The left's bogus claims of 'right wing' violence

David Harsanyi:
There Is No ‘Surge’ in Right-Wing Violence

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According to The Washington Post, which relies on Global Terrorism Database data, there were zero acts of right-wing terrorism in the entire nation in 2002. Since then, we have seen a “surge,” to 36 in a nation of 325-plus million people in 2017. Among those acts, there were 11 fatalities.

In other words, fewer homicides were committed by political terrorists of any stripe in the United States in 2017 than were committed by undocumented 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 “surges” is scaremongering, why not the other?

Then again, even if we use the criteria offered by the Global Terrorism Database, we need to be exceptionally generous to even get to 36 incidents of right-wing violence in 2017. (I could find only 32.)

For example, although the Post acknowledges that the Las Vegas shooter’s motivations are still unknown, the Global Terrorism Database had no problem categorizing the murderer of 58 people as an “anti-government extremist.” And it takes these sorts of assumptions to get in the vicinity of a “surge” in right-wing terrorism.

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 had coherent political agendas.

Still other events are even more opaque. In San Juan, Puerto Rico—apparently a hotbed of white supremacy—an incendiary device was thrown into a gay nightclub. No one was injured, thank goodness. Also, no one was caught, and no one claimed responsibility for the act. Yet the episode doesn’t even earn a “suspected” designation from the Global Terrorism Database.
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The list appears to be based on assumptions grounded in anti-conservative bigotry.  How many "white supremacists" are even in Puerto Rico.  The population is predominately Hispanic and I suspect those in the bar were also Hispanic.  The left in this country appears to use a few kooks in this country as an excuse to attack all conservatives.  It is the equivalent of those on the right who think all Democrats are really communists.

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