1,756 words
The problem goes deeper than leftist rags like ThinkProgress. It goes even deeper than Salon. If you want to see how deeply anti-white and anti-conservative attitudes have grown into the mainstream media today, you must look no further than Newsweek and the New York Times.
In these articles, we read that:
1. “You Are More Than 7 Times As Likely To Be Killed By A Right-Wing Extremist Than By Muslim Terrorists” (ThinkProgress) [1]
2. “right wing arson attacks . . . setting fire to churches with predominantly black or racially mixed congregations . . . are no ordinary crimes, but an attempt to use violence to cheat the democratic system and to intimidate people through the threat of violence. You know, terrorism.” (Salon)[2]
3. “although they are frequently dismissed as people with crazy beliefs, right-wing extremists often seem like the guy next door . . . the most common trait among terrorists is normalcy … what drives them . . . [is] friends [who] proclaim that the government is destroying freedom, or that all Muslims are terrorists, or that minorities are dragging down the country” (Newsweek)[3]
4. “Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years. In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities . . .” (New York Times)[4]
Well, the concern about church burnings generated amongst the left by that Salon article faded away into obscurity as soon as David Lopez Jackson, a black man, became the first perpetrator identified behind the string of burnings.[5] Suddenly, with a black perpetrator established, the same exact action was just an “ordinary crime” again rather than a deeply malicious attempt “to cheat the democratic system.” No matter how many blacks on college campuses write racial slurs in their own dorm rooms,[6] [7] [8] [9] [10] or plant dog shit on campus,[11] or set themselves on fire and try to blame the KKK,[12] or even set their own houses on fire,[13] the Left will become ever so predictably excited about these events when they think whites can be blamed—and lose interest the minute their hopes of finding a white villain are dashed.
But what about the claim that Right-wing extremists kill more Americans than Muslim terrorists? These statements at least proclaim to be based on hard collections of data.
Most reasonable readers have already made two perfectly reasonable observations against this claim: first, if it’s true that you’re only 7 times more likely to be killed by a Right-wing extremist than by a Muslim terrorist, doesn’t that still mean any given Muslim is more likely to kill you than any given “Right-winger” because there are much more than 7 times more conservatives than Muslims in the American population? Second, isn’t it begging the question just a little bit if we start collecting this data on 9/12/2001 solely to leave the 9/11 attacks out of consideration, as if the fact that 9/11 was an outlier makes it meaningless?
“Certainly, both of these criticisms are correct. As a matter of fact, since whites are 63% of the U.S. population and a lowball estimate is that 49% of whites identify as conservative, [14] whereas Muslims are about 0.9% of the population, [15] this means there are a minimum of 30 white conservatives in the U.S. population for every Muslim. Thus, if any given white conservative were as likely to kill you as any given Muslim, we would expect the statistic to show that you are thirty times as likely to be killed by a white conservative as by a Muslim. Well, if the story ended there, that would mean that our ThinkProgress headline is already telling us that white conservatives are more than three times less violent than Muslims (even rounding 7 up to 10 would still give us a number that is only a third of what we would see if white conservatives and Muslims committed acts of terrorism at identical rates).
But these reports delve even farther into the depths of dishonesty than that. As a matter of fact, when Think Progress reported that Right-wing extremists are “7 times as likely” to kill you as a Muslim terrorist, they actually misrepresented their very own data. What that data source actually claimed to have found was that in raw numbers, “Right-wing extremists” and Muslims were killing equal numbers of civilians.[16] At that rate, white conservatives would be thirty times less violent than Muslims.
But it turns out that the data source was bogus, too. For example, they classify Joseph Stack as a “Right-wing extremist” even though the only remotely “conservative” part of his suicide letter is criticism of the government—but the only criticisms he makes of government are of its failures to rein in “corporate profits.” He writes that “It’s clear [corporations] see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in” and ends by contrasting “The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” with “The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.” They also include Raymond Peake, who killed a man at a gun show in order to steal his rifle, in this data because he once told a single investigator that he “stole the weapon for use in an organization seeking the overthrow of the American government that he refused to name.” That investigator didn’t buy it, however; and concluded that “the gun theft was the motive for the killing.”[17]
Here are a few interesting facts about terrorism that outlets like these fail to mention:
1. Based on the sheer number of attacks, the vast majority of “terror” attacks are in fact committed by Leftists: animal rights activists and environmentalists make up the vast majority of all perpetrators.[18] These aren’t all hippies chaining themselves peacefully up to trees; some of them are doing things like holding people at the Discovery Channel Institute at gunpoint[19] to spread the message that “All human procreation must cease!” for the sake of ending global warming.[20]
2. One of the most significant “terror” attacks on Muslims of recent years was in fact committed by a Leftist whose Facebook page expressed his allegiance to causes like “HuffPost Black Voices” and “The Atheist Empathy Campaign.” [21] In fact, if we include Craig Stephen Hicks and Robert Dear, the death toll from atheist terrorists across 2001 to 2015 (at 3) is just one point behind the death toll from “anti-abortion terrorists” across the same period of time (at 4).
