The Cover-Up of Truth: Trump’s DOJ Erases the Record on Right-Wing Terror

A Study They Don’t Want You to See

By Dr. John Petrone

The Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) published a 2024 analysis documenting what many Americans already suspected but the Right has worked to deny: far-right extremists have committed far more politically motivated killings than any other group in recent decades. This wasn’t opinion. It was government-funded research.

Now, under the Trump administration, the page is gone from the DOJ website. Click the original link and you hit a dead end. Fortunately, the Internet has a memory.

Read the archived NIJ article (PDF): What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism — NIJ Journal, Issue 285 (June 2024): https://web.archive.org/web/20250911165140/https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/306123.pdf

And here is a summary of the findings they don’t want you to see:

• Since 1990, far-right extremists have carried out 227 ideologically motivated attacks, killing more than 520 people.

• In the same period, far-left extremists committed 42 such attacks, resulting in 78 deaths.

• The NIJ study concluded that militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States and that the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all others.

• A DHS threat assessment cited in the report warned that domestic violent extremists pose an acute threat, driven by grievances over immigration, electoral fraud, and even pandemic-related stressors.

The message is clear. If the facts undermine Trump’s narrative, the facts must be erased.

Erasing Reality to Protect the Lie

This isn’t routine web maintenance. It’s narrative control. While the country debates the causes and consequences of escalating political violence, Trump’s DOJ has buried its own evidence that the leading source of domestic terror is the far right.

Ask yourself: if this study showed left-wing extremists as the leading threat, would the page have been scrubbed—or blasted across right-wing media and turned into the next Project 2025 talking point?

Authoritarians don’t just attack institutions. They attack truth. They replace data with propaganda, hoping the public won’t notice the switch.

The Pattern We Can’t Ignore

This fits an unmistakable pattern:

• Purging inconvenient research from federal sites.

• Politicizing agencies by installing loyalists whose job is obedience, not accuracy.

• Rewriting the public record to shield their coalition from accountability.

When a government hides evidence of danger, it stops protecting its people and starts protecting a movement.

Why It Matters

Political violence thrives when leaders excuse it, minimize it, or pretend it doesn’t exist. Deleting this study signals to violent extremists that their actions will be downplayed. That corrodes deterrence, distorts policy, and normalizes danger.

Democracies don’t always fall with a bang. Sometimes they erode with a series of quiet deletions and convenient “reviews,” until facts themselves become partisan targets.

How We Fight Back

• Share the archive. Circulate the NIJ study widely—on social media, in classrooms, in community groups. Don’t let it disappear.

• Demand oversight. Call and write Congress. Insist on hearings into political interference at the DOJ and the suppression of public research.

• Fund truth-tellers. Support independent journalists, watchdog groups, and civic educators who shine light where authoritarians want darkness.

• Educate relentlessly. Use this episode as a teaching tool to expose how regimes erase truth step by step. Arm neighbors, colleagues, and students with the knowledge of this pattern.

• Organize locally. Attend school board meetings, city council sessions, and town halls. Speak this truth into the record where propaganda seeks to silence it.

• Protect the vote. Register, volunteer, canvass, and turn out. If a government will erase research, it will erase rights. The ballot box remains our most powerful weapon.

• Refuse silence. Share your voice, your story, and your dissent. Authoritarians thrive on fear and apathy. Every time we speak, we make the cost of censorship higher.

The Fight for Truth

The Constitution won’t defend itself. Neither will the truth. Both depend on citizens willing to notice, to care, and to act. This deletion is a test. We either pass it—by refusing to be gaslit—or we let them write over the record and call it governance.

We won’t let them.

P.S. Release the Epstein Files.