The Brief

The assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has turbocharged the conversation — and fears — around political violence in the U.S. And, more than perhaps any other recent high-profile incident, it has fed claims that far-left extremists are primarily responsible for the worsening environment.

"From the attack on my life in Butler, Pa., last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives," President Donald Trump said, just hours after Kirk was killed.

So far, no information has been disclosed that clearly links the man charged with Kirk's killing to leftist groups or movements.

Still, the Trump administration's claim that domestic terrorism largely comes from the left has flown in the face of data. Federal law enforcement authorities and non-governmental researchers have, for years, found the far right to be the most "lethal and persistent" domestic terrorist threat. Among examples they cite are racially motivated mass killings at an African American church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, and a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2022; and the 2018 massacre at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh.

But a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) posits that a reversal took place in the first half of 2025. It analyzed roughly 30 years of data and found that between Jan. 1 and July 4 of this year, the number of far-left terrorist plots and attacks outnumbered those from the far right.

"My hope was to bring some data to the discussion and to try to use the data to understand possible reasons left-wing terrorism might be increasing and right-wing terrorism might be decreasing," said Daniel Byman, director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats and Terrorism Program at CSIS. Byman co-authored the study with Riley McCabe, an associate fellow in the same program.

But the report itself has ignited a firestorm of debate within the field of counterterrorism and extremism research. For many, the conclusions are premature. And ultimately, critics say it does more to reveal the complications around collecting and analyzing data on domestic terrorism than it does to clarify the current state of the problem itself.

A claim that left-wing terrorism is rising — but with caveats

The CSIS study drew from a variety of sources that included information from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, the Anti-Defamation League and media reports. Because there is no public, official, unified and comprehensive database of domestic terrorism incidents in the U.S., researchers who wish to analyze trends are required to assemble their own data sets.

"There are a lot of ambiguities for really anyone who's trying to code terrorist attacks," said Byman. "Coding" refers to a process by which analysts apply sorting criteria to an incident to determine how it should be categorized. In the CSIS analysis, for example, there was the initial requirement to determine whether incidents even qualify as terrorism.

"If someone draws a swastika on a synagogue, do you say that's antisemitic terrorism? We tended to focus on risk of life, so that sort of violence would not count," Byman explained. "In a more political context, the arson attacks on Tesla would not count because there doesn't seem to have been any attempt or intent to kill individual people."

Additional coding happens after analysts compile their lists of domestic terrorism incidents. In this case, Byman and McCabe were interested in focusing on cases that, in their view, could be attributed to right-wing or left-wing motivations. During the first six months of 2025, they coded five instances as left-wing terrorism, and one as right-wing terrorism.

But Byman said the significance of these findings has caveats.

"Even the five [left-wing terrorist incidents] we get for the first half of 2025 — let's say that pace continues and it's 10 — that's a small number compared to right-wing terrorism when it was at its peak in recent years," Byman said. "And so the increase to me has to be taken in context."

In fact, Byman said that while several news outlets ran with headlines that highlighted a rise in left-wing plots and attacks, that was perhaps the less remarkable finding.

"The decline in right-wing attacks is actually much more striking," he said.

The single act that the CSIS study coded as right-wing terrorism during the first half of 2025 was the assassination of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the shooting of Minnesota state senator John Hoffman and his wife. Byman surmises the drop-off in frequency of right-wing incidents may be due to a feeling that the Trump administration has operationalized policy objectives, such as increased immigration enforcement, that previously animated violence on the right.

But several experts within the field of counterterrorism and extremism research have raised concerns about the methodology, conclusions and timing of the study.

'Five is a really low case number'

For Amy Cooter, deputy director at the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, the numbers found in the CSIS study are too small to support any robust conclusions.

"Five is a really low case number to try to make any kind of inference from and try to say that we're having a major increase in any kind of problem," said Cooter, who co-authored a critique of the report. "Compared to historical data, almost any increase in left-wing violence is going to look like a big jump."

By contrast, Byman and McCabe's count of right-wing terrorism tallies 144 incidents between 1994 and 2000. That suggests a rate of 12 incidents per six-month period, more than twice what they found in their analysis of left-wing terrorism during the first half of 2025.

