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This might be a weird post. I have an idea for what direction I want to go in, but it’s also something of an exercise in thinking out loud as well. This whole exercise got started during a conversation with a friend of mine. I forget how we got on the topic, but he mentioned that from a domestic standpoint right wing extremism was a far worse danger than left wing extremism. In support of this statement he offered up the figure that 90 police officers had been killed by right wing domestic terrorists. My immediate reaction was to call “BS” on that figure, mostly because I could hardly imagine that the deaths of 90 police officers would have “flown under my radar” when the best known instance of right-wing violence, the murder of Heather Heyes by James Alex Fields Jr. when he drove his car into a crowd after the Unite the Right rally in August of 2017, had gotten so much attention. So I challenged him to produce his source.
Eventually he pointed me at a report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) titled Murder and Extremism 2019 which includes a chart (page 21) showing that 59 police officers had been killed by right wing domestic extremists between 1965 and 2019, as compared to 44 who were killed by left wing extremists. (Fun exercise: See if you can spot the math errors on the chart…) As you might imagine 90 is more than 59, still as these things go it’s close. Actually the biggest discrepancy between the impression I received when having the conversation and the actual numbers was the time scale. At no point in our conversation did my friend mention that to arrive at the figure one had to go all the way back to 1965. I assumed he was talking about in the last few years, or the last decade or at a stretch maybe since 2000. And to be fair to him it’s difficult to be completely precise in off-the-cuff conversations like that, so I don’t blame him for misremembering the number or not ever mentioning the time frame. Also if we were to restrict ourselves to the period since 2000 things actually look worse for the right. With 36 deaths on that side vs. 10 on the left. In any event I’m going to admit that I was partially wrong, the claim wasn’t complete BS, but it was substantially different than what I understood his claim to be.
Of course the accuracy of that number is not what anyone is really interested in, it’s just a way of trying to get at the answer for our true question, which is: should we worry more about right wing extremism or left wing extremism? Knowing that 59 police officers were killed by right wing extremists over the last 55 years, as opposed to 90 over a shorter period of time has some utility in arriving at that answer, but that utility is surprisingly small. Primarily because the information we lack is still vastly greater than the information we have. To have any kind of confidence in an answer to our primary question of which side should worry us more, we would ideally have answers for all of these secondary questions:
- How does violence against police compare to violence against everyone else?
- If those are the numbers since 1965 what do the numbers look like more recently? Which way is the trend headed?
- When the numbers are tallied how are people and incidents bucketed into left and right?
- Out of all the harm caused by ideological extremism, what percentage of it is due to violence by extremists of that ideology, and what percentage of it is due to other factors?
- Let’s take these questions in turn and see what we can glean from that initial paper, and maybe a few other sources besides.
How does violence against police compare to violence against everyone else?
From our initial paper we read that in 2019 there were 42 deaths from extremist violence (of which 22 came from the El Paso Walmart shooting). And that out of those 42 deaths 81% could be attributed to white supremacy. And, finally that only one death was a police officer (not part of the 81% by the way, for the first time the ADL put a police killing in the category of “other extremists”.)
Expanding the time horizon, for the period 2010-2019, the ADL counts 330 deaths due to extremism of which they say that 78% were attributable to white supremacy. Out of that 330 deaths 21 police officers were killed (or close to that, the police numbers start in 2011 not 2010) and 11 were attributed to right-wing extremists, or 52%. So the answer, according to the paper, is that as a percentage, right wing violence against everyone else is worse than their violence against police. Though a lot then depends on how the ADL decides to classify something as right wing or left, a point we’ll get to.
If those are the numbers since 1965 what do the numbers look like more recently?
Whenever you’re talking about numbers in this fashion, there is the temptation to shift them in your favor by choosing an advantageous starting (or ending) point for your count. As far as the police shootings, they probably start things in 1965 because the numbers aren’t available any earlier than that, but given that the left wing numbers are much higher in those earlier years it’s worth asking if the percentages would tilt even more towards the left if we went back to 1955 and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, or to 1920 for a full century of data, or to the turn of the century when the Propaganda of the Deed was at its height and numerous governmental officials were being killed by anarchists, including a President. And note that I’m still talking about killings of police, nor am I attempting to pass any kind of judgement on what oppression may or may not have been happening, it would just be interesting to see the ADL apply the same methodology to a much bigger data set.
That speculation aside, let’s look at some things we can do with the numbers we do have by declaring different start points. Fortunately for this endeavor I was able to find some other ADL reports on extremist violence, some from previous years, and one that was sort of summation, as you’ll see these additional reports ended up being both illuminating and confusing. I’m still going to stick with police killings just because it’s more manageable, and I’m guessing the data is cleaner as well. I’ve already talked about pushing the start date back, but what if we bring it really close? What if we look at the number of police killed in the period 2016-2019?
Fortunately the 2016 ADL report on extremism has the same chart of police killings (it was missing from the 2015 version.) So how did things stand in 2016 as compared to 2019? As I mentioned 11 cops had been killed by right wing extremists over the last decade, as it turns out 10 of the 11 were killed before 2016. The left’s number for the decade was 8, and as it turns out, all of those deaths happened in 2016. What this means is that if we decide to just look at the most recent three years, eight times as many police officers have been killed by left wing extremists.
