The Washington Post recently posted an article and infographic titled “The Rise of Domestic Extremism in America”. the surge reflects a growing threat from homegrown terrorism not seen in a quarter-century, with right-wing extremist attacks and plots greatly eclipsing those from the far left and causing more deaths, the analysis shows.” There are issues I take with the framing used in this article but a few points to set the stage are necessary. Culture wars are harmful to the fabric of the Country, but they are are boon to the puppeteers orchestrating the perfect act of legerdemain, forcing you to look at one hand, while the other picks your pockets. It is much more beneficial to the media elite to have us fighting each other in a tribal war (red vs blue) than to wake us up to the class war that dominates our politics. The binary they’re enforcing, democrat=bad, republican = good, or vice versa, is a treacherous redirect away from their subtle theft of purchasing power and standards of living that we want for all Americans. Democrats and Republicans alike are both quick to spend like a drunken sailor, open up the war chest, and selectively enter wars based on US Interests. While the Ukraine War rages on, mainstream media rarely focuses on broadcasting the horrific mass starvations and casualties in Yemen on your nightly news cycle. Maybe you don’t even know about the War in Yemen. It is a war started unnecessarily by Obama, arming a militia akin to Al Qaeda, and continued by the Trump administration. Trump was supposedly so diametrically opposed to Biden and claimed no new wars, but here we are, still assisting in the massive starvation of the people of Yemen. But, it’s not your fault that you’re woefully misinformed and I truly don’t blame you. Who has the time to keep up with the inundation of the carefully curated 24/7 news cycle? We’re all just trying to survive, raise families, cherish our relationships. Those relationships are being destroyed by tribal politics, nourished by the renewed focus on race, skin color, and ethnicity (See Woke Racism, by John McWhorter).
It seems more and more people are entering the field of politics these days. If they are on team blue they turn on MSNBC, subscribe to Washington Post and the New York Times (plug here to read Buried By the Times, a true story of how the NYT purposely hid the severity of the Holocaust from its readers). If they are on team red they turn on Fox News. The bias towards left or right, largely reliant on feelings, especially when you may be pre-disposed to believe in left or right wing politics based on the community you grow up in, decides which news sources you listen to and believe. Believe me, they are not all reporting on the same thing. Switch between MSNBC and Fox News and you’ll sometimes think you traveled to another dimension, unless of course they’re riling you up to support escalation of US involvement in War.
It’s easier to operate off anger at your fellow citizens than direct your contempt at the Central Bank and Uniparty politicians that have been devaluing your purchasing power and other monetary economic policies that have turned America into a Crony Capitalist hellhole in exchange for the promise of permanent kumbaya and your votes. If after reading these first few paragraphs, you are sitting here thinking that we should focus on race and skin color and that of course all members of the party that oppose what I believe are evil serpents hellbent on banning everything I hold near and dear, I’m not sure there is much I can do. I’d just as likely convince the Pope that there is no God.
This brings me to the newly published piece mentioned at the opening. The Washington Post presents data that shows a surge in homegrown incidents not seen in a quarter-century. Their central claim is that “the surge reflects a growing threat from homegrown terrorism not seen in a quarter-century, with right-wing extremist attacks and plots greatly eclipsing those from the far left and causing more deaths, the analysis shows.” See below for their graphic.
They claim that right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities, the data shows. At the same time, attacks and plots ascribed to far-left views accounted for 66 incidents leading to 19 deaths. It ascribes more than a quarter of these right-wing incidents and about half of the deaths to white supremacy or groups espousing white supremacy. I have multiple problems with the article that make me unwilling to accept it at face value, despite thinking anyone that believes in white supremacy, supports any groups associated with white supremacy, is a vile and despicable human being deserving of contempt.
