Been there, done that, fuck you.
Well, two years and a month ago there was the storming of the U.S. Capitol. That’s why I thought your “two years” time frame was rather disingenuous.
Oh, so you have heard of it.
If you want to go back to the '60s and the Weather Underground, how about we go back to the '90s and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City?
You brought up the events in Atlanta and asked for similar examples of right-wing violence. Now you’re admitting there has been a rise in right-wing violence, so why did you ask for examples?
Why not ask the people who study such violence, along with similar violence from Muslim-extremist jihadi groups?
In other words, Gyrate’s post that you attempted and failed to refute, which acknowledged that violent left-wingers do exist but that “right-wing violence is far, far more prevalent”, is entirely in line with the views of actual experts on ideological violence. Antifa may be the biggest scariest monster of them all in your right-wing media bubble, but that’s not how it looks out in the real world.
I’ve long thought that, but never said it.
< Somewhere a bartender just rang a bell and 1 free shot of bourbon is ‘on the house’. >
First of all, Lawfareblog is a left-wing group. If I tried to provide a cite on this board from an equivalent right-wing group, it wouldn’t be accepted. Hell, I jus5 got dismissed because I cited the Washington Examiner, even though the facts in it, such as the charges of domestic terrorism are all true.
Nevertheless, I looked at your cite - which didn’t list a single attack carried out by a right wing group, and didn’t address left-wing violence at all.
However, it helpfully DID provide a cite to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism to actual data:
Here’s what they said of the period from 1970 to 2015l:
So the top four groups for commercial terrorism were all left-wing, and alone made up 35% of all attacks on commercial buildings. 19% weren’t identified. Of the remaining 46%, some were right-wing, some left-wing, and some that don’t qualify as either.
How about government attacks? This is where I would expect the right to focus, and indeed we have the Oklahoma City bombing as an example. And yet…
I actually don’t know much about the JDL. Are they left wing, right wing, or neither?
In healthcare we get to the anti-abortion terrorists, and finally have more right-wing terrorists than left. 88% of these attacks were anti-abortion protesters. However, even here there were attacks from the left wing Animal Liberation Front, one by ‘revolutionary leftists’ and one by Students for a Democratic Society. But yes, abortion is still the domain of right wing types.
Butnthen we get to the financial sector, and it flips again. Groups responsibke for attacks, in order:
FALN: 32
Left-wing militants: 28
Aryan Republican Army: 16
Black Liberation Army: 12
United Freedom Front’ 11
Weather Underground 10
Machetereos: 9
May 9 Communist Order: 8
Chicano Liberation Front: 8
Independent Armed Revolutionary Commandos: 5
George Jackson Brigade: 5
Of the 144 attacks with known perpetrators, 16 came from a right-wing group, and all the rest came from the left.
Pretty mich all attacks on the military sector came from the left, mostly duringmthe Vietnam war.
The emergency services sector has also come under terrorist attack:
The energy sector:
The last two categories, transportation and food/agriculture, appear to be dominated by the Earth Liberation Fron and the Anupimal Liberation Front.
Going up to 2015, where this report ends, it’s clear that the overwhelming number of terrorist attacks were carried out by left-wing groups. Only abortion terrorism is predominantly right-wing.
We can go back and forth on sources and stats, so here is what I found - I don’t know if the Center for Strategic and International Studies is left- or right- leaning, but their data is up to 2020, so includes TFG’s presidency:
This section analyzes the data in two parts: terrorist incidents and fatalities. The data show three notable trends. First, right-wing attacks and plots accounted for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994. In particular, they made up a large percentage of incidents in the 1990s and 2010s. Second, the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown substantially during the past six years. In 2019, for example, right-wing extremists perpetrated nearly two-thirds of the terrorist attacks and plots in the United States, and they committed over 90 percent of the attacks and plots between January 1 and May 8, 2020. Third, although religious extremists were responsible for the most fatalities because of the 9/11 attacks, right-wing perpetrators were responsible for more than half of all annual fatalities in 14 of the 21 years during which fatal attacks occurred.
Right-wing identified as White supremacists, Anti-government Extremists, and Incels. Left-wing identified as Anarchists, environment and animal rights groups, and Antifa.
Our data suggest that right-wing extremists pose the most significant terrorism threat to the United States, based on annual terrorist events and fatalities. Over the next year, the threat of terrorism in the United States will likely increase based on several factors, such as the November 2020 presidential election and the response to the Covid-19 crisis. These factors are not the cause of terrorism, but they are events and developments likely to fuel anger and be co-opted by a small minority of extremists as a pretext for violence.
First, the November 2020 presidential election will likely be a significant source of anger and polarization that increases the possibility of terrorism. Some—though not all—far-right extremists associate themselves with President Trump and may resort to violence before or after the election. As U.S. Department of Justice documents have highlighted, some far-right extremists have referred to themselves as “Trumpenkriegers”—or “fighters for Trump.”50 If President Trump loses the election, some extremists may use violence because they believe—however incorrectly—that there was fraud or that the election of Democratic candidate Joe Biden will undermine their extremist objectives.
So, no one is claiming there is no left-wing violence going on, but I think it’s pretty clear that of late, the majority of violence and terror happening within the US is right-wing caused. I guess its not really “Isolated shit” any more, and is becoming more of the norm.
That’s because right wing groups, in general, are more full of egregious bull-shit than left wing groups. This should kinda go without saying.
Obviously it was dismissed because it did not clearly detail that the perps were of any leftist political persuasion. Wearing black, and being from out of state, does not, in the least, establish ‘beyond the shadow of a doubt’ that they’re “antifa”.
