As President Trump was trashing the Left not only for assassinating Charlie Kirk, but for more political violence, the Left reared its head and fought back with its classic method – “studies.” One friend sent me a study from a person at libertarian think tank CATO touting right of center violence and another sent an email stating “nonpartisan” studies show more violence comes from the Right. I decided to dig into this and see what the reality was of these studies.
First, this is the nature of Left. They have studies and awards. The awards are supposed to be validations of creditability. “He has twelve Pulitzer Prizes.” The people touting those credentials never take a look to see that it is a closed circle who give the awards. The last person on the right to get a Pulitzer was Charles Krauthammer. That was in 1987, and he was writing for the Washington Post.
One study was done by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which gave up any semblance of non-partisanship decades ago. I did not do an in-depth analysis of the ADL study. I left that to two other creditable journalists. First, John Lott Jr. wrote Bogus ADL Report Mislabels Leftist Violence As ‘Right-Wing’. Lott is one of the most diligent journalists around. David Harsanyi wrote ADL Uses Surveys on Political Violence That Are Criminally Misleading. They fairly well tear apart the creditability of the ADL report, but you can read it yourself. Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2024 | ADL.
I read through this report and was stunned to see that none of these murders had anything to do with the person’s political beliefs. They murdered someone. As Mr. Lott points out over the last three years of their reports, the FBI recorded 58,781 murders. What was the background of the other 58,000+ murderers? This study is just flabbergasting.
The study I focused on was the one done by Alex Nowrasteh who is affiliated with the CATO Institute. Mr. Nowrasteh considers himself an expert on the subject and he will tell you so as he wrote about the issue and stated, “I should know: I assembled data on politically motivated terrorist attacks from roughly 20 sources.” Well, that makes what he did correct.
Nowrasteh also states, “My posts focused on homicides committed by politically motivated terrorist killers, with a secondary focus on perpetrators. Some critics thought I should have included incidents, injuries, arrests, property crimes, or other measures of politically motivated violence. Ultimately, those critics claim that if we widen the measurement of politically motivated terrorism to include noisier metrics, then the results would change. They certainly could change, but murders are the best measure.” If a perpetrator torches a church or maims five people but doesn’t kill them that would not be a “politically motivated” action; only if they are dead. The man has a right to his opinion, but it certainly alters the results.
More importantly, his decisions on who and what is right or left are fascinating. A detailing of his report is done by Amber Duke in the Daily Caller. DUKE: Think Tank Nerds Are Fudging ‘Studies’ To Pretend Conservatives Are More Violent | The Daily Caller
Ms. Duke does a fairly good job, but even she gets some things wrong. For example, she states Robert Bowers is properly categorized. This is one of the people of whom you actually know of because he was the guy who walked into the Tree of Life Sanctuary in Pittsburgh and murdered 11 people. I followed this story in detail at the time because Deborah Lipstadt blamed Donald Trump. She read the killer’s manifesto and stated Trump inspired him.
First, anyone who writes a manifesto and goes out and shoots a bunch of people he has never met is a deranged individual and we should not be analyzing their thoughts as if they were a modern-day Plato. These people are nuts, wackos, off the boards bonkers. Second, Ms. Lipstadt did not read his entire twisted manifesto, as he spent more time criticizing Trump than he did praising him. And because of Trump, Bowers marched into a place where Jews worship and murders people? Only an ignorant, slanted individual would attribute a person like that to any political philosophy and Nowrasteh does similar things repeatedly.
BTW, I am criticized by friends on the Right who cite some wacko and his manifesto from the Left when they point fingers at the Left for the dead or maimed. These people are just sick and quite thankfully many of them end up killing themselves. My major regret is they didn’t do it in their bedroom first instead of after their horrible act of public violence.
Here is another corker. I started analyzing the Nowrasteh report for his results in 2020 going forward because my friend who cited the report stated figures unfavorable to people on the right from that period of time forward. 2020 was tumultuous year. After George Floyd got arrested and was killed by a police officer, the country erupted in riots that killed at least 19 people and caused literally billions of dollars of damage. It wasn’t until afterward that the politically motivated attorney general of the state of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, released the video from the other side of the vehicle where Floyd was violently resisting the police causing the need to be subdued. We will never know how people might have reacted if they had known Floyd was as problematic as he was instead of Saint George who the rioters made him out to be.
There is no mention of this in Nowrasteh study. Instead, he cites two people, Steve Carrillio and Robert Justus, having reacted to the George Floyd incident and killed two people and claims they are on the Right. He is correct there, but that is the only Floyd related activity he cites. I am sure he would make some lame excuses for his omission.
Nowrasteh wrote another column that we are not in an epidemic of politically motived violence. That was after a series of attacks largely on right of center political figures. On the other hand, we are in an epidemic of ideologically Leftists attacking government facilities. In Chicago, at the ICE Broadview Processing Center on a typical night, Sept 19th, rioters obstructed law enforcement, threw tear gas cans, rocks, bottles, fireworks, slashed tires of cars and blocked the entrance to the building. This is before Trump has sent in the National Guard and exactly why he wants to do so. This would not make Nowrasteh’s list because no one is dead. Yet.
The worst part is I read the “news” analyses of these studies with a favorable commentary and none of them did an analysis of the studies. Neither did my friends who cited them. They just cited the results and took the win. There is no win. These studies are highly prejudicial and the best thing I can state about them is throw them in the trash.