My first question, and not necessarily the most convincing one, is whether things are correctly categorized into the hate crime column. I would like to start with one incident in particular that demonstrates my skepticism. Let’s start with this headline in GQ regarding the shooting that took place in March 2021 at a nail salon in Atlanta. The shooter claimed that his motivation for the shootings was not racial, but related to the shame of his sex addiction. A viewpoint circulating in some media, and linked here, was that this can’t possibly be true because all of his victims were Asian. The article goes into the long history of government sanctioned discrimination against Asians including the Chinese Exclusion Act and the horrific Japanese Internment Camps (democrat president for all you partisans keeping tally). In my view, this is akin to someone hating Starbucks for their coffee bean labor practices, committing murder in a Starbucks, and then arguing that the person clearly had a grudge against basic white girls. Not only is it malpractice and a distraction from the pornography addiction epidemic and increased isolation of young men and women from human interactions, but it can potentially minimize or cause people to look away from crimes explicitly committed out of racial enmity.
In Waukesha Wisconsin, six people were killed and sixty others were injured. Darrell Brooks, the perpetrator, lived a life mired in nefarious, harmful, and criminal activity including being a registered sex offender, and running over the mother of his child after punching her in the face. He was let out after this vicious crime after five days. In his now deleted social media posts, he frequently called for violence against white people, praised Hitler and posted other anti-Semitic vitriol. Yet, we see no mentions of this man committing a hate crime.
In Fort Worth, Texas, Mali Faisal Akram flew to the US from Pakistan and took people in a Synagogue hostage and demanded that they release Aafia Siddiqui, a woman convicted in 2010 for murdering US personnel in Afghanistan. Mali thought that Jews had a particular pull to get Siddiqui released. Initially, despite the targeting of the synagogue and demanded release of a terrorist, and despite the known anti-semitic rant that the terrorist went on, Matthew DeSarno, the special agent in charge declared but later reversed after a few days that “We do believe that, from engaging with the subject, he was singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community.”
I feel like again, I must re-iterate my political leanings, as they are not right wing nor left wing. I think Donald Trump is a disgrace to the office of the President, but so are most US presidents that foment the usurpation of the constitution using their bloated bureaucracies as a cudgel on the salient political winds of the day. Secondly, as I wrote in my article “New York City's Corrupt Democratic Machine makes New York Less Safe” if we take NYC as an example:
Just look around you! If you view the world through the distorted lens of everything is racist, maybe Adams has a point. But the people that make up the city aren’t the structures. They are individuals and, last I checked, anarchists and white supremacists aren’t running rampant in one of the most diverse, melting pot cities in the country that overwhelmingly elected it’s second Black mayor. To be clear, hate crimes did rise last year according to an article in the New York Post. Hate crimes increased by 139 percent actually. But based on Adams’ words, you’d have thought they were all against Black people. The majority of hate crime attacks were committed against Asian Americans, up 400 percent! Looking at the raw numbers, hate crimes against Asian Americans went from 21 in 2020 to 105 in 2021 in the wake of blame for Coronavirus. Attacks against Jews went up 69%, from 67 attacks to 113. There were 11 hate crimes against white people, up from four in 2020 and 28 attacks on Black people, up almost double from last year’s 15.
I also worry about taking such statistics that the Washington Post presents at face value. After reading Wilfred Reilly’s book, Hate Crime Hoax, I begin to look at incidents like these with skepticism as well as he finds that a large number of hate crimes, regardless of skin color, voting preference or ethnicity have turned out to be hoaxes. He has a whole chapter on hate crimes faked by whites and Donald Trump supporters. If you’re thinking, “why would anybody do that?”, I highly recommend reading that book. One story stands out to me in particular. An arsonist set a firefighters house in New York on fire, he and his family asleep inside, and attempted to blame Black Lives Matter. “Further, there were deadly booby traps left for the first responders that would arrive on the scene including cannisters arranged near the back door filled with ‘flammable objects and gasoline’.” The words “Lie with Pigs, fry like Bacon” were painted on the home. Well, it turned out that investigators suspected that he vandalized his own home and set his own house in fire, something that they could not prove in court after many hours of jury deliberations. My point is not to say that most hate crimes are fake, but that in times of serious tension, there are people that try to exploit and benefit.