"The primary thing that I'm worried about with that report is how some people are already interpreting that as projecting a real threat from the left, both through the rest of 2025 and through an undefined future period as well," Cooter said. "Not only are five incidents still objectively really small, we know historically we have seen a greater number of incidents that are more reasonably coded as right-oriented."

Beyond the distortions that may come from small numbers, others have raised additional red flags about the study.

"There have been methodological concerns that have been aired with that product," said Jacob Ware, research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. "I think part of the firestorm has been people pointing out individual cases that are included or are not included."

The study of domestic terrorism is highly subjective

From decisions about whether a particular incident should be coded as terrorism, to discerning a perpetrator's ideology or politics, whether those beliefs ultimately motivated the violence, and the extent to which mental health issues factored in — researchers may draw different conclusions. In many cases, those determinations simply cannot be made until court cases begin, and evidence relating to the suspect's background and planning are publicly available. As a result, there's surprising variance when it comes to analyzing domestic terrorism.

"There's a lot of subjectivity that goes into this," Cooter said. "Basically, it's up to teams of researchers deciding their own criteria for what counts or doesn't [in deciding what goes] into a particular dataset."

For those reasons, Cooter and Ware said they have different assessments about some of the incidents that the CSIS study included — and excluded — in its analysis.

"We really need to get statements or justifications, motivations from perpetrators," said Ware. "I don't think we have that in the Charlie Kirk assassination or the Minnesota assassination."

The Kirk assassination occurred after the time span that the CSIS analysis examined, but Byman said he considers that killing to be "a very obvious example" of an additional act of left-wing terrorism in 2025. Cooter, however, said she believes any coding of the killing, at this juncture, is premature.

"We're still waiting for more information on the Charlie Kirk shooting, quite frankly," she said.

Ware also noted that the CSIS study left off incidents that others might call acts of left-wing terrorism. For instance, it excluded the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., in May. Byman said the CSIS is adjusting how it codes violence committed in the name of Palestinian rights because of particular complexities around that issue.

The study also left out instances where vandals damaged Tesla vehicles and charging stations. There were several such examples of this during the early months of Trump's second term, when Tesla CEO Elon Musk was heading up the administration's efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency.

"To me, that might qualify as an act of terrorism, if somebody is using incendiary devices against civilian targets for political purposes," Ware said.

But the study does count the arson of 11 NYPD squad cars in June of 2025, a case that Ware said would not necessarily have made his list.

Other high-profile instances of violence, including the murder of the CEO of United Healthcare late last year, and two apparent attempted assassinations of Donald Trump in 2024, are further testing frameworks for analyzing domestic terrorism. In the case of the health care executive, the suspect charged with the killing has been celebrated as a kind of folk hero to some on the left. But little is still known about what might have motivated the violence. With the incidents involving Trump, the motives also remain unclear.

Byman said it is reasonable and expected that others might arrive at different conclusions about the same events.

"If you're changing your coding to try to be more inclusive or less inclusive, does it change your general trends?," he said. "And my take would be, no, we still see the relative increase in left-wing [terrorism], we still see the significant decrease in right-wing [terrorism], although the particular numbers, I would say, can vary depending on different legitimate coding systems."

'Salad Bar Extremism'

Across the field, counterterrorism and extremism researchers largely agree that in recent years, there has been an increase in violence that may be considered domestic terrorism. Many believe the increase has occurred within both the left and the right. And many agree that it is critical to achieve a firmer understanding of the source of the threat.

"If, hypothetically, we see 90% of attacks or plots coming from people of a particular political persuasion, it doesn't make sense to evenly divide our resources across the political spectrum," Cooter said, "because that's not going to pick up on the majority of those potential threats."

But some experts are questioning whether a left-right framework is sufficient to track the evolving nature of violence in the U.S. Former FBI director Christopher Wray often invoked the term "salad bar extremism" to refer to the disjointed assemblage of beliefs that violent actors increasingly seemed to hold. Earlier this year, the FBI established a new coding category called "nihilistic violent extremism" to capture a growing phenomenon of non-ideological crimes. And from a lethality perspective, the deadliest incident so far this year occurred on Jan. 1 when a self-radicalized Islamist perpetrator drove into a crowd on New Years Day in New Orleans, killing 14 people.