To be clear, I’m not saying that this is the right way to look at things, but it is what happened during the “Trump Era”. And of course we could reverse things, if we wanted to do the same thing for the “Obama Era” and look at the period from 2011-2015 when right wing extremists had killed 10 cops and left wing extremists had killed zero. You can certainly imagine the ADL screaming about the dangers of the right wing in 2015, not knowing that in 2016 things would almost equalize. Picking start and end points matters a lot.
Moving back a little bit farther, as I’ve pointed out things are pretty close to equal for the most recent decade at 11 to 8, it’s the two decades before that where right wing extremism really looks scary. If we go all the way back to 1991 the ADL numbers climb to 52 deaths from extremists on the right vs. only 11 for those on the left. But here’s also where things get confusing. When you’re engaged in any project like this, you really want to see the underlying data, so you can independently check the numbers. I was particularly interested in the 2001-2010 period where the ADL is saying that 25 police officers were killed by right wing extremists. Especially since the ADL was only showing 16 police officer killings in the 90s which contained the most dramatic example of right wing terrorism, the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. What had happened in the 2000s that was even harder on law enforcement than the bombing of a federal building?
Fortunately I found another report on their website A Dark and Constant Rage: 25 years of Right-Wing Terrorism in the United States. This report covered the period 1993 to 2017 and included a section called: Right-Wing Terrorism Inventory, 1993-2017. This section detailed the separate incidents which went into their numbers. As you go through them you see a lot of cases where people were arrested based on their intent to commit some act of terrorism, but it never actually came to pass. A few quick examples:
- a plot to murder Muslims in upstate New York using a “death ray” device that would emit lethal radiation.
- Schmidt possessed a large cache of weapons and a notebook with evidence that Schmidt was targeting Detroit-area Jewish and African American leaders.
- on federal firearm charges after receiving information that he was plotting to kill Governor Gary Locke.
Given the inclusion of these numerous unsuccessful plots I assumed that if someone actually killed a police officer it would definitely make the inventory, and yet after combing through the 2001-2010 list, I could only come up with eight incidents where police officers had been killed:
- Richard Andrew Poplawski in 2009: three police officers
- Bruce and Joshua Turnidge in 2008, two police officers
- Jacob D. Robida in 2006, one police officer
- Arthur and Steven Bixby in 2003, two police officers
For obvious reasons I would really like to know where they’re getting the other 17 killings from. I have no doubt that 17 police officers were killed between 2001 and 2010, and ended up being counted by the ADL, but why were their deaths not considered noteworthy enough to be included in the inventory? Is their right-wing connection more tenuous? To be honest I’m not entirely convinced that all of the incidents which did make the list should be considered examples of right-wing terrorism Poplawski was a domestic dispute that went horribly wrong, and the Turnidges were trying to rob a bank to pay off their debts. Regardless of whether you agree with me, I think you’d concede that it’d be easier to decide if those other 17 deaths also belonged on the list if you knew the details behind them.
Turning to the other side, the big decade for the left was 1971-1980, when 25 police officers were killed by left wing extremists. How does the ADL do in accounting for those deaths? Well, I already mentioned the eight police officers that were killed in 2016 by left-wing extremists, in the report covering that year, here’s what the ADL had to say:
None of the police officers shot by Long or Johnson [the two 2016 perpetrators] were themselves involved in any controversial shootings; they were blameless. The killings were acts of indirect retaliation aimed at local law enforcement officers because of earlier officer-involved shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge. These killings represent the worst spate of black nationalist-related murders of police officers since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when more than two dozen police officers, and several more corrections officers, were killed by black nationalists, particularly from the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panther Party (no relation to the New Black Panther Party).
This is immediately followed by the same chart of police officer killings we keep referencing, and as I mentioned it shows 25 killed by left-wing violence in the 70s, and 3 who were killed in the late 60s, so 28. The “more than two dozen police officers and several more corrections officers” would seem to get us to that figure. Meaning that while 17 right-wing murders were left unspecified by the ADL in the 2000’s, when supposedly things were at its peak, we have a basic description for all of the left-wing murders when they had their peak. Now I admit that this description still lacks specifics, but at least we have some idea of where to look, I have no idea where to go to find the missing 17 on the other side of things.
This section went longer than I expected, and illustrates what I mean by thinking out loud, so to sum things up: Deciding where to draw your line can make a big difference. There are points at which right-wing extremists are way ahead and points at which the left-wing extremists are. Again this is just if we look at killings of police officers, but one assumes that you’d find much the same thing with other measurements of extremist violence. A picture that looked very different depending on where you drew the line and what you expanded your search to encompass. And that the numbers and circumstances surrounding any additional incidents you decided to bring in would be even more ambiguous than the police killings we’ve been talking about. Which takes us to:
When the numbers are tallied how are people and incidents bucketed into left and right?