Thirdly, I must say this loudly for the people in the back. What you’ve been taught is left and right wing is completely wrong. Donald Trump is NOT a conservative. Name most congressman you can think of and, save the decent Justin Amash that left congress, and I can find you a politically intelligent grifter that does nothing but try to score political points for re-election for fear of getting out of line with party leaders. The right came out swinging at President Biden for pledging to put a woman on the Supreme Court. The right largely remained silent when Donald Trump announced he’d be picking a woman before the evaluations even began. We need to be able to recognize hypocrisy and petulant whining regardless of what “team” we play for. We need to have consistent principles by which we live by to evaluate right from wrong.
Fourthly, in my view, white supremacy is not a right wing ideal. I know you may be thinking to yourself, of course it is! I even understand why you might think as most articles you google would likely have an opposing opinion, but hey this is Opposing Points, so I’d like to help you break free of the left vs right political dichotomy. Wikipedia and textbooks disagree with me, so it is understandable if you do too, but let me walk you through why I believe that we can use logic to determine that white supremacy is not right wing. Identity politics is rooted in Marxism, fascism, communism, you name it. Below, we see the typical spectrum (source: medium)
My argument is that this line is actually oversimplified if you consider the changing definition of liberalism, as it has had to be distinguished from classical liberalism, the views of the founders of the country. Classical liberalism rejects identity politics but instead emphasizes individual freedom unconstrained by the grips of government intervention. It is a very confusing task to try to sort through the various shifts. Your views on left wing vs right wing depends on what your definitions are as well. but we will use the Wikipedia definition as a starting point. Wikipedia defines Fascism as “a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalist characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.” Jonah Goldberg argues in his book “Liberal Fascism” that yesterday’s liberals (by this I mean pre-Trump) are Fascists, something labeled far right on the graph above and by Wikipedia. Goldbergs book is an excellent dissection of liberal politics but where I think Goldberg fails is his lack of acknowledgement that the right wing of the party, the party of George W. (the W is for War Criminal) Bush at the time, and yes, Donald Trump is also composed of big government fascists and has been for quite some time. This is the trick. Both parties have fascist tendencies, but we can’t see the forest through the trees and peel away the layers to see we’re being controlled by two fascist parties that have slightly different priorities depending on where you stand in the culture war, and they use that stance to distract you as they take on more control of your life and destroy the value of the money in your pocket while blaming it on that other guy. This opinion may have you aghast, but I ask that you sit critically with it and assess your own beliefs.
Goldberg writes that the fascist movement was born when “a coalition of intellectuals going by various labels - progressive, communist, socialist, and so forth - believed the era of liberal democracy was drawing to a close. It was time for man to lay aside the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like and rise to the responsibility of remaking the world in his own image.”
Let’s start with the brutal dictator, Benito Mussolini. As Goldberg writes, Mussolini was a fascist and prior to to their laws passed rounding up Jews in 1938, was fondly viewed by Jewish people. At the time, Jews were serving in the Italian government and the fascist party as high ranking officials. In fact, Mussolini was supported by the Chief Rabbi of Rome, and a large portion of the Italian Jewish and world Jewish community. Jews were actually OVERREPRESENTED in the fascist movement in Italy until 1938, after Hitler’s invasion of Italy when the Jews were put on trains to the horrific death camps. Liberal progressives at the time wrote glowingly of Mussolini, according to Goldberg’s research, one even remarking that dictatorship is the best form of government if you have the right dictator. This isn’t exclusive to the US. Winston Churchill, the revered former leader of Britain remarked that Mussolini was the world’s greatest living lawgiver. In fact, Mussolini likely approved and maybe wrote, according to Goldberg, an article deriding fascism as “one hundred percent racism.” Considering Fascism sits to the right of Nazism on that spectrum, that’s an odd statement if it were true that Fascism is a right wing ideology, even further right than Nazism.
In 1919, Goldberg writes that Mussolini helped found the Fasci di combattimento in Milan to form a group of pro-war leftists from socialist veteran groups to anarchist to nationalist. Let me know if any of these look familiar:
Lower the minimum voting age to 18, the minimum age for representatives to 25, and universal suffrage, including for women.