Ware said that for him, the shift in domestic terrorism is better defined by a change in who has been targeted.

"Terrorism is getting more personal," he said.

In the past, Ware said, domestic terrorists have tended to aim for higher body counts. He pointed to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people. But recently, Ware said that attacks have been circumscribed to far fewer victims — even when there was the opportunity to kill more.

"I think one of the really strange cases where you see this very strongly was the Washington, D.C., Capital Jewish Museum murders," he said. "[The suspect] executed two people in the street and then entered his target without launching further violence. ... It was almost like he felt he'd already achieved his goal with just those two pointblank, horrendous murders."

While the CSIS study has set off vigorous discussion and disagreement about the source of terrorism in the U.S., few believe that it will materially impact policy.

"The administration is going after anti-fascist groups or networks, movements. That's not really where the violence is coming from," Ware said. "So even if the findings are correct, that doesn't mean the administration is doing the right thing with those findings."

In fact, since Trump took office in January, some developments have elevated suspicion that this administration may go farther than simply ignoring data. In September, independent journalist Jason Paladino wrote that the Department of Justice appeared to have removed a study that found far-right extremists to be responsible for the most lethal terrorism since 1990. The study is still available through The Internet Archive. The DOJ's Office of Justice Programs did not respond to questions from NPR about this.

Additionally, in March the Department of Homeland Security discontinued funding for the Terrorism and Targeted Violence project at the University of Maryland. That project was the only publicly available centralized data project collecting information about terrorism and targeted violence in the country. Since 2020, that database has provided information used by professionals in areas of homeland security, school safety and violence prevention.

In response to an NPR query about the decision to discontinue its funding, a DHS spokesperson said the project had "biased and misleading data practices." It also said it "disproportionately focused on right-wing ideologies while downplaying left-wing extremism."

Ultimately, as the administration refocuses from terrorism to counternarcotics operations and immigration enforcement, Ware said Americans are increasingly at risk.

"We are seeing a higher drumbeat of violence across the board and now the onus shifts to the administration to be able to prevent that. And I think that is where the American people should be really concerned," he said. "Whether the violence is coming from the left or the right, the onus is on law enforcement and intelligence agencies to prevent it and to protect the American people. And they are not doing that right now."

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Political persecution, threats of violence and the seizure of sensitive documents might sound like a plot line for a heist or thriller movie.

For California election officials tasked with enabling participatory democracy, these are now everyday realities — from Riverside County, where Sheriff Chad Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots from his own county’s registrar of voters, to Shasta County, where threats of violence forced the longtime registrar to retire early.

The integrity of the state’s voting systems will be under intense scrutiny this year with control of the U.S. House on the line, as Californians could play a decisive role in which party wins the majority. Yet while timely and decisive results are more crucial than ever, California is famous for its ploddingly slow vote count.

That lengthy wait has increasingly sown distrust in the accuracy of California’s results, especially among Republicans, and particularly in races where a candidate leading on election day falls behind as more ballots are processed in subsequent days.

“Every day matters,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. “Election security is about security in reality and also security in perception, and they're both equally important.”

During a panel Thursday on election integrity, presented by CalMatters and the UC Student and Policy Center, Alexander argued that election administrators are boxing themselves into a “false choice” if they sacrifice timeliness in the name of accuracy. When winners aren’t decided for days, sometimes weeks, the ensuing uncertainty leaves room for doubt to take root, speculation to grow and misinformation to spread.

It took eight days in 2024 for The Associated Press to be able to declare Republicans had won control of the U.S. House, partly because of outstanding votes in California races, Alexander said. Two years earlier, it took nine days. In 2020, it took the AP seven days to determine that Democrats would retain the House, she said. Each time, outcomes in California swing districts played a decisive role.

“We're creating a window of opportunity for people to make these claims,” Alexander said, referring to largely unfounded claims of systemic voter fraud and election rigging. “We have to acknowledge that.”

Fellow panelists defended California’s meticulousness as crucial to its election integrity. Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, Democratic chair of the Assembly elections committee and former Santa Cruz County registrar of voters, argued that county officials need time to verify voters’ signatures on vote-by-mail envelopes “so people don't get disenfranchised for penmanship or for failure to sign.”

