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NYT: Most Extremist Violence in the US Comes from the Political Right
Just a quick note on an article I came across this morning. I know it’s The New York Times, but remember that there are many in this country who still consider it to be a source of news. The article is not specifically identified as an opinion piece, although it may be so labeled in the print edition. Or heck, it could be a straight news piece. It’s The New York Times. Hard to say. I pasted the first few paragraphs below. Anyway, please read the whole thing: The Buffalo killings are part of a pattern: Most extremist violence in the U.S. comes from the political right.
‘Numbers don’t lie’
Over the past decade, the Anti-Defamation League has counted about 450 U.S. murders committed by political extremists.
Of these 450 killings, right-wing extremists committed about 75 percent. Islamic extremists were responsible for about 20 percent, and left-wing extremists were responsible for 4 percent.
Nearly half of the murders were specifically tied to white supremacists:
Source: Anti-Defamation League
As this data shows, the American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left. And the 10 victims in Buffalo this past weekend are now part of this toll. “Right-wing extremist violence is our biggest threat,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, has written. “The numbers don’t lie.”
Whoever wrote this article apparently struggles with math, calling 55% “nearly half.” The New York Times editors also apparently struggle with math. So they should change their title from, “The Numbers Don’t Lie” to something like, “The Numbers Don’t Lie, But We Don’t Understand Them.” But hey, don’t sweat the details. Just remember that Republicans are bad. That’s all you need to know.
Whoever wrote this article is also apparently unaware of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, or other Democratic Party supporters who burned cities for a year during the Trump-Biden campaign. Or, more likely, the author doesn’t consider Antifa and BLM to be extremist organizations — to him, they’re moderates! So their violence is not ‘extremist violence.’ Or something. But hey — don’t sweat the details. Just remember that Republicans are bad. That’s all you need to know.
Now, of course, The New York Times would never make such inflammatory claims without backing up its point with data from a neutral, non-partisan source: The Anti-Defamation League (Fighting Hate for Good!). The ADL article doesn’t break down its data, either. I would love to see the details on how exactly they came up with these stats. But hey – don’t sweat the details. Just remember that Republicans are bad. That’s all you need to know.
Remember that the Democrats did not have to pay for this campaign ad, or any of the others provided by news media across America every day. It’s free.
The media is just doing its job, here. They’re trying to create a plausible background narrative in preparation for the trials of the January 6th protestors, which of course will be timed to have the maximum possible impact on the midterm elections. Making a group of goofy unarmed hooligans look like dangerous armed insurrectionists would be impossible, without the media’s help. So they do what they can.
They also keep attention off inflation, our border crisis, Ukraine, the opiate crisis, the crime wave in cities, election irregularities, baby food shortages, supply chain problems, and all the other things that have blown up under Democrat rule. Change the narrative to violent Republicans. Since Republicans are known more for their love of golf than for their love of firebombing, this is difficult. But the media does what it can to help.
The New York Times and every other old media outlet will always have more impact than a 30-second paid campaign ad during a sitcom. They work together to create the narrative they need at the time — it’s so ubiquitous, it becomes as natural as the air we breathe.
And the Democratic Party doesn’t have to pay for all this electioneering. It’s free.
Most of the Democrats’ efforts to control the outcomes of elections don’t involve stuffing ballot boxes in Philadelphia. There’s so, so much more. And the problem is, most of it, like the article above, is not illegal. And you can’t cut off its funding, because the Democrats didn’t pay for it to begin with. As Time Magazine pointed out, the Democrats “save elections” through many different techniques. And most of them are legal. Perhaps not ethical. But legal.
And it all is so ubiquitous, it becomes as natural as the air we breathe. After a while, you don’t even notice it.
Just relax. It’s easier that way. It’ll be ok — really.
It’s amazing that Republicans ever win an election anywhere…
Published in General
Did they give any information on the source of most of the centrist or moderate murders?
The New York Times seems to be suffering from dementia almost as extreme as pResident Biden.
Guess what the Buffalo murder referred to himself as . . .
And what about the human hating machines?