The abolition of the Senate and the creation of a national technical council on intellectual and manual labor, industry, commerce and culutre
end of the draft
repeal of titles of nobility
a foreign policy aimed at expanding Italy’s will and power in opposition to all foreign imperialisms
The prompt enactment of a state law sanctioning a legal workday of eight actual hours of work for all workers
A minimum wage
the creation of various government bodies run by worker’s representatives
Reform of the old-age and pension system
The obligation of the state to build rigidly secular schools
A large progressive tax
The list goes on. As Goldberg eloquently states, “ah yes. Those anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labor-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth-confiscating, draft-ending, secularist right-wingers!” The last point I’ll bring up from Jonah’s book, as more can be gained from reading it than me summarizing a few salient points is this.
The Nazi’s rose to power exploiting anti-capitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism. Moreover, Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other places and times: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, an emphasis on the organic and holistic - including environmentalism, health food and exercise- and, most of all, the need to “transcend” notions of class. For these reasons, Hitler deserves to be placed firmly on the left because first and foremost he was a revolutionary. Broadly speaking, the left is the party of change, the right the party of the status quo. On this score, Hitler was in no sense, way, shape, or form a man of the right.
Jonah’s blind spot at the time was republicans though his focus was on liberals for this book. It is my belief that republicans also largely stand for Fascist principles as well. The bailouts were performed by George W. Bush in 2008, a fascistic enterprise to "save the free market”. Bankers are enriched at the hands of you, the average person. Airlines are bailed out so that they can kick you when you’re down with change fees, leave you stranded, and increase baggage costs. The republican and democrat false dichotomy isn’t working for us. I guess what I’m saying is that at it’s roots, a true right winger today would be a classical liberal in yesteryear. A true right winger opposes a government that has the power to confiscate and redistribute wealth to corporations and power to unilaterally launch wars without a vote from congress. We can’t look at Donald Trump and say that’s a right winger in the same way we can’t look at a cat and say it’s an elephant, or maybe more accurately, call a wolf in sheep’s clothing an actual sheep. If we look at Justin Amash, the former representative from Michigan, or Ron Paul, the former representative from Texas, we see individuals hyper-focused on freeing the people from the albatross of government and increasing freedom. The left wing and much of the right wing today wants to regulate, tax, spend, engage in conflict, and focus on identity politics.
In summary, fascism, marxism, socialism, all play around with identity politics, a staple of today’s left wing ideology. The spectrum mentioned above lists anarchism as a left wing extreme. However, Anarcho-capitalism, a political philosophy that says that governments are not needed but that private property rights are needed is not a left wing ideology, but rather a right wing ideology because the right wing of politics wants less government, which the Republican party pretends to desire. Barry Goldwater, one of America’s last great conservatives to receive the Republican nomination for President, was staunchly pro-liberty and pro-constitution. Since Goldwater, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have drastically shifted to the the left on both social and economic issues, in fact it was so subtle that you might have missed it. Obama did not recognize gay marriage until his Presidency. Donald Trump was seemingly the first President to enter office in open support of gay marriage and appointed the first gay cabinet member, Richard Grenell. This shift to the left from both parties meant more government intervention for the rest of us but slightly different focuses depending on which party was in control. By re-defining and re-labeling what constitutes right wing, it re-aligns the culture war that the media and elites want us to be fighting as we enter a potential food, energy, and financial crisis. The label also means that anyone associated with the republican party can be labeled a racist, bigoted, foaming at the mouth fascist and anyone associated with the democratic party can be labeled a pedophile, groomer, or other tribal-based derogatory names. At the end of the day, spectrums don’t matter and the country is being destroyed from the inside out by fringe groups and their enablers in both parties support largely fascist ideals. That’s all I’ve got today. There’s a lot of reading that can be done in these topics and I’m happy to recommend if asked. Thanks for tuning into Opposing Points.