It’s interesting that not just the ADL, but everyone wants to classify violence as being either the fault of one side or the other. That the ADL spends so much effort talking about the evils of right wing extremism and not the evils of violent political extremism in general.
Alternatively, if you’re really trying to target ideologies that lead to violence, I think you’d want to get as specific as possible. As I mentioned, if you just look at the last three years not only are left-wing extremists responsible for more police officer killings, but all of those killings were carried out by black nationalists, furthermore, and as we saw from the quote, according to the ADL, the last big spike in police killings by the left, in the late 60s early 70s, were also carried out by black nationalists. Meaning that one fairly compelling interpretation of the numbers would be that the left in general is very good at eschewing violence, but we should spend a lot of resources specifically to prevent violence from black nationalists. Once again, to be clear, none of this is to deny the many grievances blacks currently have, or to say that oppression doesn’t exist, but if we’re looking for patterns in the numbers, which seems to be the whole point of these reports I’ve been referencing, this pattern of violence from black nationalists does seem like one we should be paying attention to, and in fact it’s the dominant pattern if we just look at the last few years and also a very significant one if we go back as far as we have numbers.
As long as we’re on the subject of black nationalists, the character of those incidents is different as well. The two incidents from 2016 (and many of the incidents from the 70s) were ambushes that were specifically designed to target and kill police officers. From that years ADL report:
Eight police officers were killed in two incidents this past year in which extremists deliberately targeted police officers for murder. In July 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson, who had ties to black nationalist groups such as the New Black Panther Party, killed five police officers (and injured nine others) in Dallas, Texas, in an ambush attack aimed at police maintaining public order at a Black Lives Matter protest. That same month, Gavin Eugene Long ambushed and shot six police officers, three of them fatally, in Baton Rouge. Long was an adherent of black nationalism as well as the anti-government sovereign citizen movement.
Contrast this with Richard Andrew Poplawski who I mentioned above. He also killed three police officers, but under very different circumstances, Wikipedia says that the shooting:
…stemm[ed] from a mother and her 22-year-old son’s argument over a dog urinating in the house. At approximately 7:11 a.m. EDT, 22-year-old Richard Poplawski opened fire on two Pittsburgh Police officers responding to a 9-1-1 call from Poplawski’s mother, who was attempting to get the police officers to remove her son from the home. Despite Poplawski’s mother telling the 9-1-1 operator that Poplawski had guns, the police officers were not told. Three police officers were ultimately confirmed dead, and another two were seriously injured.
It later came out that Poplawski frequented right-wing web-sites and voiced racist views online but nothing about the actual killings was ideological in nature, and yet these three killings get counted and reported as being fundamentally identical in the chart we keep going back to, despite being very different. Long and Johnson ambushed the police officers they killed, Poplawski only killed them after they showed up at his house. Additionally it sounds like if the dispatcher had not neglected to tell the police that Poplawski had guns perhaps the killings wouldn’t have happened at all. This suggests that there might be a continuum when it comes to the circumstances of the killings as well, and more importantly another place where a line is being drawn. What characteristics does an incident have to possess in order to classify it as right-wing or left wing extremism?
I’ve provided a comparison related to our primary focus, police killings, what about if we widen it to other killings? Turning back to the 2019 ADL report, we see that it also has a section for incidents. These include people targeting synagogues or, the most horrible one from last year, when Patrick Crusius went into a Walmart intending to kill Hispanics and ended up murdering 23 people. These unquestionably are acts of violence in the service of extremist right wing ideology. But many of the incidents on the list seem less clear cut. This despite being listed under the heading, “The 2018 extremist-related murders preliminarily documented by ADL include:” (side note: 2018 is obviously a copy and paste error, all the incidents are from 2019)
For example some incidents which also appear under that heading:
Anthony Voight, a member of the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, was arrested for the shooting murder of a man who accompanied Voight’s ex-girlfriend to retrieve her belongings from Voight’s home.
White supremacist Travers Proulx was arrested on first-degree murder charges after he allegedly stabbed his mother to death following an argument.
Keeton Waring, a reported member of the Southwest Honkeys, one of several Missouri-based white supremacist prison gangs, allegedly shot and killed another man during an argument over a missing cellphone. He has been charged with second-degree murder.
These three sound far more similar to the Poplawski murders than the Johnson and Long murders.
Is it possible that the ADL has a bias? For many people the fact of their left-wing bias is so obvious that they wonder why I’ve wasted so much time quoting from them. For myself, I would expect that, if they were unbiased, that somewhere in that accounting of the incidents which occurred in 2019 that I would find reference to a marxist, or an anarchist or a black nationalist who stabbed their mother, or got into a violent argument over a cellphone. In the absence of that I’m inclined to believe that their statistics probably do have a left-wing bias, if that’s the case then using their biased numbers to answer our original question, “should we worry more about right wing extremism or left wing extremism?” leads to a biased answer.
