmen. Militia organizations. A January 6 participant. A ricin mailer. Over fifteen years. Against one man. Because of the color of his skin and the office he held.

The Biden Years

In May 2020, Alexander Hillel Treisman drove a van loaded with an AR-15, multiple additional firearms, explosive materials, and over $500,000 in cash to within four miles of Joe Biden’s home in Delaware. He had searched online for Biden’s home address, state gun laws, rifle parts, and night-vision goggles. He had written a checklist that ended with the word “execute.”

Treisman’s apparent motivation was rage that Biden had beaten Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination. His devices also contained drawings of swastikas, admiring videos filmed at the Las Vegas massacre site, and thousands of images of child pornography. He was a deeply disturbed man who had settled, for that particular season, on Biden as his target. He was arrested on unrelated charges before the plot could advance further.

In August 2023, Craig DeLeeuw Robertson, 75 years old, posted on Facebook that he was planning to “clean the dust off the M24 sniper rifle” when he heard that Biden was coming to Utah. Robertson was a registered Republican. He described himself, in his own words, as a “MAGA Trumper.”

He had previously written: “The time is right for a presidential assassination or two. First Joe then Kamala!!!”

He had also threatened Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and New York Attorney General Letitia James — all of whom were, at the time, involved in legal proceedings against Donald Trump.

Robertson did not survive the FBI’s attempt to serve a warrant. He was armed when agents arrived. He was shot and killed.

Within hours, far-right figures declared him a martyr. “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander announced that the FBI was “now killing all online critics of Biden.” A man who had openly planned to assassinate the sitting president of the United States became, overnight, a symbol of resistance.

In June 2024, an Alabama man allegedly drove to Atlanta with plans to kill Biden during the CNN presidential debate. He failed to gain access after arriving at the wrong venue.

What the Record Actually Shows

These are not allegations invented for political effect. They are arrest records, court filings, criminal convictions, and documented deaths.

And here is what they do not prove:

They do not prove that Republicans are violent and Democrats are not.

They do not prove that conservatives harbor murder in their hearts while liberals tend their gardens in peace.

They prove something older and less comfortable than that.

Evil is not a party platform. It is a human condition. It finds its host in the grieved and the grandiose, the paranoid and the purposeless, the man who believes God has appointed him to pull the trigger and the man who believes history has. It does not stop at the registration desk. It does not check voter rolls.

What the record shows is simpler and more damning than a partisan charge sheet: when a nation spends decades marinating in the language of enemies, traitors, and existential threat, it produces people who take that language seriously.

More seriously than the people who sold it ever intended.

Or so they claim.

The question is not which party owns the violence. The question is what we keep feeding — and whether we have the honesty to look at what it grows.

We have seen what it grows. The graves are on record.