Are "White Supremacist" Terrorist Attacks Really Surging? Doubtful

AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

Domestic terrorism and terrorist attacks are a thing again.

I know, I would have been shocked myself except this is the same tired refrain we hear year after year. Terrorist attacks are up, they tell us, but at least this time they’re not saying “right-wing” domestic terrorism.

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No, now it’s “white supremacist” attacks, and they’re saying they’re at the highest levels in a quarter of a decade.

Yet there are problems with it.

From The Hill:

Domestic terrorist plots and attacks in the United States have skyrocketed to the highest rates recorded in a quarter-century, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

CSIS, a nonpartisan nonprofit that specializes in national security issues, has been monitoring extremism since 1994. There have been 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities since 2015, most of which came from the far right.

Left-wing extremists made up 66 incidents, which led to 19 deaths.

In 2020 alone, far-right extremists committed 73 domestic terrorist incidents, an all-time high record. In total, CSIS has recorded nearly 1,000 incidents since 1994.

Some attacks are harder to decipher, whether it is left or right. However, The Post uses the attackers’ court records, social media postings, news accounts and other material from local, state and federal law enforcement authorities to “refine the types of extremism involved in each case,” reporters wrote.

Now, that sound fair, though it’s not necessarily accurate. Someone who may be on either the left or the right could carry out an attack and it not be politically motivated. Trying to decipher a motive from some people based on their personal politics might be accurate in some cases, but in others it’s not.

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Some people on all ends of the political spectrum are just nuts.

If that were the only problem, it would be enough. It’s not, though.

Predominantly Black churches have been attacked and vandalized at least 15 times in the past six years, one of which was the New Shiloh Christian Center in Melbourne, Fla. The church was set on fire three times in early 2015, and there were no suspects.

Then how do you know why it was burned?

Look, you’re talking about a little more than two churches a year and without suspects, it’s impossible to determine a motive, even from social media postings. Were the churches targeted because their outreach efforts threatened criminal endeavors? Was the pastor a jerk to some kids who decided to pay them back? There are a plethora of reasons for this kind of thing.

Meanwhile, there’s no mention of the number of churches vandalized during last summer’s riots.

Of course, the January 6th storming of the Capitol is categorized as a “white supremacist terrorist attack” rather than a political protest that got out of hand, which is what it was.

So, you see, the problem we have here is that they can’t even categorize attacks we know about correctly, so how can they conjure up accurate motivations for attacks when that information isn’t readily available?

The answer, of course, is that they can’t.

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As per usual, they lump everything they disagree with as “right-wing” or “white supremacist”–including treating those terms as synonyms, it should be noted–and claim that the left just isn’t a threat.

Meanwhile, they conveniently ignore the legion of vandalism carried out by left-wing thugs during the protests, claiming there were only 25 cases of left-wing violence, most of which were during the protests. Those are likely only those cases where charges were filed because we know damn good and well there were a lot more acts of violence and vandalism.

Then again, that’s not what the media wants us to think, so they conveniently leave that part out.

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