Of course the idea that the ADL is biased shouldn’t be surprising. Everyone has biases. I’m sure you’d be quick to point out mine. But as a result of these biases any categorization of one murder as being a right-wing murder, while another is left wing murder (or bereft of ideology entirely) is bound to depend on where the person making that categorization drew a subjective line. But as I reflect on it, I think drawing the initial line separating the world into just two teams: right and left, may be the most damaging line of all. Rather than having everyone on the same team against all extremist violence, or indeed against all violence period, or, on the other hand, attempting to narrowly define the source of the problem so that our accusations against the innocent are minimized, we’ve got the worst of both worlds. We bind up half of everyone in our accusations, which must surely include some innocent people, while also just as surely overlooking some violence in the half we’ve declared to be “our team”.
To return to the question that started this section, “When the numbers are tallied how are people and incidents bucketed into left and right?” The answer is: subjectively.
Out of all the harm caused by ideological extremism, what percentage of it is due to violence by extremists of that ideology, and what percentage of it is due to other factors?
I’m already running long on this post, so I’ll try and keep this section much shorter than the previous two. I think the obvious answer to this question is that only a tiny fraction is due to violence by ideological extremists. Allow me to explain what I mean.
In our modern world the only people who identify as Nazis, or indeed as Communists, tend to be pretty radical (though more so in the former case than the latter), but there were times and places when such identification was not only mainstream but expected, e.g. the Third Reich and Soviet Russia respectively, and it was when these ideologies had triumphed, when they had gone from extreme to expected that the really horrific violence occurred. My takeaway from this is that what we’re really engaged in when we ask the question, “should we worry more about right wing extremism or left wing extremism?” Is a discussion on what the behavior of the extremists tells us about the direction we’re headed and the potential harm that could be inflicted once an ideology becomes more widespread.
It’s clear that people want to use evidence of extremist violence to act as a guide for where an ideology and society as a whole is headed. And more commonly, but less acknowledged as evidence to back up their impression of where they think it’s going. But the connection between ideological extremism (even if properly attributed) and the ideology itself and society more broadly is more tenuous than people think. Compare the heights of ideological violence from the reports, with the high points of those actual ideologies. The high point of leftist violence preceded a run of right-wing presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagen, with only Carter thrown into the mix to be really confusing. On the other side the peak of right-wing police shootings happened in the 2000s, and was followed by the election of Obama. The most extreme example of right wing violence, the Oklahoma City Bombing immediately preceded the re-election of Clinton. But people think there’s a connection between that and Trump being elected 20 years later?
Obviously I was being facetious just then. My claim is not that right-wing violence isn’t increasing, it might be, and also people might be drawing the line more expansively when it comes to classifying an incident as right wing vs. left wing, as I pointed out in the examples I quoted of cellphone fights and domestic disturbances. No, my claim is that the waters are very muddy, and I don’t think some of the connections being made by organizations like the ADL are as clear as they would lead you to believe, while on the other hand I think some very clear connections are being ignored entirely, for example the Ferguson Effect. Given that I’ve already talked about it at some length, I’m not going to rehash it, but it is worth looking at what happened in St. Louis last month.
Before the Michael Brown shooting, monthly homicides in St. Louis averaged around 13. Afterwards that average went up to around 18. In July they spiked to 54. That’s a marginal increase of 36 deaths, over something that was already elevated, or in other words more deaths in one month, in one city, than the worst decade of police shootings from the right and left combined. If we assume that these deaths are due to left-wing ideology, which is at least a hypothesis that can’t be rejected out of hand, then, to refer back to the question that began the section, this would be an example of where the harm caused by violent extremists is a tiny, essentially negligible fraction of the violence caused by the ideology as a whole. And of course, as I see it, the whole point of this blog has been to map out the wider and less visible harms caused by technology, progress and yes, ideology.
Conclusion
I hope this post has been interesting for you, it was very interesting for me to deeply comb through a very small set of statistics, and it led to a major epiphany, though you’ll have to wait for my next post to discover what the epiphany was. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that this post was just a vast exercise of my own biases, which is okay, that’s part of my epiphany. But to the extent we can look past my biases I think there are still a few objective principles we can take away:
- Even with a very narrow focus (i.e. just police shootings) you can still pull out numerous different interpretations of what we should “really be worried about”.
- One way to change the interpretation is to change the start or end date you’re using for the statistics on which that interpretation relies.
- Interpretation and subjectivity operate at all levels of the discourse, from the classification of individual incidents all the way up into deciding that there’s really only two kinds of extremists.
- This bilateral division might be the worst possible way to divide things, maximizing both the innocent people who are declared guilty and the guilty people who are declared innocent.
- A point I ran out of space for, but can be seen both from the Oklahoma City bombing and from the ambushing and assassination of police officers in 2016, violence is very much subject to tail events, or black swans as they are sometimes known. Where a large part of the harm comes from only one or two incidents.