3. Comparing the public response to Eric Frein[22] and Christopher Dorner[23] is instructive. While both went on a string of murders against police forces, Eric Frein was a white conservative; Christopher Dorner was a black liberal who supported Hillary Clinton and praised mainstream liberal media.[24] Whereas Eric Frein murdered State Troopers exclusively,[22] one of Christopher Dorner’s first acts was to kill two innocent relatives of a man who had appealed to the LAPD on his behalf.[25] Nonetheless, a professor of African American Studies could be heard on public TV stating that Dorner was “like a real-life superhero” and that his killing spree was “kind of exciting.”[26] The largest “Support Eric Frein” page on Facebook has only 404 “likes” [27]; the largest Christopher Dorner support page has over 17,000.[28]
Getting back to the data source behind these claims, the New York Times report based part of its argument on a report from “Arie Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center.” First of all, this report addresses the topic of Right-wing violence exclusively. So the New York Times is comparing two separate reports—one on Muslim terrorism, one on Right-wing violence—with completely different methodologies. Arie Perliger explains on pp .85–86 of her report that “The dataset includes violence against human targets as well as property . . . based on . . . relevant information drawn from . . . the SPLC hate crime dataset” [29] — but the data on Muslim terrorism addresses terrorism exclusively. This, seemingly one of the most impressive citations in the group of quotations that started this post, actually turns out to be one of the most bunk. And contrary to common impression, whites are not overrepresented in hate crimes, so if we were to include hate crime data across the board, this would not make whites look worse.[30]
Finally, all of these sources of data leave out the question of how many acts of terrorism we’re successfully foiling. What if there are relatively fewer Islamic terrorist plots because we’re stopping relatively more of them? That would skew the relative ratio of Islamic to Right-wing terrorism, but it wouldn’t prove that our focus on Islamic terrorism was being misplaced; in fact, it would do exactly the opposite.
Well, it turns out that we actually do have studies explicitly addressing the relative number of foiled Islamic and Right-wing terrorist plots [31] — and they show that there are about 7 foiled Islamic plots every single year (even prior to 9/11!), compared to just 1.8 foiled “Right-wing” plots.
In any case, once we factor in foiled plots (which are 3.8 times more often Islamic than Right-wing), and we correct for the population rate (where white conservatives are represented in the population at a rate 30.8 times higher than Muslims of any race), and we leave out the dishonest inclusion of non-terrorist attacks or non-“conservative” terrorists,[32] the statistic we end up with is that the 0.9% of the population that is Muslim is committing 1.8 times as many terror attacks as the 30% of the population that is white and conservative. If we increased that 0.9% of the population to 30%—replacing the white conservative population with Muslims—then (multiplying (30/0.9) by 1.8) this means they would commit 60 times as many terror attacks as the white conservative population currently does.
When the mainstream media can manage to turn “You Are More Than 60 Times As Likely To Be Killed By A Muslim Terrorist Than By Right-Wing Extremists” into “You Are More Than 7 Times As Likely To Be Killed By A Right-Wing Extremist Than By Muslim Terrorists”—and even get away with adding the byline that “The face of terrorism in the United States is white!”—the perception of anti–white bias in the American media is no longer a paranoid fantasy; it’s fact. This is why we need alternative media. This is why outlets like Counter Currents are invaluable, and will only become more necessary as time goes on and these trends continue their acceleration.