“There's nothing in law that says, I need to meet your deadline,” Pellerin said of media outlets and journalists who are eager to call races on election night. “What the law says is that I need to count the votes accurately, securely. I need to check them, and double-check them, and audit them, and then I certify them.”

Matt Barreto, director of the UCLA Voting Rights Center, noted that counties have 30 days post-election to certify their results and submit them to the secretary of state. That process, he said, should be completed as quickly as possible but “not at the expense of the county registrars doing their job effectively to make sure every vote is counted.”

Catharine Baker, head of the UC Center, emphasized — pointedly to Pellerin — that counties need more money to make sure they’re sufficiently staffed and have the equipment they need to count efficiently.

They all agreed that voters can do one thing to speed up the count: turn in their mail ballots early so counties can process them before election day.

Large partisan divide over election integrity

California voters are highly polarized in their views on the status of democracy in their state and country, largely along party lines.

A new survey from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found a third of Democrats said they are “extremely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the way democracy works in California, while only 4% of Republicans said they felt that way. Conversely, more than two-thirds of Republicans are not satisfied at all, compared to 10% of Democrats.

Those results are practically unchanged from voters’ responses in 2024, despite several major political events, including a presidential election that President Donald Trump won, a new presidential administration and a special election in California in which voters adopted more partisan gerrymandered congressional districts.

“It speaks to the fact that in a lot of ways our democracy is stuck,” said Eric Schickler, a UC Berkeley political science professor and co-director of the institute. “Republicans have one perspective on what's wrong — they make claims of voter fraud and slow ballot counts,” he said, “and Democrats have another, which is concerns about voter suppression.”

The poll also highlighted the partisan divide over a proposed ballot initiative from Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio of San Diego that would require Californians to show photo identification to vote. When asked whether they would support the measure, but without any context about who was for and against it, 56% of survey respondents said they strongly or moderately supported it, while 39% were strongly or moderately opposed.

But those shifted the more information voters were given. When told that DeMaio was the main proponent of preventing fraud and that Democrats argue the measure is part of Trump’s agenda to keep people of color from voting, the support flipped, with only 39% supporting the measure and 52% opposed.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmental activist and self-styled progressive candidate for governor, is on track to run the most expensive gubernatorial campaign in state history, having already spent more than $132 million.

He’s saturated the Internet and TV as special interest groups ramp up advertising of their own ahead of the June 2 primary and county officials prepare to mail out ballots.

Campaign finance disclosures filed late Thursday show that through mid-April, Steyer continued to outspend his opponents twenty- to thirty-fold, mostly to blitz the state with television ads that began airing early in the race. Nearly all of the money came from Steyer personally, $105 million of which he poured into the campaign from January through April 18.

He’s already dwarfed the $73 million Gov. Gavin Newsom’s campaign spent fighting the recall election against him in 2021 and surpassed the amount Newsom’s political committee spent last fall to pass Proposition 50, the Democratic gerrymander effort with intense national interest.

If Steyer continues at this rate, he is likely to come close to or exceed the $159 million record that former eBay executive Meg Whitman burned through — also largely of her own money — in her unsuccessful 2010 run for governor.

The campaign finance filings show that his competitor, tech-backed San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, dominated his fellow Democrats in fundraising over the past four months, bringing in $13 million. Former Rep. Katie Porter raised $2.8 million in that period, while former Attorney General Xavier Becerra brought in $1 million, former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa raised $707,000 and state schools Superintendent Tony Thurmond raised just $62,000.

Second from left, Katie Porter speaks during a gubernatorial candidate forum hosted by California Immigrant Policy Center, California Latino Legislative Caucus Foundation, and ACLU California Action at the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center in Sacramento on April 14, 2026.

(

Fred Greaves

/

CalMatters

)

On the Republican side, conservative television commentator Steve Hilton’s campaign said he raised $4.4 million while Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco raised $1.5 million. Both remain at the top of the polls.

Steyer’s outsized spending is a flashpoint in a race defined by wealth, inequality and California’s affordability crisis. Progressives are eager to tax billionaires this year; the resulting backlash to those proposals has prompted wealthy Silicon Valley executives like Google’s Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Michael Moritz to spend in earnest this election year.

Steyer is promising to rein in wealthy interests like them and corporations. He says he’ll implement publicly-funded universal health care, reduce electricity bills and raise corporate property taxes to pay for state services.

