DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing

Aryeh Jay said:

Perhaps the current FBI can reevaluate the data and release it.

Click to expand...

If RFK Jr. doesn't need any data to change conclusions, I don't see why the FBI would.

essentialsaltes said:

If RFK Jr. doesn't need any data to change conclusions, I don't see why the FBI would.

Click to expand...

Sometimes you just know the truth without needing numbers provided by organizations with agendas.

ThatRobGuy said:

I can see the subcategories, but unfortunately it wants me to put in personal info in order to download the full dataset, so I'm looking to see if there's another source I can get it from.

I'm curious to see the actual data (where it lists out the cases) because one of the critiques I'm seeing floating around, some events and incidents are notable by their absence, and certain notable incidents get omitted based on the fact that prosecutor decided to not to pursue charges.

This is one I see commonly being cited

Government drops charges against all inauguration protesters

"The solidarity we showed as defendants won out," said one activist whose charges were previously dropped.

www.nbcnews.com

Another thing I see being mentioned is that high profile incidents aren't getting labelled correctly, or not labelled at all.

One example I heard was the Chaz/Chop situation that happened in Seattle.

When I look at Washington State...and "anti-government/sovereign citizens"
View attachment 370229

25 people, and 23 getting attributed to "far-right"? At the very least, Raz Simone (the leader of that whole thing, who was walking around with an assault rifle) should at least be 1 notch in the far-left category right?

I may end up creating a burner account later just to download it.


It changes it because it's not so much the data itself, but how it's being used to shape public perceptions.

In contemporary discourse in the US
"Right = Republican"
"Left = Democrat"

I realize that's often too superficial of a categorization, but it is how the majority discusses it, none the less.

Really, what people are trying to discuss (and yes, disingenuously score political points with), is which voter faction/bloc presents the biggest risk of violence when they're not getting their way.

So attributing right-wing motives/reasoning to things that left-wing people are doing obfuscates the public debate people are actually trying to have.

For instance, if a left-wing pro-Palestinian activist were to commit arson on a Synagogue or assault a Jewish student (despite being a politically left voter, who opposes republicans on almost everything), that action would be chalked up as antisemitism, therefore 'a right wing ideology'.

And then gets added to the tally that's aiming to convey the message "Right wing = Republican/conservative, and look - there's more right wing violence"

There are times when it does line up...for-instance, anti-abortion violence. If someone is bombing an abortion clinic, it's stemming from a right-wing ideology, and is overwhelmingly likely that it's a right-wing person doing it.

However, the Chaz/Chop I mentioned earlier would a good example of when it doesn't line up, "anti-government/sovereign citizens" movements get the label of "right-wing" (therefore it gets added to the bucket that people interpret as "republican/conservative"), but the people participating in that certainly weren't "right wing conservatives"

Click to expand...

There might be a mismatch in what you believe is in the "anti-government/sovereign citizens" category and what they put it in it. Here are probably the guys areested in chop/chaz. You'll have to read the definition document. I think they were all arrested in 2020, if I read the kernel density estimation correctly.

Stopped_lurking said:

There might be a mismatch in what you believe is in the "anti-government/sovereign citizens" category and what they put it in it. Here are probably the guys areested in chop/chaz. You'll have to read the definition document. I think they were all arrested in 2020, if I read the kernel density estimation correctly.

Click to expand...

I don't think Raz Simone was ever arrested for the Chaz/Chop thing (despite, him publishing his own video of him walking around armed, referring to himself as a racial justice warlord)

That ties in one of the aspects I mentioned...which is "unpunished violence not getting counted as violence". By that standard, the J6'ers don't count because they were pardoned.

If I light a cop car on fire and there's evidence of me doing it, but the city opts not to prosecute me for it or drops the charges (for whatever reason), I still "did the thing".


But to my other point (which I feel is the more important one)...

Left-wing actors engaging in actions that are considered to be a "Right-wing type of violence" (and it being tallied as such) is used to make broader implications about the "Democrats vs. Republicans: Who's more prone to violence?" debates, and in ways that may not be giving people an accurate picture about the full scope of things.

And pundits are leveraging that "Right = Republican; Left = Democrat" contemporary interpretation (and the assumptions that go along with that) to promote a certain narrative.


As you noted in your example, if a Black guy kills a White guy for racial reasons, race-motivated murder is categorized as a "right wing form of extremism". If that happened 10 times in a week. And it got reported as "There were 10 instances of right-wing violence this past week", how is the average person going to interpret that?