Pulling all of this together and returning to that original question, “should we worry more about right wing extremism or left wing extremism?” I think there’s plenty of reason to worry about both, that in the process of declaring something as part of one side or the other lots of bias is brought to bear, and that all of our worries or alternatively all of our assurances could look silly in the face of some future extreme event. This is one of the points I’ve made again and again. That the future will be shaped by unforeseen, extreme events, that someday, probably sooner than we expect, some ideology will be responsible for the deaths of thousands if not millions and it will make our comparison of 59 right wing police killings to only 44 left wing police killings look both quaint and naive. But this is not all, running underneath these extreme events, are broad, implacable currents, which are ultimately just as impactful, but largely dismissed or ignored by people who want to talk about whether extremism was up or down in 2019. Together these two factors combine to determine the shape of the future, and we’re not paying enough attention to either of them.
Where you draw the line makes a big difference. I have decided to draw the line at never charging for my blog, but really hoping that other people will decide to draw the line at: worth supporting anyway!
In context of a population of hundreds of millions of people over multiple decades, the gross numbers of deaths – even if they’re off by an order of magnitude – seem like something the police or FBI should worry about on a case by case basis. Certainly we shouldn’t talk about it when discussing significant dangers or concerning trends.
And through the lens of ‘cases of (potential) political violence the police/feds didn’t anticipate or stop’ over more than half a century, the larger question is, “Why so few?”
Are we just far less violent than we perceive ourselves, or are the authorities just that good?
I’m interested in the response to domestic extremism, more so than the extremism itself. If we look at foreign terrorism, these lists and worries about how to stop domestic terrorism should give us pause.
The response to 9/11 – a truly horrific event – was itself a tragic tale of overreacting to the data. Certainly acts of foreign terrorism have decreased. But to get there we entered into a state of perpetual war, and abandoned Constitutional restrictions on government search and seizure (sorry, just finished Snowden’s memoirs). This feels kind of like saying to the terrorists, “You can’t attack our constitution or our liberty if we don’t have them!”
Similarly, we could rearrange our political system because we’re hyper-focused on the outliers, or we could stop engaging with the worst political arguments of the other side, focusing instead on the center. I’m less concerned with the actions of extremists than I am about the public response to them.
I agree that the response to 9/11 was a vast over-reaction. And I may have to use that quote “You can’t attack our constitution and our liberty if we don’t have them!”
As far as this paragraph:
“Similarly, we could rearrange our political system because we’re hyper-focused on the outliers, or we could stop engaging with the worst political arguments of the other side, focusing instead on the center”
I think most of the harm is going to come from the outliers, but that they’re also hard to stop. So I think we should have quite a bit of focus there. I wonder if part of what’s happening is that rather than being hyper focused on outliers that they have, rather expanded the definition, such that all of their ideological opponents are outliers. So that if, to use one of the examples I mentioned, if someone whose expressed racist views kills his mother that’s extremism. We’re not so much hyper focused on the outliers as we are broadening the number of our ideological opponents who are defined as outliers…
Right, but given the level of harm is extremely small, the bigger question is WHO should be concerned about the outliers? As you pointed out, it’s not possible to stop all of them.
What’s our rate of attacks? Say it’s around 50 +/-25 over more than half a century. Not sure how to calculate how many people that is out of, but let’s say it’s around half a billion in the USA +/- 250 million (given births/deaths over that period). In that case, we’re looking at an event rate of 1 per every 10 million people. Add an order of magnitude and you’re still at one in a million.
This is not the kind of thing that breeds good public policy. It’s the kind of thing police or special investigators should handle under the full restraints set forth in the Constitution. And since the event rate is already acceptably low, any attempt to improve the efficacy of law enforcement in this specific type of case is more likely to risk negative outcomes than to reduce the death rate, which could come down by a maximum of 1/yr.
In 2016 there was an absurd case being made for somehow achieve zero numbers of special kinds of attacks. Somehow no cases of ISIS inspired killings would happen by….I guess calling it “Islamist terrorism”? But regular school shootings were ok. Moody teenagers were fine, provided they were moody from hanging out on incel websites or too much Call of Duty play rather than Islamic ones.
But zero cases are impossible even with ‘overreaction’ and gov’t ignoring civil liberties. Somehow when I need to buy something, Facebook shows me ads for it, but after I already brought it from someone. If Google and Facebook cannot figure out the once every 15 years I buy a desk before I actually buy one despite having the largest amount of data ever accumulated, it’s not going to happen with the gov’t being able to figure out whose about to ‘go postal’ even if all our emails, texts and messages are fed to the NSA without a warrant.
Here, though, I would say I’m less concerned about case by case than I am about what is keeping violence at bay. It’s not unlike Covid where it was called nothing to worry about when 10 people had it in the US and another 10 technically didn’t because they were being trapped on a cruise ship so our ‘numbers didn’t look bad’. But exponential growth can mean a single digit is sometimes a single digit but other times the moment before the giant wave hits.
Who has the ideology for violence and who would be expected to push it if given a chance? The right. The Christchurch killing in New Zealand is now coming to mind, esp. the part where the killer livestreamed it to Facebook and the tech companies had to go into emergency mode to stop copies of it from getting duplicated and distributed all over the place.