His own wealth is derived from a hedge fund where he once invested in fossil fuels and private prisons before pivoting toward liberal activism. It serves as both fodder for criticism from opponents across the political spectrum and an unlikely source of his own progressive credentials. He’s been able to convince several left-wing groups such as the California Nurses Association and the Bernie Sanders-founded political action committee Our Revolution that he “can’t be bought” by other special interests, earning him their endorsements. His ads have helped boost his standing among likely voters from relative obscurity to the top of the Democratic pack.

Democrats still tied

Yet he’s hardly broken away, continuing to be essentially tied in recent polling with other Democrats just behind the two Republican frontrunners, Bianco and Hilton.

Instead, in the wake of fellow frontrunner Rep. Eric Swalwell dropping out of the race this month over sexual assault and misconduct allegations from multiple women, it was Becerra who got a surge in support. The former Biden-era health secretary had been polling around 5% and fundraising poorly before getting a boost from small donors when Swalwell’s campaign imploded just two weeks ago.

Becerra surged enough in polls to be included in the first of a series of televised debates on Wednesday night, during which he was eager to attack his opponents but faced criticism for lacking policy specifics and for giving Newsom an ‘A’ grade “on effort” for his approach to homelessness. The number of Californians who are homeless has risen steadily during Newsom’s nearly eight years in office.

Becerra will have to keep raising money to remain competitive. His campaign spent four times what he brought in between January and April 18, and he ended the cycle with just $507,000 as the race entered its most expensive stage.

Porter, a former Orange County congressmember who has been stalling in the polls, raised less than she did in the second half of last year. But she still has $3.7 million on hand.

Aside from Steyer, Mahan raised the most over the past four months. Little-known around the state, he is running on a platform of making state government more efficient. He has promised not to raise any taxes, to suspend the state gas tax and tie state agency leaders’ pay to performance.

His campaign is funded by a who’s-who of Silicon Valley executives, billionaires and groups known to clash with Sacramento’s powerful labor unions. They’re also funding a pair of independent political spending committees supporting Mahan that raised $25 million and spent $19 million on ads through April 18.

Other special interest groups are also ramping up their spending. A group opposing Steyer, funded by the state’s realtors, construction industry, electrical workers’ union and Pacific Gas & Electric, has spent $14 million on ads attacking Steyer’s prior investments. This week, PG&E and the California Chamber of Commerce poured in another $7 million. Steyer has proposed challenging PG&E’s monopoly status to lower Californians’ utility bills.

Swalwell used campaign funds to pay attorney

The filings also revealed that Swalwell used campaign funds to pay one of the attorneys defending him against the misconduct accusations.

His campaign paid $40,000 to Sara Azari, who sent press statements denying the accusations after he had already suspended his campaign and appeared on NewsNation, where she is a legal analyst, suggesting his accusers had “shame” or “regret” but that “doesn’t make it rape.”

Swalwell had also used at least two other law firms to send cease-and-desist letters to the women and others alleging misconduct; those firms do not appear in his campaign finance statement. His gubernatorial campaign has returned at least $43,000 in donations since its implosion.

Swalwell paid campaign funds to use his own campaign finance AI startup, and to cover about $22,000 in child care expenses, which he and his wife routinely did for years from his congressional campaign account. That is allowed under federal and California campaign finance law as long as the child care needs were campaign-related; Swalwell has been one of the biggest spenders in that category.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Skunks aren’t exactly the most adored mammals in Southern California, but there's a cute reason why they should be on your radar: It’s baby season right now.

That also means some changes in skunk behavior. Here’s what you should know about skunk life and how they care for their young around L.A. County.

Quick skunk facts

The skunks most people encounter in California are the striped species, which have jet black fur and two bright white stripes that run from the back of their neck to the base of their tail. (Yes, like Pepé Le Pew if he were a little less groomed.)

Ted Stankowich, a biological sciences professor at Cal State Long Beach, is a skunk expert. He said they’re nocturnal, omnivorous creatures that primarily come out around dusk or early evening to find food.

“They eat bugs, eggs, grass, fruit and anything they can find,” he said. “A lot of scavenging for trash among humans.”