ThatRobGuy said:

I don't think Raz Simone was ever arrested for the Chaz/Chop thing (despite, him publishing his own video of him walking around armed, referring to himself as a racial justice warlord)

That ties in one of the aspects I mentioned...which is "unpunished violence not getting counted as violence". By that standard, the J6'ers don't count because they were pardoned.

If I light a cop car on fire and there's evidence of me doing it, but the city opts not to prosecute me for it or drops the charges (for whatever reason), I still "did the thing".


But to my other point (which I feel is the more important one)...

Left-wing actors engaging in actions that are considered to be a "Right-wing type of violence" (and it being tallied as such) is used to make broader implications about the "Democrats vs. Republicans: Who's more prone to violence?" debates, and in ways that may not be giving people an accurate picture about the full scope of things.

And pundits are leveraging that "Right = Republican; Left = Democrat" contemporary interpretation (and the assumptions that go along with that) to promote a certain narrative.


As you noted in your example, if a Black guy kills a White guy for racial reasons, race-motivated murder is categorized as a "right wing form of extremism". If that happened 10 times in a week. And it got reported as "There were 10 instances of right-wing violence this past week", how is the average person going to interpret that?

Click to expand...

I'm sorry but I can't know why the police or prosecutors didn't interact with him. Do you have reason to believe that happens more often if the perpetrator is left-wing? Do we have any data? Which left-wing actors do you believe to be miscategorized (there are quite stringent criteria to be included in the PIRUS dataset)? It's up to the journalists to do their due diligence if any definition is at risk of being contra-intuitive, if they want to publicize it.

To answer you're last question, they are going to interpret it as if there was some right-wing violence. Isn't it right-wing violence? Perhaps the dataset isn't perfect, they never are. It seems that they have chosen to use exclusive categories, and I don't think there are double counts.

Stopped_lurking said:

To answer you're last question, they are going to interpret it as if there was some right-wing violence. Isn't it right-wing violence? Perhaps the dataset isn't perfect, they never are. It seems that they have chosen to use exclusive categories, and I don't think there are double counts.

Click to expand...

It's "far-right violence" in the purist sense of the terms "right" and "left" as the concepts would be taught in a Political Science class.

But as I noted, contemporary usage of those terms follows the pattern of "right is interchangeable for republican/conservative" and "left is interchangeable democrat/liberal"

So it's being used to convey the notion that "republican-voting activists & protestors are more likely to be dangerous than democrat-voting protestors and activists"

Stopped_lurking said:

I'm sorry but I can't know why the police or prosecutors didn't interact with him. Do you have reason to believe that happens more often if the perpetrator is left-wing?

Click to expand...

It depends on the city... in the case of the Chaz/Chop incident, or some of the violence that took place during the mass protests and demonstrations in 2020, sometimes it's a case where local authorities give directives to not prosecute, either for reasons of political ideology, or merely to downplay events in their jurisdiction that got out of hand.






I think another aspect of this that's important as well, left-leaning protests tend to be more of the "mass protest" nature, as where right-leaning causes tend to have protests that are much smaller in scale. I think it stands to reason that mass protests are a somewhat chaotic environment, where not everyone engaging in violent behavior is going to be arrested and/or accounted for (especially when black bloc anonymizing measures are being taken as some of them)


Per the Crowd Counting Consortium affiliated with the Harvard Ash Center, the majority of large more "mass protests" have been for left leaning causes, while a smaller percentage are for right leaning causes.

In 2022, CCC logged more than 13,400 left-wing protests across more than 2,000 different U.S. cities and towns.
The mean crowd size at events with information on it was just under 500
Arrests occurred at 170 left-wing events in 2022 (1.3 percent)
Protesters damaged property at 86 left-wing events in 2022 (0.6 percent)
Participants were reportedly injured at 45 left-wing events in 2022 (0.3 percent)

Participants carried firearms at 3.3% of the left-wing events we recorded in 2022



In 2022, CCC logged more than 5,700 right-wing events in 2022.
The mean crowd size at events with data on that feature was 186
Arrests, injuries, and property damage were rare at right-wing protest events in 2022.
We saw arrests of right-wing participants at 52 events (1.0 percent);
reported injuries 18 events (0.3 percent);
and property damage by right-wing participants at 13 (0.2 percent).

Consistent with the trends, we also saw a decline in armed right-wing protests in 2022, where “armed” means that at least one participant visibly carried a firearm. Our count of those events fell from 2.2% in 2021 to 1.2% in 2022.


None of that seems to convey that there's anything more uniquely dangerous (in terms of violence risk) about right-wing events than the left-wing.