From my POV the last 20 years the fringe right has been making the case for armed attack and mostly executing it. Nothing that happened in the BLM protests alters that. The exception would be Islamist inspired terrorism (which has seemed to be on a down swell). I could argue that too is right wing as it’s literally being done to restore a Medieval model of theocratic government but let’s call it religious based terrorism instead. Then you have up and coming “personal terrorism”. Here I would put in school shootings, the Incel attacks, probably the movie “Joker” set the model for this (even though it’s set in a pre-Internet age). You can loosely find some political threads in some of these attacks (Incels diss feminism, for example, but they really don’t care about any of the issues that normal anti-feminists have ever felt important like abortion, women working outside of home, men being head of household etc., except only in the most tangential way). Many of these attacks, though, seem to be a combination of self-expression combined with a desire to be ‘big’.
The ‘personal terrorism’ option reminds us that this appears to be something rather new where the terrorism simply picks up a few pieces of ideology with only a slim attempt to really flesh it out and believe in it. Tim McVeigh was steeped in the Turner Diaries which made a case, that many militia minded types are sympathetic too, for disregarding democracy and using violence to take power and ‘fix things’. ISIS has an elaborate set of doctrines to justify both terrorism outside the Caliphate and the Caliphate inside it. People who do the terrorism may have a good or bad understanding of these ideas but they are operating from within a serious ideological framework.
We are veering towards the age of the ‘ironic terrorist’ where the terrorist has smatterings of an ideology but they feel more like sampled music. The Boston Marathon bombers seemed to be one of the first. Yes they referenced some stuff about Russians oppressing Muslims but they didn’t all that immersed in Islam from any angle. The Christchurch killer had a rambling manifesto which I believe had ‘callouts’ not only to Trump but various video games and fringe ‘influencers’ from his neck of the Internet.
The ‘ironic terrorist’ is something to worry about because there’s no ideology to really fight. He could come out of anywhere and tallying up the score by ‘left wing’ versus ‘right wing’ attacks may end up making about as much sense as tallying them by lefthanded and right handed attackers.
Yeah, attacks can come from many directions, but as you pointed out below, the frequency distribution is still too low to do any meaningful statistics on it. And it’s not a frequency that appears to follow anything like exponential growth. Probably because it’s really hard to convince people to go on a murder spree.
I understand why people get worked up about these acts of senseless violence. But as you pointed out we’ll never eliminate them. All we can do is break the republic trying to stop it entirely.
Well here’s the thing, there is an infrastructure on the right for terrorism. Theories advancing it, fantasies of it happening, people ‘training’ for it, etc. To a degree we can say there is some of this on the left, although I don’t think Antifa really counts here. I think the concern from the right is pretty legitimate. Beyond Antifa there is a core of anarchists on the left that have been pretty steady IMO for decades. What I see, though, to me appears to amount to something ike the European soccar hooligans at worse. They terrorized socccar games but it wasn’t like they were plotting to blow up buildings in rival teams cities during the off season. The IRA, they were not, which doesn’t mean they didn’t need addressing.
This feels to me a bit like the Covid denies who said when there were only a few people in the hospital “see only 20 cases!”. If you wait for the cases, you’ve screwed up. Here we should also consider failed cases. We’ve had more than a few cases of people arrested with stockpiles of weapons and ‘plans’. If for every Tim McVeigh there’s 99 aspiring ones who get cold feet, screw up, can’t figure out how to make the bomb work etc. then having 25 or so of these characters every year could mean you get one OK bombing every generation. But if you suddenly inspire 5,000 people you could go from it being rare to it happening every month. We also know from ISIS over time people get better at things. Back in the 90’s maybe it took 99 aspiring Tim McVeighs to find McVeigh, but the more people do it, that figure will drop for the same reasons podcasts are done more professionally today than they were 20 years ago.
I’m still trying to understand where you see exponential growth. It’s not in the numbers. It’s not in the model. Sure, people get better at things, and clearly so do investigators. And as much as I’d love for law enforcement to stay within the limited powers granted to them, they’ve tended to grab and process exponentially more information, applying it to more kinds of situations.
So what makes you think extremism is increasing, and to such a degree that it’s becoming an exponentially larger problem? Because of one-off news stories of failed extremism? I see a different problem from these data:
I’m not saying extremism doesn’t exist, or that it isn’t a problem. I’m saying that we should use the number of extreme cases of violence as a barometer for how authoritarian our government police powers have become. Without police intervention, I’m sure there would be many more cases. With increased intervention we’ll still never get to zero. But how much lower could we go? I’m thinking ‘not much’. From the paucity of extremists violence, our concern should run the OTHER direction. Why don’t more extremists make it through? Perhaps because the authorities have a lot more power than we realize.
Exponenital growth will not be in the numbers until it’s here. If you’re in a big house and your fire alarm is whether or not you smell smoke, your system is almost useless unless the fire breaks out right in front of you.
The question then are the forces for an exponential growth building or declining and on the right you have them building. Among these are:
* An ideological strain that rejects authority, esp. democracy.
* A fantasy of ‘revolts, revolutions, burn it all downism’ as a solution.
* Formation of numerous clubs, militias and groups that play act it.
* Let’s face it, Trump supporters have more or less made rule of law optional at this point as their governing philosophy.