These mammals are explorers that typically don’t venture that far. Females go up to a square mile away from home while males can traverse up to four square miles.

They can have multiple dens with a particular favorite. Skunks can live in a variety of nooks and crannies, like rock piles, under homes or in bushes.

The creatures tend to have a bad rap because of the spraying, but Stankowich said a lot of that is based on misconceptions. The mammals aren’t usually aggressive.

“ I like to say that they have sort of a great attitude of the world — you leave me alone. I leave you alone,” he said. “But if you mess with me, I’m gonna come after you.”

As for lifespan, they live about two to four years in the wild. That’s shorter in cities because they’re more likely to be killed by drivers.

How baby season changes behavior

Baby skunks are called kits.

In warmer climates like ours, mating can start as early as January.  Mothers are pregnant for about two and a half months, so if they mate in February, they’ll likely give birth to a litter of four to six kits around April.

These little ones are born blind, deaf and mostly hairless. They’re mostly helpless for the first few weeks of life and rely on their mother for milk.

A kit’s little body can make a droplet of oily musk within about a week. However, Stankowich said they can’t spray it properly until week three or four.

While skunks aren’t normally aggressive, lactating mothers are the exception. They leave the den at night to forage, so they can eat and keep up with milk production. That can make them “a bit more ornery,” Stankowich said.

“ They get more nervous, they get upset if they’re harassed,” he said. “Those animals are much more feisty than your normal non-lactating or pregnant skunk.”

Kits can be a little feisty too. When they’re in the den, they’re developing defensive behaviors. Stankowich has seen kits do foot stomps and hiss to act aggressive and strong.

The offspring start leaving the den and start exploring with the family at around two months old, meaning there are likely more skunks than usual around May to June.

Kits turn into adults around late summer and early fall when they venture off on their own.

What that means for you (and your pets)

Since skunks aren’t as big as coyotes, it’s easy to miss the increased activity. But you could still spot a mother with her kits wandering around her in a big group.

If you do see skunks out and about, Stankowich said you don’t need to turn tail and run. Instead, stay still, keep any pets on a leash and don’t try to feed the skunks.

“ They’re not there to bother you. They’re not there to attack you,” he said. “If they tell you to back up, you’ll know it.”

Now if you have the unfortunate gift of getting sprayed anyway, there are steps you can take to get rid of the smell on you or your pets.

First off, tomato baths are a myth and water activates more of the smell, making it worse. Instead, use a combination of these three things:

• A quart of hydrogen peroxide
• A quarter cup of baking soda
• Teaspoon of dish soap

You’ll wash yourself or your pets with this. Depending on how long your pet’s hair is, you might need a couple of rounds. If spray gets in your household, bleach can be used to knock out the smell.

On Wednesday, shovels hit the ground in Pomona, a city in the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, where construction has begun for a 10,000-plus capacity premier cricket stadium. It will serve as the venue for men’s and women’s games, played by six teams in each competition.

The stadium is being erected in the Fairplex fairgrounds as the home of the Los Angeles Knight Riders, a professional Major League Cricket team owned by the Mumbai-based Knight Riders Sports. The company is co-led by Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan.

The groundbreaking kicked off with a “bhumi pujan,” a ritual rooted in Hindu tradition, which often marks the start of a construction project as a way of seeking divine blessings and forgiveness for disturbing the earth.

Cricket is already woven into the cultural fabric of U.S. diaspora communities from all over the world, particularly South Asia, where it is followed with religious fervor. In the U.S., cricket fans, coaches and players view a dedicated cricket stadium in a major sports market like Southern California as a huge milestone.

Investors hope momentum from local major league cricket games carries into the Olympics, taking the sport to a mainstream American sports audience. Many also believe that this newfound visibility will help carve out promising pathways for homegrown cricketing talent.

Olympics could make cricket mainstream in America

Venky Mysore, CEO of Knight Riders Sports, said establishing the Knight Riders Cricket Field is just the first step in getting the average American fan engaged. Mysore is convinced of the sport’s commercial potential.

“People who watch the Olympics are not necessarily cricket fans,” Mysore said. “When cricket becomes an Olympic sport, that takes interest and awareness to the next level.”

