I don’t discuss political views with anyone. I’m entitled to mine, and you’re entitled to yours.
What’s below is not a political view. It’s about whether we hold the same standard no matter who’s involved, and if you think I’ve got it wrong, show me the evidence to change my mind.
My philosophy is that your beliefs don’t make you a better person; your behavior does. And under no circumstances is political violence acceptable.
Ask someone to name an act of political violence. They won’t have to think about it. Then notice which one they named, and you could probably guess how they vote.
There have been enough that nobody has to reach. Each one starts the same argument, and it’s never about the person who was hurt. It’s about whose fault this kind of thing is. With the midterms weeks away, it’s getting louder.
For years I reviewed pandemic loan files for the Small Business Administration. The rule there was simple. The standard doesn’t move from one file to the next, no matter how you feel about the people in it. We’ve never held that standard in public, and we’re not holding it now.
When someone associated with the other side commits violence, we see it clearly. We point to the rhetoric that preceded it. We ask what environment produced it. We demand that leaders condemn it. Sometimes we treat it as evidence about the movement itself.
When someone associated with our own side commits violence, we get careful. That person was disturbed. That person doesn’t represent us. Millions shouldn’t be blamed for one person’s choice. Rhetoric isn’t responsible for everything someone does.
Those may all be legitimate arguments. So why do we only make them for our own side?
There’s evidence we judge the same violence differently depending on who’s involved. Researchers at the University of Bergen and Johns Hopkins ran a survey experiment through YouGov in 2024 and published it in Public Opinion Quarterly in March 2026. Participants read a scenario in which a rally was disrupted nonviolently, and attendees beat the disruptors in response. The only things that changed were the party identities and the severity of the disruption.
Party labels moved the judgment. Thirty percent of strong Republicans rated the beating somewhere between somewhat and completely justified when the victims were Democrats. Eleven percent said so when they were Republicans. Among strong Democrats, it was 27 percent and 10 percent. The gap was almost identical in both parties.
The authors are careful about what this shows. It’s one hypothetical beating, not a lethal attack. The sample has limits. Your side is always either the attacker or the victim, never uninvolved, so some of this may be loyalty to whoever got hit. It doesn’t measure which party commits more.
This is also contested ground. An earlier study built on homicide scenarios found no partisan gap at all, which these authors attribute to the fact that almost nobody justifies killing, so a difference had nowhere to show up.
But if party labels can move how we judge a hypothetical, it’s fair to ask what they do after something real happens.
Now read the same numbers in the other direction. Even among strong partisans shown violence against the other side, roughly seven in ten did not call it justified. Some of them picked the neutral middle rather than coming out against it. But they didn’t endorse the beating.
That’s the part that keeps going missing. The double standard shows up in the numbers. But most people still don’t justify the violence. When we talk as though the other side has been overtaken by people willing to excuse political violence, we’re calling a minority response the country.
In those files you could not decide whether a rule meant one thing in one case or something else in the next because you liked the second answer better. The facts changed every time and so did the people, but the standard stayed where it was. If you moved it anyway, a second reviewer sent the file back with notes.
Politically, we do that constantly, and nobody sends the file back.
There’s a reason review standards get written before the files come in. Set the rule after you’ve seen who’s in the file, and you’ll set it to fit the answer you want. That happens to careful people, not just dishonest ones, which is why the rule has to exist before the case does. The only fix is to set the standard first and apply it to whatever shows up.
Someone will say attribution matters, and they’re right. If rhetoric contributes to violence, we should want to know whose and how much. But that shouldn’t depend on who’s holding the microphone. Ideology, motive, scale, and frequency matter too. They just shouldn’t decide whether we condemn violence, only what we conclude once we have. Even if one side proved the other had committed more, it still has to answer for its own.
We’ve seen where that goes. Someone points to an attack by the right, someone answers with one by the left, and soon the argument isn’t whether political violence is acceptable, only whose is worse. Come out of that convinced it’s mostly something the other side does, and every new incident becomes proof the people across the divide aren’t simply wrong. They’re dangerous.
The seven in ten are still there, in both parties. They’re just harder to hear than the argument.
So run the file review. Before you make the argument, ask whether you’d make the same one if the parties were reversed. If the answer is no, you haven’t caught the other side excusing something you never would. You’ve caught yourself moving the standard, and there’s nobody to send the file back but you.
Sources
Lars Erik Berntzen, Cornelius Cappelen, Lilliana Mason and Tor Midtbø, “Mind the Gap: Partisan Bias in Justifying Political Violence in the United States,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 90, No. 3 (Fall 2026), pp. 758-777.
Sean J. Westwood, Justin Grimmer, Matthew Tyler and Christopher Nall, “Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 119 (2022), e2116870119.
This is an independent analysis based on publicly available information and professional experience. The views expressed are my own.
Traci Harig is a former GS-13 loan specialist at the U.S. Small Business Administration, where her work on 7(a)/PPP covered eligibility and forgiveness reviews, affiliation analysis under 13 CFR §121, appeals, and case reviews and analysis on matters referred by OGC, DOJ, and OIG, including False Claims Act matters. She writes about program design, eligibility verification, and federal program integrity.
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