Leftists are always trying to say that Leftist nutjobs are of the Right. It is a lie. Identity politics, eco-fascism, communism are all Leftist thinking. The most recent nutjob is similar to the Christchurch nutjob, from what I hear of their writings, which include Azov imagery.
Lying liars lie.
You must read between the lines; murders listed as centrist or moderate are actually by leftist. But that must not be mentioned in polite society.
I don’t know the author but the article in the Times was as predictable as the sun rising this morning. When one decides what to include and not to include in a survey, one can usually get the result one wants. So Antifa or BLM are obvious must excludes.
But let’s also try these on for size. How much violence has been perpetrated either by those who have not been properly incarcerated because of criminal justice “reform?” And how much violence has been perpetrated by those here illegally because of open border policies? There is as much reason if not more to call those examples “left wing violence” as there is to classify the Buffalo nut job as “right wing.”
“Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure,” as the old saw goes.
As with pretty much everything in the social so-called sciences, I’d need to see it presented in a spreadsheet so I can evaluate its veracity and completeness myself. A New York Times story purporting to be about statistics that omits the raw data and methodology is about as trustworthy as a YouTube video claiming to reveal shocking facts you won’t believe! about name-your-topic.
It’s worse, Doc. You can get to their “data” through a link, the categorizations of what they call “white supremacy” is hilarious. These are nutjobs, not white supremacists. Some of the murders have literally nothing to do with racism, but they are murders perpetrated by an idiot. Or the motive isn’t determined, so they’ll just call it white supremacy, and mission accomplished.
Garbage. It’s the summarizations of the garbage that will get published, and not the questions on the underlying data or assumptions.
https://www.adl.org/media/17498/download
A big problem is that the people working the numbers are likely the type who see “conservative” and “white supremacy” as synonyms. When Larry Elder is accused of white supremacy, then what exactly are they talking about?
The ADL is a political organization with all the political biases and blind spots that go with being a political organization. Just reading the “key findings” section of its report reveals that the report excluded from consideration many killings that many people would consider motivated by left-wing ideology. If you exclude from consideration most leftist extremist violence, then of course extremist violence is going to look lopsidedly right-wing.
The importance of “what gets included” reminds me of how over the years reports trying to show “school shootings” as an epidemic included as “school shootings” incidents that happened on or near school grounds that had nothing to do with the fact that it was a school. Reports trying to show lots of “mass shootings” included incidents in which criminal gangs shot each other.
What gets included and excluded from the statistics is critically important. If the ADL “report” is the basis of the NYT opinion piece, the NYT is using a report that is highly flawed by excluding a lot of what the “report” purports to be reporting on.
I can’t tell immediately if this is an issue here, but we have seen over the years several incidents classified as “white supremacist violence” merely because the perpetrator is white, and sometimes the “white supremacist” label is applied just because the perpetrator is a race other than black.
First off, notice the choice of time-frame. It eliminates 9/11. Because if they include 9/11 then their entire argument goes out the window.
“Murders committed by political extremists”.
That’s an interesting category. Note they did not call it “hate crimes” or “politically-motivated murders”.
How many of the white supremacists were also involved in organized crime, and the murders were just regular ordinary drug murders?
How many other organized crime organizations could just as easily be labeled “political extremists” if it suited the NYT’s purposes?
The Italian Mafia, for example. Their whole modus operandi is to assert that an area is their exclusive “territory” and that they have the exclusive authority to collect taxes from the inhabitants. That is an extreme political position, enforced through violence. They are claiming a monopoly on the use of violence within their territory, which is of course the classical definition of a government.
If we were to include every organized crime organization that asserts exclusive authority over a territory as “political extremists”, how would the ethnic breakdown change from the NYT’s numbers?
…
Also, were these people members of white supremacist organizations, or are they simply labeled white supremacists because they posted racist stuff online? If it’s the latter, was the same standard applied to all the other murderers?
Really good point.
Leftists often choose their words carefully.
It’s “A woman’s right to choose” – NOT “A mother’s right to choose”. After all, if you call the pregnant mother a mother, people might get the wrong idea, like abortion is a mother killing her child. Not a woman choosing, um, something. So she’s a woman, not a mother. Which is misleading, but not overtly false. After all, the mother is a woman, right? But in this case, mother sounds bad.
