Please disable your Ad Blocker to better interact with this website.

News Clash

DEBUNKED: WAPO’s Claim That Right-Wing Violence Is ‘Surging’

If democracy ever ‘dies in darkness’, WaPo will want to get themselves a lawyer and an alibi.

They’ve been busily demonizing one half of America again. But The Federalist’s David Harsanyi took them to Truthtown.

Here are some of the highlights.

A new Washington Post “analysis” of domestic terrorism argues that attacks from white supremacists and other “far-right attackers” have been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency, and “surged since President [Donald] Trump took office.” It’s a familiar storyline meant to assure liberals that, yes, Trump-motivated right-wing terrorists are running wild. There are, however, a few problems with this proposition.

“Surge” as a term is somewhere between misleading and completely bogus because they went from ZERO incidents of right-wing terrorism in 2002 to 36 by 2017, with eleven fatalities. In a nation of more than 325 million, that’s a statistical nonentity.

But if WaPo insists on saying that’s a worrisome number, he has a uncomfortable question to throw back in their court.

Or, in other words, fewer homicides were committed by political terrorists of any stripe in the United States in 2017 than were committed by illegal immigrants in the state of Texas alone — which I am assured is an incredibly low number that shouldn’t worry us very much. If one of these is scaremongering, why not the other?

And even that count of ’32’ was shaky.

Of the 32 incidents I was able to find, 12 featured perpetrators who were merely “suspected” of being right-wing terrorists. Some of these incidents could have been the work of one person, as in the pellet-gun shootings of Muslims in New York. In other incidents, we are asked to treat patently insane people as if they have coherent political agendas. In still others, the attacks could easily have non-terroristic motivating factors.

Terrorism, as we know, need to meet specific criterion, including a political aim.

Speaking of definitions:

If the definition of domestic terrorism is muddy at best, the definition of “right-wing” terrorism is often arbitrary and self-serving. To help bolster right-wing terrorist stats, for instance, we would have to perfunctorily include every anti-Semitic act. The Washington Post even mentions an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) study showing “a 57 percent surge in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017.”

If anything, the ADL study is the kind of cautionary document demonstrating how difficult it is, not only to quantify these incidents, but to categorize them ideologically. The ADL’s faulty data was self-reported, and most of the “surge” can be attributed to a single Jewish teen in Israel calling in a number of bomb threats to Jewish centers.

In the real world, a Jewish American is probably more likely to encounter anti-Semitism at a college campus or progressive march in the guise of “anti-Zionism” than he is anywhere else, because Jew hatred is non-partisan.

Then there is the matter of inconsistently defining terrorism. If throwing a rock through the window of an Islamic center is an act of right-wing terrorism, why isn’t it an act of left-wing terrorism for anti-capitalists to throw rocks through the window of a business in Portland?

(You might want to ask Ben Shapiro whether right-of-center Jews ever get vicious treatment from the left.)

You know what was omitted from that data?

ISLAMIC domestic terrorist events which had both greater lethality and frequency.

On that topic, if the analysis had begun one year earlier — 2001 instead of 2002 — would those domestic terrorism numbers get skewed at all? Hmmmmm?

This is what happens when reporters work backwards from a predetermined premise.

You’ll notice, as well, that these analyses typically begin in 2002, since the 2,996 Americans murdered in 2001 is inconvenient to the white-supremacy-is-more-dangerous-than-radical-Islam narrative. The reason we don’t have a real-life “surge” of Islamist attacks since 2001, incidentally, is that the United States has spent billions yearly to stop it.

“When reporters work backwards from a predetermined premise.”

You mean, the premise that American Citizens on the right are vicious bigots that must be stopped by the good and wise defenders of democracy in the Media(D)?

Gee, however did it come to happen that We The People lost faith in our vaunted ‘free press’?

By the way, since Facebook has unpublished ClashDaily’s page, your best bet to keep in the loop is to Subscribe to our ClashDaily Newsletter right here:

Become a Clash Insider!

Sign up for our free email newsletter, and we’ll make sure to keep you in the loop.

We’re also moving onto a new platform, MeWe. It’s like Facebook without the data breaches and censorship.

Sign up and you can still get all the ClashDaily goodness by joining our MeWe group.

Do you love what we’re doing at Clash?

Do you want to kick in to our ‘war chest’ so that we Happy Warriors can maximize the size of the footprint we leave on Leftism’s backside? Here’s a link for ya to do just that.

Stay Rowdy!

Wes Walker

Wes Walker is the author of "Blueprint For a Government that Doesn't Suck". He has been lighting up Clashdaily.com since its inception in July of 2012. Follow on twitter: @Republicanuck