* On the darker areas of the web, critique and evaluation of various terrorist acts, sharing of videos etc.
Now confusing the data is the fact that you could have an explosion of violence out of unexpected corners….the UFO cult that blows up a building because they think it’s hiding the evil death ray machine, the cult a few decades ago that tried to use biological warfare to give huge numbers of people food poisoning so they could win a city election. Add to that as well the rise of the ‘ironic terrorist’ who will do terrorist acts for the sake of the social media credit but only loosely align with any actual ideology.
So a factoid that might be of interest here….one survey at least put 10% of the population as participating in at least one BLM event. That figure, is, well, amazing in its scale. Interestingly, the most notable targetted killing of law enforcement during all this came not from that but from the ‘boogaloo movement’ who killed a security officer at the Oakland Federal Court house and 3 sheriff’s deputies that were shot and attacked with an explosive device (1 dead, 3 injured). (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_boogaloo_killings).
Nitpick: “That same month, Gavin Eugene Long ambushed and shot six police officers, three of them fatally, in Baton Rouge. Long was an adherent of black nationalism as well as the anti-government sovereign citizen movement.”
I would classify the sovereign citizen movement as right wing. Strictly speaking, Malcome X style ‘Black Nationalism’ is also pretty right wing. I mean look at the Nation of Islam that makes a gathering of evenglical whites look like a group of spaced out hippies. The only reason this is defaulted to left wing is because we work with an unspoken assumption the right is a party for Whites which pretends it’s about other things (family values, free trade, law and order etc. etc.) but Trump, in his political death thrashing, has more or less taken the mask off.
So while I think it’s valuable to assemble reports that try to list each and every ideologically motivated killing or act of violence, two things that have to be considered:
1. Rate of violence – If a small, less than 1%, amount of BLM protesters wanted violence, there would be hundreds of cops dead. Given the ease of gun access in this country, it would be insanely easy for even a handful of Antifa style protesters to coordinate a mass shooting at cops or counter protesters. In fact we’ve had multiple cases now where right wing militia style groups do armed counter marches on one side while armed Black groups (the armed Black militia group that protested at the Confederate monument is technically not BLM but it’s own thing which has some kooky beliefs if you peal back the surface too much from what I understand). Given this I’m a bit surprised at how little violence there’s been. It’s not unusual for someone to get beaten up at a professional football game despite the huge amount of hidden security there is at stadiums. All that is there because professional sports learned from the European soccar hooligans of the 80’s just how much some people are itching to riot whenever there’s a chance, and that really ruins the payday if sporting events get the reputation for being dangerous to attend.
2. Contingency in low numbers. In a slightly alternative universe, Tim McVeigh & company botched the wiring on their bomb. The truck just caught on fire and McVeigh was sentenced to ten years for arson. A small degree of luck is all that keeps us from having many more dead people.
Put #1 and #2 together and you have a receipe for percentages totally failing you. A single person having a bad day at their favorite video game can go out and change a year with no percentage increase to one that kills more people than the last two decades combined. A person typically cannot do this with other types of crime. You can’t go out and steal so many cars that you single handedly double the nation’s auto theft rate.
I mostly agree the labelling has issues. It also tends to exclude the unexpected. Remember in the 90’s a cult in Japan created batches of sarin nerve gas and released it on the subways killing people and blinding many others? Nothing like that happened before or since by a Buddhist fringe cult. Yet it did. What about Islamist terrorism? What about the incels who were driving cars into crowds of people for a while, if I recall. A guy got mad at another guy over an online video game, he attempted to SWAT him but the police showed up at the wrong address and killed someone unrelated. Isn’t SWATTING a type of indirect terrorism using the police as puppets for the violence?
SO perhaps a better approach would be to consider the explanations for why we don’t have more violence. One is no doubt violence is rather hard. I think I remember something like 50% of soldiers on the front line didn’t even fire their guns. It’s easy to imagine shooting your enemies, holding the gun in your hand and pointing it is another matter. Many videos of peopel brawling don’t look like high intensity action sequences. They look like fools who have no idea what they are doing.
This, though, only works as a taboo barrier. The moment you start getting used to breaking the taboo, it gets easier.
Another reason there isn’t more violence, IMO, is a general trust in the system. People assume if they kill someone, there is a system of very smart people who will try to figure out who did it and arrest them. CSI and all, we hear about the guy arrested decades after he murdered people because his relatives putting their DNA into 21&me narrowed him down as a suspect. That’s functional trust, the system can get you efficiently. Reputational trust is that the system is good, should not be overthrown, but it should be corrected. The cop who kills should be put on trial and convicted just like the regular person that kills and all.
Here things have worked but the bigger danger IMO has come from the right. We’ve had nearly 4 years of Trump using the pardon power to subporn perjury and get his people to obstruct investigations knowing he will save them from any trouble in the end. His lawyer has asserted he is immune from any and all civil and criminal law while in office. This trickles down. The absurd rich couple who stormed out of their absurd mansion to point guns at BLM protesters were charged for bandishing a weapon and having an illegal weapon. Sean Hannity had the governor on his show and extracted a promise from him to use his pardon power to keep them out of trouble. Hmmm..
