Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
A Developing Narrative: Far Right Extremists worse than Islamic Extremists
On last Sunday’s progressive indoctrination of “60 Minutes” and “Madam Secretary,” there was a “60 Minutes” story of an ex-White Supremacist who is attempting to get others out of this … well … cult. Scott Pelley said something that I found was a direct quote from this article: “The numbers don’t lie. Far Right Extremists are behind more plots and attacks than Islamic extremists.”
OK. To get the obvious out of the way: I thoroughly condemn the philosophy and actions of White Supremacy groups and any hurtful action towards Blacks and Jews whether physical or verbal. Same for Islamic Extremists.
Having said that, I’m trying to put together in my head why it seems so important to the Left to show that White Supremacy is a larger, more pressing, and all-around worse threat than Islamic Extremism. As opposed to claiming, say, that both are really bad.
The math side of me wants to know what is being measured and compared in this statistical claim. The cynical side of me is wondering how this issue serves as a deflection mechanism for the Left to avoid taking ownership for their contribution in pushing our nation into a greater moral abyss and division among varying social groups. And the compassionate side of me wonders if there is something I need to learn from all of this — is racism really the big issue of our day that I need to give more prayer and attention?
Published in Islamist Terrorism
Hypothesis 1: Combating Islamic Extremism is a military and border control problem, therefore the Left are against it. Combating White Supremacy is a thought-control and police state problem, therefore the Left are all for it.
Hypothesis 2: It’s perfect cultural marxism. White Supremacists pretend to represent “us”. Islamic Extremists pretend to represent “them”. For cultural marxists, “them” is always superior to “us”.
Read up on Gramsci.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci
Orthodox Marxism had predicted that socialist revolution was inevitable in capitalist societies. By the early 20th century, no such revolution had occurred in the most advanced nations. Capitalism, it seemed, was more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through ideology. The bourgeoisie developed a hegemonic culture, which propagated its own values and norms so that they became the “common sense” values of all. People in the working-class (and other classes) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.
Marxists must destroy the Bourgeois values of Society. Most were established by white European culture.
They all hate America. ‘Nuff said.
From what I’ve seen in the past, these lists of “far-right extremists” usually include a lot of people that are anything but. I suspect they’re also down-playing the danger of left-wing violence, which we see regularly. For that matter, why single out right-wing, as opposed to left-wing violence at all, if they’re critiquing the government’s response to such? Should the government treat the two sides unequally?
They are most certainly downplaying the high body-count of the Sept. 11th attacks, and how that might affect perceptions of the dangers of Islamic terror.
As for why the Left likes to hyperventilate about the coming right-wing race war on women? That’s simple. They need to keep people terrified that the Klan is everywhere, and packing suicide vests. Or genocide vests, I suppose.
Fighting Nazi’s is like a jab. It is basically a defensive maneuver to keep an opponent off of you and also distracting them while setting them up for an effective offensive attack.
Nazi’s and other white nationalist types are ineffective and highly rare. They have the same ends as leftists and most of them are actually leftists themselves. However, the energy spent fighting them is far less than the good will gained by the PR in fighting them.
The true institutional racism that is causing the downfall of minorities in the US, comes from Democrat policies. Its all a diversion designed to keep certain people groups in serfdom to their Democrat masters. Actually, it has little to do with race. It is all about power. Always has been. Even southern slavery wasn’t about race. Most whites in the south had worse living conditions than many black slaves.
I clicked on your link to the HuffPo article. The author is somewhat dismissive of the mental health aspect of some lone wolf attackers. In the cases of Jeremy Christian and Dylan Roof mental health issues did play a role in their actions. There is more than political belief playing a role in these cases. As a society it is odd that mental health must never be associated with a cause for violence, but political belief must always be a cause for violence. Don’t get me wrong, there are people across the spectrum, whether Left or Right that hold some ugly beliefs, but mental health plays a big role in lone wolf attacks.
60 minutes is full of it. It only takes one minute to figure that out. Haven’t watched them since the fake exploding car capper.
If they were really against Nazis they wouldn’t have supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. She wasn’t a Nazi, but if they were really concerned about all the bad things Nazis stood for and all the bad things they did, they wouldn’t have supported her.