Notes
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/the-other-terror-threat.html?_r=0
5. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/2/black-man-charged-in-st-louis-church-burnings/
7. http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/02/montclair_state_students_are_c.html
9. https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-admits-tweeting-fake-threats-fellow-black-students-204320195.html
10. http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/20329/
12. http://newsone.com/2065903/sharmeka-moffitt-louisiana-2/
13. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/minister-sentenced-to-2-years-for-staging-fake-hate-crime-at-his-home/
14. http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/
15. http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/
16. http://securitydata.newamerica.net/extremists/deadly-attacks.html
17. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/02/raymond-franklin-peake-ki_n_667996.html
19. http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/09/01/maryland.discovery.suspect/
20. http://www.tedmontgomery.com/remarks/10.7-12/JamesJayLee/manifesto.html
21. http://zombiemeditations.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/craig-hicks-facebook-page-1.jpg?w=300&h=212
22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Frein
23. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_and_manhunt
24. http://twitchy.com/jessem-34/2013/02/07/msm-covers-up-christopher-dorners-hard-left-political-views/
27. https://www.facebook.com/Support-Eric-Frein-1552769784953519/
28. https://www.facebook.com/ChristopherDornerOfficial
30. https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2013/topic-pages/offenders/offenders_final
31. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2011.582628#
32. https://zombiemeditations.com/2015/12/11/red-white-blue-or-brown/
7 comments
The thing the left never seems to realize is that if you need to write articles like this, it clearly isn’t true. If right wing “extremists” (surprised they didn’t just call them Nazis) were offing innocent minorities at the rate they are suggesting, you would hear constant new coverage. There would be no need to write an article trying to convince people of who the “real terrorists” are because everyone would already have a pretty good idea. It’s common practice for the left to do things like this. They try so hard to get people to ignore the blatant truth. Sadly, it often works for them.
Indeed. Same with the “white cops are killing black men with impunity” idea. Obviously, the idea is not to report the truth but to manufacture the ideologically driven lie.
If a large minority of the population was as violent as the media attempts to portray them, I doubt there would be any need to More than that I doubt any of them would be alive to report it.
Thanks for this. I first learned that about interpreting stats with the global warming scare. Michael Mann refused to give his data for the hockey stick hypothesis so that other scientists could repeat his computer simulations. I am not a statistician, but those who were said it could not be true and that he forgot to include a lot of data. He still refused to share his data. Now that is supposed to be what scientists do to get to the truth. Hello! It was totally political. That changed everything for me. Gore’s glow was gone. Carbon credits are absurd. The trees are still cut down. You have not saved anything. The real questions are not asked. This is also why I refuse to participate in surveys. They ask the wrong questions. False dichotomies all the way down. If they can get you to say yes or no to something, they have you in their frame of reference and lead you to their conclusions.
Amazing take down. There’s also the issue of long-term distribution. Muslim terrorism is carefully planned to produce high body-count spectacles. So you see extreme outcomes with less predictable regularity. On the other hand, homegrown terror is unorganized. It happens more predictably but with less extreme outcomes. That difference makes it easy for the people shaping public opinion to dismiss Muslim terrorist events as aberrations.
You can’t really avoid occasional shootings by guys like Glenn Miller or Dylan Roof. You can even predict that you’ll see one or two of them each year in a country as big as the U.S.. But there’s a fairly low ceiling to the body count you can expect from these events. No one’s worried about Tactical Bowl Cuts trying to dirty bomb the Super Bowl. Meanwhile the likelihood of a really catastrophic, city-destroying Islamic terror event approaches 100% the more time goes by.
So the failing New York Times and Think Progress must resort to comparing unlike data sets, ignoring huge differences in population, and discounting thwarted attacks. The poor little saps had to work so hard to weave their web of deception. In contrast people who simply report the truth have it easy. The people who work hard are liars and debunkers of their lies, and you deserve credit for being in the latter category. Thanks for this article. It’s a good resource.
There’s one core confusion that tends to lie at the bottom of arguments like this: there is a difference between the likelihood X/Y will kill you and the likelihood you will die from X/Y. We can see this most easily by comparing something like bears and cars. The likelihood that you will die in a car accident is much higher than the likelihood that you will die from a bear attack. But if you run into a group of bears, that doesn’t mean you’re safer spending the day hanging out with them than you driving away, because your chance of being killed by a bear is still way higher than your chance of being killed by a ride in a car.
I will say that the only “criticism” of my argument here that holds any weight is that many of those foiled terror plots were the result of stings that some would consider entrapment. But does that really matter? I don’t think so, because I don’t want to invite someone to live next door to me who deep down would like to blow me up, whether it’s true that it would take someone saying “Hey, Abdul, I have a bomb; would you like a bomb” to get them to actually try to do it or not.
I’ve also yet to see anyone detail how often right–wing “terror” attacks are the products of stings—but on the other hand, I also doubt that quite as many “right–wing extremists” would be gullible enough to take bombs from anonymous strangers to begin with. And I think that what most “right–wing extremists” want is a change in policy, which they understand can’t happen without at least some degree of ‘consent from the governed’, so I expect you would find a lot more understanding amongst those groups that wanton violence is extremely counter–productive to achieving their goals over the long term.
But in any case, even if we accept that criticism, we can already see that Muslims are committing several times more acts of terrorism per capita even before including the foiled plots, anyway. [1]
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