Republican members of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee used a hearing on political violence this week to advance a narrative that could justify sweeping crackdowns on progressive nonprofits, even as testimony revealed the Trump administration has dismantled evidence-based violence prevention programs and deleted government research showing right-wing extremism poses the greater threat.

The hearing, titled “Politically Violent Attacks: A Threat to Our Constitutional Order,” included testimony about proposed legislation, championed by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) that would allow the US Justice Department and law enforcement authorities to pursue RICO charges—prosecutions under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—against organizations that “support” protests and “rioting” via anything from helping to organize protests to establishing legal defense funds and bail funds to support organizations and individuals engaged in protest.

Cruz has explicitly called out progressive or left-wing protests and groups, including anti-ICE protests, the recent “No Kings” protests, and protests against Israel’s war in Gaza as the intended target of the legislation, despite the fact that such protests have been largely peaceful—and that available data show that political violence is far more likely to come from the political Right.

In fact, the Department of Justice, under the Trump administration, has removed from its website an internal study that found the greatest threats of political and ideological violence in the United States come from right-wing actors.

As Daniel Hodges, a former member of the National Guard and current Washington, DC, police officer who defended the Capitol on January 6, 2020, testified in the hearing:

The current administration is doing whatever it can to downplay the threat that right-wing violence presents to the United States, including literally erasing data. Between September 12th and the 13th of this year, the Department of Justice deleted their own study from their website, which came to the conclusion that right-wing extremism poses a much greater threat than left-wing extremism. I quote now the opening paragraph of this National Institute of Justice report published just last year: “Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violence extremism.”

Speaking on the Senate floor, Cruz ignored these findings, and instead painted a sweeping picture of the political Left, asserting, “It is many of the same networks, unfortunately, whether they are open border radicals, whether they are anticapitalist communists, whether they are jihadists,” and made an obvious reference to the Open Society Foundations, founded by billionaire George Soros, saying “At the end of the day, the thug who is engaged in violence is committing criminal acts. But the billionaire who is trying to tear down this country by writing checks to fund it, bears in many ways far greater responsibility.”

Read the full article about Senate attacks on nonprofits by Isaiah Thompson at Nonprofit Quarterly.