These last two sentences do not compute. Southern slavery was very much about race. Worse living conditions didn’t have anything to do with that fact. There were southern slavery apologists who pointed to the worse living conditions of white workers in the north. Didn’t mean the slaves didn’t want to be free and shouldn’t have been free, and it certainly didn’t mean southern slavery wasn’t about race.
If the attacker is on the left—e.g. a #BLM-inspired murderer of police officers—then mental health is the problem, also that mentally-ill people can walk into Wal-mart and buy a gun, no questions asked. If the attacker is a Muslim—e.g. Omar Mateen—then mental health is the problem, specifically the internalization of Christian Republican homophobia (not, of course, Muslim homophobia).
But it is also crucial is not to “stigmatize” mental illness, so you don’t want to link mental illness too closely with violence even when it is clearly, obviously a factor.
It’s all so muddled that I marvel that any reasonably intelligent person doesn’t get red-pilled by the sheer incoherence of it all.
I think what he meant was that race and racism have been manipulated by people/Democrats with other agendas.
Here’s the issue: The Left is broadening the definition of “terrorism” such that the acts committed by “right wing extremist groups” are counted. For instance, if you go down the rabbit hole of links to click, you will eventually find this page:
https://apps.revealnews.org/homegrown-terror/
I looked at Oregon for instance and found three “right wing extremist” acts:
So you see, a bank robbery is terrorism, as is an act of discriminatory violence (I refuse to use the term hate crime). These are not acts of terrorism, not as defined by the U.S. national security community as it was taught to me from 2011 to 2014 during a Masters program at the Catholic University of America. So the Left is doing their usual crap of playing with the language to achieve the picture they want to paint.
I think it comes down to Muslims vote on the left, are against Israel, and have anti-western attitudes. Islam serves the left’s deconstruction of the western society.
Please forgive my confusion. Are you lampooning left-wing talking points, or are you unfamiliar with current gun laws?
But then why did he bring in the sentence about living conditions?
She’s pointing out the narratives that the Left approves.
Although, unless someone who is mentally ill has committed a crime, they will probably not be in the NCIC database, or a state criminal database that is used for firearms background checks. Regardless of what they told a therapist about fantasies of committing violent acts HIPAA laws prevent the sharing of that information with authorities.
The Texas church shooter, although convicted of domestic violence by an Air Force court martial was not reported to the FBI for inclusion in the NCIC database. A domestic violence conviction automatically disqualified him for the purchase or possession of a firearm. He assaulted his wife, and fractured his 10 year-old son’s skull.
The Santa Barbara shooter was being treated for mental health issues, that included violent fantasies but his therapist had to abide by HIPAA laws, thus he was able to purchase firearms.
Actually I’m much more worried about Progressive extremism.
During the election campaign we had Clinton & Sanders supporters violently disrupting Trump rallies, but Trump supporters did not do that to Clinton & Sanders rallies.
We’ve had Progressives attempting to murder Republican congressmen and assaulting Rand Paul. We had someone murder a FedEx deliveryman because they looked like Donald Trump.
Since the election, we’ve had an onslaught of self-inflicted hate crimes by Progressives, designed to increase racial and ethnic strife in America.
We’ve had Progressives violently shutting down speakers with whom they disagree.
We had Progressives elect as Vice-Chair of the Democratic National Committee a Congressman obsessed with Jewish slave traders.
We’ve had Progressives spew hateful rhetoric based upon race and religion.
And we’ve had a complete failure to denounce this behavior by the Progressives who dominate news, social media, politics, academia, the NGO world, entertainment, and high tech.
Roof looks to me like a schizophrenic but since the deinstitutionalization in the late 60s, here is no way to know. The shooter in the movie theater in Colorado was being treated by a psychiatrist.
Also a good dose of paranoid fear-mongering about White Supremacists infiltrating the military and police in that 60 minutes piece…
As with any moral panic, those fomenting it have a self-serving interest in grossly exaggerating the scope of real dangers. But leftists don’t merely exaggerate this threat, they actively feed it. White supremacy is a form of resentment-fueled identity politics. For Leftists, it’s just the wrong kind of resentment-fueled identity politics.