When you’re wrong and you know it, you choose your words very, very carefully.
The data comes from here. I looked at a few of the “extremist murder” cases. It appears that if you are or were part of a group that the ADL defines as “right wing extremist” and kill someone for any reason, that murder is counted as a murder associated with a right wing extremist group. Example… suppose a guy was in the Aryan Brotherhood while in prison for drug dealing. Upon his release he goes back to dealing and kills someone’s in a drug deal gone bad. Murder? Check. Aryan Brotherhood? Extremist? Check. That case is in. But the Times makes it sound as if extremist politics are the motives for thes murder and that’s not the case at all.
They want to hate us and they want to disarm us. Such an argument excuses their hated and justifies their unconstitutional actions.
That sort of thing could really skew your stats. In prisons, gang membership is a safety feature, and a lot of the gangs are race-based. So if any non-black gangs are considered white supremacist groups, then if any of those criminals commits a crime for any reason, it’s a murder committed by a political extremist on the right.
But this type of data makes it into The New York Times. After all, “The Numbers Don’t Lie”.
Golly…
“Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”
One of my first white collar jobs entailed (in part) producing “gee whiz” statistics and graphs to accompany research reports put out by a public-policy consulting firm.
After a while you can spot ‘em a mile away.
Kind of like died with COVID or died from COVID. And of course, racist means “right” because . . .
On the other side…the non-white race-based gangs like the Crips and the Bloods and MS13 and the Mongols don’t get classified as “political extremist” so murders committed by their members do not appear in this dataset.
On the contrary, these groups can be celebrated. Consider this year’s SuperBowl halftime show. It featured Snoop Dogg – who runs a segment of the Long Beach CA Crips – sporting an outfit that’s just a giant blue bandana – signature Crip colors:
Basically a nationally televised Crip commercial. But hey. Whatev.
Yeah, for the last couple of years (especially in New York) there were lurid stories about “anti-Asian violence”. Then, publications such as the New York Post began running videos of attacks. In almost all cases, the attackers were not white. Of course, those attacks were probably anomalies…probably…
It sounds simple enough: for their purposes, gang members killing each other, etc, is not “extremist.”
FBI. You HAVE to read the definition of Right and Left wing violence.
Racism, anti-government, and religious are considered right-wing.
The only thing considered left-wing is explicitly communism.
antifa was likely labeled anti-government.
They likely took “racism” and called it white supremacy, even though black racism against whites would be classified as “racism”, therefore right-wing.
This is how the FBI defines it.
The FBI is too busy for this. They are checking those who attend school board meetings to weed out the terrorists.
Well, if all whites are supremacists by definition according to the left, I’m not surprised over half of all murders connected to political extremism are committed by “whitey” . . .
May I presume that Crips, Bloods, Banditos, La eMe, MS-13, Sinaloa Cartel, Hells Angels, Los Zetas, Black Guerrila Family, the Gambino crime family, and other criminal organizations, etc, etc, are not labeled “political extremists”?
I’m not even saying such organizations are racist, but rather that every organized crime organization is by definition politically extreme, because they assert a monopoly on violence within their claimed territory.
It’s probably worth pointing out that “political violence” is a miniscule slice of all violence committed in the United States. The New York Times piece is reporting on an analysis of 45 murders per year.
That’s 45 murders. Per year. Nationally.
Just for perspective, we consider that to be a bad month in Chicago, where 51 individuals were shot to death in April of this year.
That’s 51 murders. Last month. In Chicago.
Of course, that could be a wild outlier. Maybe it isn’t usually that bad?
There were 800 homicides in Chicago last year. That’s 66 murders a month: the very bad month of April 2022 was actually an improvement over last year.
One is going not very far out on a limb — and it’s a pretty stout limb — to suggest that well over half of those homicides were likely committed by black men. (The victims were also disproportionately black men.)
So one identifiable group in one U.S. city is killing people at a rate 50 to 100 times greater than the rate of “political violence” nationwide as identified by the New York Times.
Now I’m going to hold my breath until the diligent reporters of the Times write a piece decrying rates of violence committed by black Americans. If you don’t hear back from me, you’ll know why.