Knight Riders Sports operates multiple teams worldwide — in India, the Caribbean and the United Arab Emirates. But the Pomona venue is the only stadium they’ve built from scratch, Mysore said. Only three international-level cricket stadiums operate in the U.S. — in Texas, Florida and North Carolina. The sport is also played in other multi-purpose venues like the Oakland Coliseum.

L.A. is one of a handful of dedicated US cricket venues

Peter Della Penna, who has been covering cricket in the U.S. for the past two decades, says this is the first time an international cricket event in the U.S. will have a dedicated venue. In 2024, a high-capacity modular stadium was specifically built for the T20 World Cup in New York, but was dismantled after the event.

But during the L.A. Olympics, it would not be ideal to hold the cricket matches in another part of the country, he said.

“Cricket players would want to be in the Olympic Village, walk shoulder to shoulder with U.S. track and field athletes, swimmers and basketball players,” he said. “Cricketers in America have not had such prominence and U.S. cricket really needs that.”

Cricket has had a long, rich history in the U.S. The first international cricket match was played between the U.S. and Canada in 1844 at St. George’s Cricket Club in Manhattan, New York. Canada beat the U.S. by a slim margin before thousands of spectators, with large wagers placed on the event.

A high point came in 2024, when the U.S. national team achieved a stunning upset over Pakistan in a T20 World Cup match.

Debjit Lahiri, a Wisconsin-based cricket historian, said Olympic cricket was last played in 1900 in Paris where the Summer Games were a chaotic sideshow to the World’s Fair, featuring events like live pigeon shooting. Cricket never made it to the 1904 Olympic Games held in St. Louis.

Cricket in Los Angeles began around 1900 with local clubs. It gained prominence in the 1930s with the Hollywood Cricket Club formed by expat British actors, drawing big names like Errol Flynn, Laurence Olivier, Cary Grant and Boris Karloff. The club’s original home at Griffith Park was torn down to build an equestrian center for the 1984 Olympics. It moved to Woodley Park in the San Fernando Valley, where several aspiring cricketers learned to play the game, including Ayan Desai, a 22-year-old rising star who hopes to play for Team USA in 2028.

Desai, whose family owns a motel near the future Knight Riders stadium, said he was thrilled to hear about a world-class cricket venue almost in his backyard.

“To play the Olympics is special, but to do it in front of your home crowd, in your home city, that would be amazing,” he said.

Desai, a left-arm fast bowler, plays for the Seattle Orcas major league team and has competed in four international games as part of the U.S. national team.

“This is what we’ve needed to grow cricket in Los Angeles,” he said.

Questions remain about cricket’s sustainability

Antigua native Reggie Benjamin, a former U.S. cricketer and longtime coach based in Los Angeles, remains skeptical.

“I’m happy to see cricket get an opportunity to showcase itself here,” he said. “But if you can’t get average Americans to come to a game and sit in the stands for three hours, or if you can’t get American kids to play cricket, the game is not going to grow.”

Benjamin said he’s been disappointed to see homegrown talent and grassroots efforts cast aside as players from other countries are brought in to play for major league teams and the national team. He also points to poor management that has beset U.S. cricket and raised concerns about cricket’s inclusion in the 2028 Olympics.

Last year, those challenges came to a head as USA Cricket, a nonprofit tasked with developing the sport in the United States, filed for federal bankruptcy protection after ending a contract with American Cricket Enterprises, the group that created Major League Cricket. Since then, the International Cricket Council, which oversees cricket worldwide, has been temporarily running the U.S. national cricket team. ACE also filed a lawsuit alleging wrongful termination of the contract.

Yet big investors like Mysore are optimistic that a cooperative relationship is possible between USA Cricket and Major League Cricket. Both feed off each other, he said. National selectors often look to major league teams for star players.

“A strong national team is important because it keeps interest alive in the sport,” he said.

Walter Marquez, CEO of the Fairplex, says he believes in cricket’s future. A diehard baseball fan, Marquez said he’s been boning up on cricket recently. He now knows what a “yorker” means, and he sees real potential for the game to grow.

“For those who don’t know cricket, given an opportunity, they will learn what an exciting game it is, especially the T20 format,” said Marquez, referring to the truncated format the Olympics will use in 2028.

“We like home runs. We love the long ball. Cricket has a lot of those. American sports fans just don’t know they’re cricket fans yet.”

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.