Identity politics is a reduction of groups to stereotypes. If a group is, on average, more marginalized than another group, the Left treats all individual members of the group as if they experience marginalization at the same level. The reformed white supremacist that Pelley interviewed was, in his particular circumstances, marginalized in his youth. And yet he is not afforded the same sympathy that a member of a marginalized group would be (regardless of how much he was marginalized as an individual.)
I am perfectly willing to countenance ideas like “White Privilege.” But telling underprivileged white kids that they unjustly benefit from it is such an obvious lie, that you shouldn’t be surprised if some go to the opposite extreme.
By definition, the lone mass murderers are mentally ill–they are a danger to themselves or others.
These are people who descend into obsessed madness in their isolation from others.
It is the nation’s psychiatrists who need to be front and center in this national debate.
I’ve read of too many incidents of patients going off the rails to allow the psychiatrists to disappear into the crowd of innocent bystanders.
The most egregious incident that comes to mind is the Aurora theater Colorado shooter. While he was a university student, he sent his plans to do this awful thing to his psychiatrist at his school. The shooter was so obviously schizophrenic in his behavior and demeanor that for his psychiatrist to have missed that he was living inside his own mental pressure cooker was malpractice as far as I’m concerned.
One little event that I’ve noticed that has occurred since the Las Vegas shooting is the common use and acceptance of the term “high-functioning psychotic.” Finally we have a language to attach to a phenomenon we have all observed. Adopting this language will be impetus enough to revise how we diagnose schizophrenia. It does not always manifest in the patient’s seeing a snake that isn’t actually there. Sometimes the delusions and hallucinations are quite ordinary looking. We need to look for other signs and symptoms such as lack of sleep.
I don’t recall that one. Can you tell me about it?
My mistake – he was actually a UPS deliveryman. Happened last December. Here is link to article. Only got passing mention in media. Can you imagine the coverage if, after the election, a guy in Alabama shot a woman because he thought she was Hillary Clinton?
Your cynical side should recognize such a narrative is about gaining control of the population – the Left is all about a favored few controlling everyone else. To get there, the Left defines the “extreme right” very broadly to include much that is anything but, as was pointed out in an earlier comment. To get the power to banish anything that might be considered not-far-Left, and thus control the population, the Left builds up the “menace” of the “extreme right” (now subtly expanded to include lots of normal stuff). Once the public is convinced that the “extreme right” is a gigantic menace, the public will go along with all manner of controls that oppress anything other than the far-Left. The Left builds up the menace of the “extreme right” in the public mind by comparing it to a menace people are already familiar with – Islamic terrorism. So the comparison isn’t necessarily about downplaying the menace of Islamic terrorism as much as it is to increase the relative perception of the “menace” of the “extreme right.”
I see no intention by the Left to deflect from their own culpability in the moral rot because they truly don’t see what’s around them as moral rot.
They? Multiple personality disorder?
Both of these events have kinda fallen through the cracks haven’t they? When was the last time either was mentioned by the MSM?
In Alabama? They would find the victim’s yearbook left behind, signed “DA.”
Thanks for reminding me of that story about the UPS guy. It really is amazing what they will and will not allow us to forget. The Majority Whip got just about as close to death as Gabby Giffords, and yet I find myself casting about to try to even remember his name. Steve Scalise, I believe. (I’m guessing Giffords’ shooter is among their examples of so-called right-wing violence.)
What doesn’t fit the narrative will be discarded. That’s why I recommend not getting bogged down in debates over whether right wing or Islamist extremism is worse. The real discussion is why Progressive extremism is awful because the extremists, their enablers and apologists are now the mainstream of the Democratic Party, which is not the case with right wing extremism and Republicans. Make Democrats and Progressives own this.
Developing narrative is the right title. USA Today had an insert earlier in the week with a breathless front page headline about the growing white nationalist movement. The story and the evidence was from the only incident any of us know about, the Charlottesville demonstration last Aug. I’d guess something is in the works.
The Chalottesville demonstration where white nationalist thugs were greatly outnumbered by Antifa thugs?
You awful racist, you!
Yes. And although the OP title says “developing narrative,” this is a narrative they’ve been working on for at least 25 years, i.e. almost as long as there have been social media on the internet. Back in the early days there wasn’t much about the Islamic threat, but there was plenty about the threat posed by the “extreme” right.