Clearly they are left-leaning since their stats are in opposition to what @Sam_Stone believes.
It’s really always that simple.
(my bolding to the last part of the quoted section)
Doesn’t that also make them Antifa?
Super-Antifa more likely.
Well, here’s what the left-wing Trump administration thought back in 2020:
And here’s a Congressional report from 2019:
And a more recent Senate report from last year:
Here’s the left-wing Washington Post, but they bring the actual data:
I note you didn’t bold the bit that said “all of which took place in the early 1970s”.
The 1970s and 1980s were a peak period for left-wing terrorism, absolutely. It began to dwindle and right-wing terrorism surpassed it as a threat in the 1990s during the Clinton administration. RW terrorism receded somewhat during the Bush years and then surged again through the Obama and Trump administrations. In the 20 years following 9/11, right-wing extremists killed more Americans in domestic attacks than Muslim extremists did, and committed more than twice as many attacks as left-wing extremists.
What - this one?
Admittedly that one remained largely peaceful because unlike the BLM protests the police didn’t pre-emptively violently attack the protesters and there weren’t vigilante groups from the opposing political standpoint also actively committing violence and destruction at the urging of their elected representatives.
Gyrate and others have already pointed out this absolutely pathetic resort to timeframe cherrypicking so you could include the 1970s in your data set. It’s generally accepted, and certainly nobody here was denying, that the 1970s were indeed a time of spiking ideological violence in the American left and its extremist organizations.
For you to attempt to imply that that somehow refutes Gyrate’s original claim back in post #148 that “at the moment, right-wing violence is far, far more prevalent” (emphasis added) is ridiculous.
Very convenient that you suddenly forget how to look up basic information about well-known organizations when it might undermine your carefully selected results. The very first line in the Wikipedia article on the JDL states “The Jewish Defense League (JDL ) is a Jewish far-right religious-political organization in the United States and Canada […]”.
It was YOUR cite that included those statistics. I didn’t cherry pick a thing - I used the entire dataset. I was being morevthan fair, because that dataset stopped before the rise of Antifa, the George Floyd riots, the Chaz/Chop zone in Portland, the firebombings of police stations, police cars and a courthouse by the left, leading right up to the current situation which saw five leftists charged with dimestic terrorism. I even acknowledged that right-wing violence is on the rise. What I reject is the idea that the maior risk in America today is right-wing terrorism, and that it outnumbers left-wing terrorism. You can only get there by rejecting the actions of left-wing extremists in the past three years as being violent or terroristic.
But the part that I quoted from that cite was the part about attacks in the last few years. You know, the data actually relevant to a discussion of ideology-based violence at the moment.
You, on the other hand, went trawling the same site for a carefully selected additional five decades or so, in order to be able to include the left-wing violence surge of about half a century ago. In other words, a completely irrelevant deflection away from the actual point.
Yeah, just like the climate-change deniers who claim that the present-day warming is NBD because “it’s been far warmer in the past”. With “the past” conveniently broadened to include periods tens and hundreds of millions of years ago, which are likewise fundamentally irrelevant to discussion of the particular circumstances of global warming now.
Yes, Sam, arbitrarily stretching the horizontal axis far into the past, so you can conveniently “counterbalance” the datasets currently under discussion with much earlier unrelated ones, is in fact a form of cherrypicking.
Here’s Disco Sam laying down the science:
As has been pointed out to you already, the Department of Homeland Security—and AFAICT every other organization that is actually professionally involved in understanding and combating domestic terror threats, rather than pulling half-digested right-wing media propaganda out of their asses—disagree with you.
Since you’ve either missed, or completely ignored, this information posted above, it bears repeating:
Since 2019, DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have repeatedly
identified domestic terrorism, in particular white supremacist violence, as the most persistent and
lethal terrorist threat to the homeland, including in multiple threat alerts provided to Congress and law enforcement agencies across the country.
Living in this bubble you’ve created won’t ever change the facts.
I think what friend Sam meant to say was
“What I reject is the actual factual analysis that clearly states that the maior risk in America today is right-wing terrorism, and that it outnumbers left-wing terrorism.”
Or he might have meant:
“I reject is the idea that the maior risk in America in the 1970’s was right-wing terrorism, and that it outnumbered left-wing terrorism.”
Hard to tell if it’s a brain tumour or trolling.
I mean, to be totally fair, it may be technically valid to claim that left-wing terrorism “outnumbers” right-wing terrorism even nowadays if we are counting, e.g., all instances of property destruction identified as “ecoterrorism” and so forth.
If we count as an act of terrorism every incident where, say, a radical environmentalist bashes a hole in a pipeline or an anarchist smashes a police-station window, I would consider it quite plausible (though I haven’t seen actual numbers) if it turned out that more such acts are carried out by left-wingers than by right-wingers. However, that still wouldn’t invalidate the intelligence community’s findings that right-wing terrorism is a far more major risk in America today than left-wing terrorism.
While I don’t condone left-wingers bashing holes in pipelines or smashing police-station windows, I think it would be delusional to consider them comparable, in terms of the risk they pose to society, to right-wing gunmen massacring people in synagogues or mosques or inner-city supermarkets. (Much less Proud Boys and their ilk organizing an actual insurrection attempt to overturn a Presidential election.)
And apart from your general rejecting of actual data, you can only make the argument you did if you attribute every bit of violence and destruction during the BLM protests to the left and deliberately ignore the considerable amount of violence and destruction by right-wing groups and the police themselves. As indeed the right-wing media have deliberately been doing to mislead their viewers for years.
For the datasets I’ve seen those are already counted as left-wing violence - “ecoterrorism” and the “animal liberation” types have been the main leftist terrorist fringe for decades.