To me the percentage differences and changes over a number of incidents that is less than 100 per year is probably less important than the chipping away at the damm.
“In our modern world the only people who identify as Nazis, or indeed as Communists, tend to be pretty radical (though more so in the former case than the latter), but there were times and places when such identification was not only mainstream but expected, e.g. the Third Reich and Soviet Russia respectively, and it was when these ideologies had triumphed, when they had gone from extreme to expected that the really horrific violence occurred. My takeaway from this is that what we’re really engaged in when we ask the question, “should we worry more about right wing extremism or left wing extremism?” Is a discussion on what the behavior of the extremists tells us about the direction we’re headed and the potential harm that could be inflicted once an ideology becomes more widespread. ”
I think that, except where an ideology actually requires violence (e.g. Nazism or the sort of Islamism supported by terrorists), how much violence a government that supports it commits depends much more on the government’s political organization and popular support; many ideologies initially seen as extreme and motivating political violence, when they became official government policy, stayed in place without much bloodshed. For example, a partially socialist economy like those of, say, modern Scandinavia would probably have been seen, in the Gilded Age, as almost as extreme as revolutionary communism, and yet such policies have been implemented without the sort of literal class warfare that the early 20th century capitalists feared and the early USSR encouraged. In the early 19th century abolition of slavery was seen as unlikely to work and likely to lead to violence by many people (especially after the revolution in Haiti; indeed, a number of American slaveowners argued that they had to keep slavery because a population of freed black slaves would commit genocide against white people as they had done in Haiti), but slavery was abolished peacefully in the British Empire in 1833, even in the Caribbean, whose economy had depended on slavery, and after the American Civil War had ended most of the violence in the South was by white people trying to re-subjugate the freed slaves rather than black people looking for revenge. The Jacobins are now remembered as violent radicals, but their goal was basically the establishment of a liberal constitutional democratic government of the sort that have governed America and much of Europe peacefully for decades. I would guess that any political movement is likely to use violence when the established government uses force to suppress them such that violent conflict is necessary to implement their ideology (e.g. abolitionism in parts of the New World, most of the dissident groups in pre-revolutionary Russia), when their ideology is so unpopular that the general population will resist it if not forced to accept it (e.g. Marxism in the early USSR), or when they have normalized political violence in the course of overthrowing the government (most of the examples I’ve given); that doesn’t necessarily (indeed, doesn’t usually) mean that the policy will cause political violence when legally implemented in a moderately stable constitutional republic. In a weak and unstable republic such violence is more likely (e.g. Rome from the Social War to Augustus, Weimar Germany, most of the hastily decolonized states of Africa), but I don’t think America is close to that point now. The worst-case scenario in this respect would be a blatant delegitimization of the government in power, as would happen if Trump tried to stay in power after losing the election or clearly biasing it in his favor by e.g. refusing to count mail-in ballots, since this could lead to different parts of the police, military, etc. recognizing and obeying different leaders and would probably get violent radical groups on both sides to take action, but I think the more likely result even in this case would be an undemocratic but not overly destabilizing decision like Bush v. Gore in 2000 or Hayes vs. Tilden in 1876. The US government is large and powerful enough to suppress most violent rebellion (besides, something like an urban riot or a terrorist attack is destructive but nowhere near an existential threat) but also, because of its federal structure, decentralized enough that it would be hard for an authoritarian leader to gain enough control over the lower-level governments or expand the federal government’s domestically usable power enough to commit much political violence (except against what are generally considered acceptable targets, like Japanese-Americans in WW2 or Muslims after 9/11, and such groups are usually too small to make a direct political difference), so I don’t think political violence on a large scale is likely unless state governments themselves get involved in it as they did in the Civil War.
Excellent comment, and some great points. Two things occur to me after reading it:
1- While I think the distinction you make is an important one, I’m not sure how to make that distinction before the fact, rather than after. How were people pre-civil war to know that the end of slavery would not descend to Haitian like levels of violence? How were the French to know that the Jacobins would resort to the guillotine rather than parallel Washington and Adams? I understand that you don’t think we’re close to any of these subjective markers, but I don’t think any of the people in your examples thought that they were particularly close before hand either.
So yes, I agree with you that large scale violence in the US is unlikely, but people’s opinion of things frequently doesn’t match the facts on the ground, which takes me to…
2- I think we’re more on the same page than you might think. But people’s perception of the potential for violence and where things are headed can have a major impact on the landscape. To put it another way, let’s imagine that at first glance Trump wins in November, which is to say he loses the popular squeaks out a win on the electoral college, and while there are lots of irregularities they’re not blatant enough to overturn things, or maybe they make it to the Supreme court and they rule in Trump’s favor in a 5-4 decision. I don’t think that’s the end of the world (it’s not my preferred outcome) but I think there are lots of people who think it is and will act on their impression of the calamity rather than the actuality of the calamity.
Which is to say I wasn’t saying we were going to turn into Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, but that’s the model people are using to determine how strongly to react now.