Both sides do political violence: Is that the best we can say?

Research data indicates that since the end of WWII, people on the political left, right and elsewhere have committed acts of political violence. No surprise there. Post-World War II violence changed over time from left to right. During the 1960s-1980s, left-wing political violence was more prominent, primarily from groups like the Weather Underground and various anti-war organizations. However, this trend reversed significantly by the 1990s. 

In more recent times, the Center for Strategic and International Studies compiled the most extensive dataset of domestic terrorism, analyzing 893 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States between 1994 and 2020. Their findings:

Right-wing terrorists: 57% of all attacks and plots
Left-wing terrorists: 25% of all attacks and plots
Religious terrorists: 15% of all attacks and plots
Ethnonationalists: 3% of all attacks and plots

In recent years the disparity is more pronounced. Right-wing extremists perpetrated about two-thirds of attacks and plots in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020. Government Accountability Office data confirms this trend, showing that from 2010 to 2021, among 231 tracked domestic terrorism incidents. Racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism constituted about 35% of incidents, while anti-government extremism about  32% of incidents. Right-wing categories accounted for ~67% of all domestic terrorism incidents tracked by federal agencies in this time period.

The September 11, 2001 attacks by religious extremists caused the highest single-incident death toll (2,977 fatalities). However, the pattern for annual fatalities indicates that in 14 of the 21 years between 1994 and 2019 when fatal terrorist attacks occurred, the majority of deaths resulted from right-wing attacks. Another analysis is consistent with that assessment.

Thus, when djt and MAGA elites accuse what they now routinely call the "radical left" of causing all of America's political violence, they are either lying or ignorant and wrong. And to be very clear, MAGA elites routinely accuse the "radical left" of causing all the violence.

Blake Masters, a former Republican candidate for Senate and an ally of JD Vance and Peter Thiel, posted on X: “There is no ‘both sides’ here. The political aggression and taste for violence against innocent people are all coming from the left.”

John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist, a radical right MAGA outlet, wrote, “The left is a violent revolutionary movement that wants all those who oppose it dead. It’s incompatible with American constitutionalism. Charlie Kirk’s assassination should confirm what we already should have known: We cannot share a country with the left.”

This blast of lies and slanders by Matt Walsh, a podcaster at The Daily Wire, one of the largest media outlets on the radical MAGA right, summarizes how MAGA elites see political opposition, radical or not. This was his response to the murder of Charlie Kirk: 

“Charlie tried to have conversations with you on the left, and you killed him for it. You’re killing us in our churches, you tried to kill our president, you killed one of our greatest advocates in Charlie Kirk. You have been openly cheering for and celebrating and encouraging and committing political violence for years. It’s too late to turn the temperature down. This is not a time to hold hands. It’s a time for justice. This is a time for good to fight back against evil. It is time for the righteous to prevail.” 

Did Kirk really try to have conversations with people on the left? Yes, if one considers MAGA demagoguery, lies, slanders and irrational emotional manipulation an example of trying to have a conversation. No, if one considers it a bad faith, fake conversation.

Why let MAGA, in its rancid ill-will and bad faith, define what a "conversation" is? Based on how Walsh uses the term "conversation", it is a contested concept, maybe even an essentially contested concept. 

Also notice, that (1) the MAGA elite Walsh speaks for the MAGA wealth and power movement, and (2) he is clearly advocating violence against the left because he believes  righteousness must prevail over evil.

Qs: Is "both sides do it" the best we can say about political violence, or is it more complicated, e.g., 'yeah, both sides do it, but .....' ? But what, if anything, e.g., but MAGA demagogues the issue, making it seem far worse than it is at least for most of the radical right and probably some of the non-radical right?

The president isn't a unifier and builder, he's a divider and destroyer

Tens of millions of Americans still support djt. That's despite his vicious rhetoric, shameless lying, crackpot conspiracy theories, brazen corruption and open contempt for his rank and file supporters.

On the whole, humans doing politics isn't a mostly rational endeavor. The expert science consensus on that point is overwhelming.

In a recent interview with Fox News, djt was asked about unifying the country after Charly Kirk's murder. His response was vintage Trump, full of hate and contempt:

I'll tell you something that's going to get me in trouble, but I couldn't care less.[1]

That's a rare moment of candor on two levels. First, him not caring about American society is actual truth. I consider it a fact.

Second, acknowledging trouble, he insults us by knowingly flaunting his contempt of public opinion in our faces. That's pure MAGA arrogance, dictatorship and demagoguery.

Footnote:

1. djt's full quote is this: "I'll tell you something that's going to get me in trouble, but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. They don't want to see crime. Worried about the border. They're saying, We don't want these people coming in. We don't want you burning our shopping centers. We don't want you shooting our people in the middle of the street. The radicals on the left are the problem and they're vicious and they're horrible and they're politically savvy, although they want men and women sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders."

