 The Anti-Defamation League's data claiming right-wing extremists are responsible for the vast majority of "extremist-related killings" is a total fraud.
Even the Washington Post last week had to come out and admit their data is junk.
From The Washington Post:
Beware the data on American right-wing violence
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By Megan McArdle | May 23, 2022 at 2:45 p.m. EDT
[...]
The aftermath of the Buffalo massacre saw a spate of articles describing the menace of right-wing extremists. The New York Times's David Leonhardt characterizes it as "a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left." You might even have glanced at the reports these articles often cite from the Anti-Defamation League. Over the past decade, the ADL has counted about 450 murders committed by domestic political extremists, with 29 occurring just last year. It reports the overwhelming majority were committed by people with ties to various right-wing groups.
Seems straightforward, right? Well, yes -- until you look at the underlying data.
The people citing these reports write about them as if they primarily document political violence -- or "domestic terrorism," as my own colleagues put it. That is to say, attacks that are motivated by someone's political affiliation and at least tangentially related to some political goals.
Certainly such attacks do happen, and far too often. Just in the past year, Nathan Allen, allegedly a white supremacist, killed two Black people in Massachusetts before being shot by police officers; "manosphere" devotee Lyndon McLeod went on a shooting spree in Colorado; and Aidan Ingalls opened fire on the South Haven, Mich., pier using a gun decorated with swastikas.
But look closer and some of those cases aren't as clear-cut as they sound in the gloss. McLeod appears to have killed people he knew from the local tattoo community for possibly unrelated personal grievances. Ingalls's two random victims were White.
Drill down further into the data and you'll find other cases are even less clearly political: prison gang members engaging in pedestrian criminal violence; white supremacists killing their wives; people with mental illness acting on elaborate delusions that sometimes include references to right-wing conspiracy theories; people embroiled in criminal trials or child custody disputes who have become enamored of "sovereign citizen" theories that tell them the state has no right to interfere.
I'm not cherry-picking a few ambiguous outliers; I'm arguably describing the majority of the incidents in the ADL's 2021 report. [...]
"One of the most striking features of white supremacist murders is the large proportion of non-ideological killings to ideological killings," the ADL wrote in its most recent report. "Over the past 10 years, only 86 of the 244 white supremacist killings (35%) were ideological murders."
One reason for this confusion is that all prison gangs tend to be organized along racial lines, for complex sociological reasons, yet only the White gangs are coded as white-supremacist groups rather than criminal organizations. [...]
After all those reports on the threat of right-wing violence, any new case with a tenuous link to the alt-right or the Aryan Brotherhood seems like part of a trend meriting wall-to-wall coverage. Meanwhile, a Black man driving into a parade after making anti-White remarks on Facebook is seen as a sick individual. RealClearInvestigations has more:
"The FBI has not issued the official number of murders in the U.S. in 2021, but it is expected to exceed the number of murders in 2020: 21,570 -- of which, according to ADL, 23 were committed by extremists," Carl Moody, an economist at the College of William & Mary who studies crime, told RealClearInvestigations.
"The data presented by the ADL could also be characterized as follows: the number of murders committed by extremists is very small, only 29 in 2021, of which less than half were committed by white supremacists," Moody said. "It is also 63% lower than the maximum number (78) in 2016, so extremism is down since 2016. In 2020, according to the CDC, 1080 people were killed falling out of bed. Therefore, you are 47 times more likely to be killed by a bed than by an extremist."
[...] Crime experts also note that many of the killings cited by the ADL – such as the slaying committed by Shawn Lichtfuss, the New Jersey man who killed his wife, or John Hilt and Justin Murphy, the allegedly lethal members of the Family Values prison gang – were not hate crimes aimed at terrorizing blacks or other minorities.
These include:
- A white supremacist with a "swastika and SS tattoos on his face" who killed another man in an extended-stay hotel "following an argument over a social media post."
- An alleged member of a Fresno, California, white supremacist street gang who "allegedly [shot] a man with whom he had long been feuding."
- Four members of the New Mexico Aryan Brotherhood who "were involved in a shootout amongst themselves inside a vehicle." While the ADL is constantly hyping the purported threat of neo-Nazi extremism in America and pushing for domestic terrorism legislation to crack down on their political opposition, they run cover for neo-Nazi extremists in Ukraine and support arming them to the teeth.
All they care about is advancing their political agenda.
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