Studies that sound like an agenda which many have warned us about for decades.
Brace yourself because for the rest of this week you’ll hear about nothing but the supposed “surge in right-wing extremist violence” or the “rise of violent white supremacists.”
True, a lunatic who feared immigrants (and automation and a corporate takeover of the federal government) did shoot up a Walmart in El Paso on Saturday, killing nearly two dozen people. But that’s no more a reason to panic about a nonexistent proliferation of violent white supremacy than a single plane crash is reason to ground all commercial air travel.
Naturally, any time a white male even attempts a mass shooting, the national media will reheat the “right-wing extremism” and “white supremacist violence” myths.
The New York Times editorial board on Sunday evening declared that the United States has “a White Nationalist Terrorist Problem.” The piece linked to an ABC News story from early July on the “growing threat of violent white supremacist extremists.”
Back in June, CNN’s Jake Tapper wondered on air whether a shooting by a white guy that resulted in no deaths or injuries “represents a growing threat in the U.S. of extremist right-wing violence.”
As detailed in my forthcoming book Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People, it’s all a hoax. Every news story about right-wing violence or “white supremacy”-linked violence is based on the same set of joke studies that count each and every murder involving a supposedly racist white person, no matter how ridiculous the circumstances, as racially motivated.
One of those studies is put out by the Anti-Defamation League every year. Take this one from last year that said 2018 “was a particularly active year for right-wing extremist murders.” It further said that “extremist-related murders in 2018 were overwhelmingly linked to right-wing extremists.”
Unfortunately, the report obscures the most crucial information. It doesn’t list all of the violent incidents that it takes in to account, but even in the few concrete examples that the Anti-Defamation League does provide, you get examples like this: “Richard Starry shot and killed four relatives at a local nursing center and at his home in an apparent act of domestic violence before killing himself. According to local media, Starry had been a member of a white supremacist group while in prison.” Or like this: “James Mathis, a member of the Georgia-based white supremacist prison gang Ghostface Gangsters, and his wife, Amanda Oakes, allegedly killed their six-month-old son and put his body in a freezer in a hotel room.”
So when white people kill their own family members, even their own babies, that’s the kind of “white supremacy”-linked violence the Anti Defamation League is looking at. It’s not a rash of Ku Klux Klan members lynching blacks and Latino immigrants in the streets.
By contrast, let’s have a look at what the Anti-Defamation League has to say about Islamic extremism. The same report admits that despite a higher number of “incidents” related to “white supremacy,” the ones perpetrated by Islamic extremists have a far higher body count. “Compared to right-wing extremists,” said the report, “domestic Islamist extremists in the U.S. have been involved in far fewer lethal incidents — but a number of those attacks have been high-casualty events, including most notably the Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, which left 49 dead.”
Another one of the media’s favorite studies to cite is the Government Accountability Office’s 2017 report on “countering violent extremism.” The report lists a number of violent incidents between 2001 to 2016 that the Government Accountability Office believes were either motivated by “far-right extremists” or “radical-Islamist extremists.” The supposed “far-right” included white supremacists, “anti-government” people and “right-wing extremists,” totaling in 62 incidents and 106 victims. The radical-Islamist extremists, by contrast, was literally just Muslims and the group accounted for 23 incidents, with a total of 119 victims.
Using a very advanced form of arithmetic, that’s less than two victims per “far-right” attack versus at least five victims per Muslim attack. Put another way, Muslim extremists had a third of the “incidents” that the “far-right,” had, but they claimed more victims.
I’m not the best at math but something about those numbers leads me to believe there’s at least some difference between what constitutes a “far-right” attack and the mass terror perpetuated by Muslim extremists, a group with a much narrower definition than that applied to “the far-right.”
Included in the radical-Islamist extremist category of the Government Accountability Office study were some well-remembered episodes of mass terror, like the Orlando night club shooting in June 2016, resulting in the death of nearly 50 people; the San Bernardino shooting spree of December 2015 that claimed 14 lives; and the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, which the study says killed 3, but that doesn’t include all the limbs and muscle tissue lost by another nearly 300.
By the way, the Government Accountability Office report only looked at data after Sept. 12, 2001, thus excluding the 3,000 people who lost their lives in the 9/11 New York terror attacks. That’s convenient for anyone searching for proof that the “far-right” bears at least equal blame in turning the country into a hellhole.
The details of the “right-wing” violence are far less comprehensive or even comprehensible. One entry in the report reads that in Mesquite, Texas, in 2001, a “White Supremacist member of Aryan Brotherhood killed a man.”
Okay, but what was the man’s race? The odds are that he was white, given the extremely low number of interracial homicides. Other entries lack the same information. Another one tells of a “White supremacist [who] shot and killed 9 at his community college.” That one is a reference to 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer, who shot up Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, but he wasn’t targeting minorities. Witnesses said he was targeting a specific religion, asking his victims if they were Christians before pulling the trigger on those who said yes.
The next several days will be yet another attempt by the national media to shake the country into believing that white supremacists and the “far-right” are on a violent rampage. The purpose, naturally, is to link it all to President Trump, who as we’re reminded day in and day out, is supposedly a racist himself.
It wasn’t true before and it’s not true now, even after El Paso.
See source here for additional links and sources….