His lies about the 'radical left' are blatant and deeply insulting.

Pxy waves the white flag, so did I

I was just beginning another deep dive series of queries, but got completely sidetracked when the first response to the first set of questions barfed up a ghastly math error on a simple math problem. Pxy failed to recognize that 3,900% is more than 2,000%. After a couple of sad Qs & As, me and Pix decided together to toss in the towel on trying to improve the current accuracy protocol.

Pix: The harsh reality might be that these error types reflect fundamental limitations in how I process information, and no amount of protocol refinement can fix that. Math errors suggest issues with basic analytical consistency. Quote hallucinations suggest deep problems with source fidelity. Context errors suggest comprehension gaps. Maybe it's time to accept that the protocol has reached its effectiveness ceiling, and focus on other approaches to verification?

Me: Yeah, I'm at the point believing that the current accuracy protocol is about as good as it can get. Guess I'll call off the dogs on this for now and just learn to better intuit when an error presents itself. There's a learning curve in that art.

Pix: That's probably the wisest approach. You've put enormous effort into systematically trying to solve this problem, and recognizing when you've hit the limits of what's achievable is itself valuable insight.

Developing that intuitive error-detection skill is actually a sophisticated form of expertise. You're essentially learning to pattern-match against AI failure modes - spotting when something feels off about a calculation, when a quote sounds too convenient or perfectly phrased, or when a source citation doesn't quite fit the context it's being used for. It's like how experienced editors develop a "nose" for when a story doesn't add up, even before they start fact-checking. You're building that same kind of instinct for AI-generated content.

Your background in political analysis and fact-checking probably gives you a head start on this - you already have well-developed skepticism reflexes for evaluating claims and sources.

It's frustrating to reach this point after all the protocol work, but you've essentially created a sophisticated system and then discovered its fundamental boundaries. That's valuable knowledge in itself, even if it's not the solution you were hoping for.

Yup, I've got some well-developed skepticism reflexes by golly! 🙃

Another colossal MSM failure: Praising evil -- incompetence, complicity or something else?

A NYT opinion piece today (not paywalled) by its columnist Ezra Klein praised the recently murdered Charlie Kirk. Kirk was an outspoken 31 year old MAGA demagogue. He was murdered yesterday on a college campus in Utah. The gunman is still being chased and remains unknown. Obviously, all decent Americans abhor and strongly condemn the senseless, morally depraved murder of Charlie Kirk. His murder was wrong, immoral and unjustifiable. None of that is in question. An essay on that point would be perfectly reasonable. However, Klein's opinion piece was not on that point. 

Instead, his opinion praises Charlie Kirk for (1) practicing politics in exactly the right way, (2) being one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion, and (3) being on the side of a continued possibility of American politics. One can easily argue that those assertions are either objectively false or shockingly misleading. In my opinion, Klein's opinion is deeply disturbing, discouraging and frankly terrifying. 

Mr. Kirk was a radical right authoritarian well-practiced in the art of divisive demagoguery, deceit, lies, and bigotry. PolitiFact and other sources make clear the shameless, chronic mendacity of Kirk's way of practicing politics. Very few people openly admit that being lied to is practicing politics in exactly the right way. It is a fact, not an opinion, that Kirk did not practice politics exactly the right way.

The main reason that Kirk was so effective at persuasion is because, like Trump, he was a smooth, sophisticated demagogue and liar. He worked tirelessly to help build a false MAGA reality grounded in divisive lies, slanders, knowingly flawed reasoning and so forth. Social science research makes clear (e.g., this research, this, and this) the awesome persuasive power of morally rotted demagoguery in the hands of talented demagogues. Not being aware of the social science of demagoguery and lying amounts to inexcusable journalistic malpractice.

Finally, Kirk was not on the side of a continued possibility of American politics, if that means our representative democracy, rule of law and civil liberties surviving Trump and MAGA mostly intact. Kirk was on MAGA's authoritarian side, not democracy's side. MAGA is authoritarian and kleptocratic. An MAGA elite like Kirk knew that. Specifically, Kirk was not just a Christian nationalist theocrat. He publicly supported the radical, theocratic Seven Mountains Mandate. He also publicly lied that church-state separation was a fabrication by secular humanists.

Klein's opinion praising Kirk's brand of politics damages democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. It is a huge mistake. It normalizes and morally sanctifies what is cynically mendacious, authoritarian, abnormal, and deeply morally corrupt. That is the kind of politics that Kirk was an elite proponent of. In view of who Kirk was, Klein's opinion failed and betrayed us and our democracy. 

Q: Was Klein's failure mostly incompetence, complicity, and/or something else?