U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz this week accused Democrats of focusing excessively on white supremacist violence, while overlooking attacks on white people, police and Jewish and Asian Americans, in an effort to inflict political damage on Republicans.

“Unfortunately, we see over and over again efforts to politicize acts of violence,” Cruz said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on domestic terrorism, where he alleged that Democrats in Congress “try to use the charge of ‘white supremacy,’ which is undoubtedly evil, bigoted and wrong, and weaponized by their own party, they try to use that as a proxy for attacking a political party they disagree with.”....

The Texas Republican’s remarks drew a swift rebuke from U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who noted that the vast majority of “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” investigated by the FBI in 2020 were white supremacists.

Federal law enforcement data and expert studies have shown that terrorist attacks by violent extremists have risen sharply in recent years. The trend has been driven largely by white supremacists and the far right, though left-wing extremists accounted for an increasing proportion of terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. last year.