Yeah, it takes such great aim to blow up a Ryder truck.
What’s with the roll eyes, Ditka?
It seems pretty evident to me that right wing violence is both more common and more lethal. On almost any major political question in the US, whose more likely to cause violence? Is someone more likely to be beaten up for being gay, or for opposing gay rights? Is someone more likely to be targeted by threats and violence for belonging to a pro life protest group, or working at an abortion clinic? Are there more white supremacist groups out there, or black supremacist groups? Right down the line, the violence is overwhelmingly more common and more deadly on the right than on the left.
Othering seems to be a dominant feature of RW principles, in pretty stark contrast to the Left, which mostly preaches inclusiveness. But it is kind of ironic that the Left ends up othering swaths of the Right, because they have not figured out how to crack that nut.
I hope you’re being sarcastic there: othering is a dominant feature of the left too, what with no-platforming, accusations of sexism, racism, and so on.
Unless you’re looking at just the past few years, in which case it’s the opposite.
Either way , both are exceedingly rare, which is why they make the news.
So hooray for the US in making politically motivated violence exceedingly rare.
After thinking about this, I’d just guess that left wing extremists conduct far more attacks on property (e.g., black bloc smashing windows to take down corporate Amerikka) and right wing extremists conduct far more attacks on people (e.g., beating up people as hate crimes).
Because lumping violence from radical Islam with “right-wing” is an arbitrary attempt to shift the blame. They are no more right-wing than left-wing.
No true [del]left-winger[/del] Scotsman commits violence.
My WAG is that they are roughly equal, but right-wing violence gets more attention.
Regards,
Shodan
If we go back up to 25 years then right wing creates far more victims, largely though because the sample size is so small, there just isn’t a lot if it, so when you have a bombing that creates hundreds of victims it can swamp the numbers for the next 20 years. Which garnishes a lot of attention .
Because religious fundamentalism is obviously an overwhelmingly left-wing trait.
Religious extremists, whatever faith motivates them, have in common the desire to combat social advancement and take folks back to an earlier (and to them preferable) time. Accordingly, lumping them with righties seems pretty apropos.
Sexism and racism are types of othering. You think that people who find othering unpalatable should just say nothing?
Breitbart compiled a list of left-wing “violence” that includes everything from national stories to local news to YouTube clips. They asserted there were “639 Acts of Media-Approved Violence and Harassment Against Trump Supporters.”
I didn’t go through the whole list, but they provided 238 incidents from January 21, 2018, to Election Day 2018. So I looked for those that I would generally say, “Oh yeah, there’s violence against a person, or a serious threat that police should get involved in.” I ignored property crimes since the discussion seemed to be focused on person-on-person violence. (I’m not dismissing things like breaking windows, but you can count those if you wish.)
So out of the 238 incidents, I counted roughly 25 that I would say are actual violent incidents, or substantial threats that I would say police should investigate. For a news organization soliciting stories of left-wing attacks from its readership, ~25 actual examples over 10 months is hardly indicative of a problem.
Among that roughly two dozen I included some edge cases, like one in which a Trump supporter appeared to be harassing people until they just snapped - yelling in their faces and whatnot. I didn’t include incidents that seemed to be merely unpleasant, like someone spit on another person.
And among the 238 incidents reported by Breitbart, a lot of them were just total bullshit, like “November 5, 2018: Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) tells cheering supporters he “wanted to ‘Beat the Living Crap out of’ his GOP Opponent.”
So Shodan, would you hazard a guess that during the same timeframe, there were also about two dozen-ish examples of politically motivated violence from neo-Nazis and sovereign citizen types? I’ll even give you a credit for your assertion of under-reporting and the inevitable accusation that I’m biased in my count. Let’s double that number Breitbart gave, so we say there were 50 acts of left-wing violence over 11 months.
You would take a bet that there were roughly that number of violent acts by right-wing extremists during the same time period?
Rember, if you accuse someone of anything, that means you are guilty of worse.