The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center on Extremism Wednesday released an annual report detailing the incidents and ideologies of extremist-related murders. According to the report, “Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2022,” while the total number of people killed by extremists decreased from 33 in 2021, it is the first time since 2012 that right-wing individuals committed the totality of extremist-related murders, with 21 of the 25 killings linked to white supremacists.

ADL found that right-wing extremism was the motivation behind 75 percent of extremist-related murders over the last decade. Islamic extremism, at 20 percent, is a distant second. Left-wing extremism is even less prevalent, standing at only 4 percent.

A defining feature of violent extremism in the last decade is mass-killings, primarily perpetuated through the use of firearms. Experts attribute the rise in mass shootings as a tactic to raise accelerationism in white-supremacists. Accelerationists believe “modern society [is] irredeemable and [] it should be pushed to collapse so a fascist society built on ethnonationalism can take its place.”

Accelerationism took hold of the white-supremacist movement after the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania ended the “optics debate.” Spurred by the national reaction to the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, which culminated in the death of anti-fascist activist Heather Heyer, prominent figures in the far-right debated how their movement should continue. Some in the movement preached moderation, but a social media post by the terrorist responsible for the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue shifted the conversation towards an explicit embrace of violence. The post, written immediately before the shooting, ends with the sentence “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”