FACT FOCUS: Heritage Foundation leader wrong to say most political violence is committed by the left
FACT FOCUS: Heritage Foundation leader wrong to say most political violence is committed by the left
The leader of a conservative think tank claims that most recent political violence in the U.S. has been caused by left-wing extremists, but the data paints a different picture.
Holy shit, people are still trying that lie? We've known that's a lie for a while:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/28/extremism-right-wing-deaths/
Reality means nothing to conservatives or they wouldn't be conservatives.
I heard a guy with a theory that it's all kayfabe and it makes so much sense. They know it's a lie and they believe it because it's more satisfying than reality.
Recently was talking to a conservative guy about the rising fascist on the right.
I wasn’t calling him a fascist, just pointing out that extreme views are brewing on the right and I think that could be a problem.
He just responded with “but the left are the ones committing all the genocides”. No examples or anything to back that up.
I honestly didn’t know how to respond. He also supports Israel so… they literally live in a different reality. They probably consume propaganda that constantly tells them the left are this terrible boogeymen.
It's such a flagrant lie, too. I mean, it's not like it's in the realm of close, of that it depends on how you interpret the data - there are way more on the right, period.
No, see, they are wholesome Christians who worship guns and fear mongering. They love phrases like fuck around and find out, don't tread on me (or else), and something along the lines of this house is protected by Smith and Wesson. But Lincoln was a Republican killed by Democrats, so they are evil murderers. Please ignore that in today's politics he would have been a far left woke Democrat killed by a Republican....
I hate putting this out there, but my hyper conservative dad when confronted with these and other links here about RvL terrorism..."because conservatives have the conviction and drive to take action!"
cant. win. JFC
In reality they aren't true conservatives. They are a perverted and warped version that was invented to fulfill the MAGA Nazi agenda.
Right-wing extremists were just as likely to commit violent acts as those motivated by Islamic extremism, the researchers found. Left-wing extremists were a distant third.
Word.
The only thing white people are actually currently embracing with supremacy: violence against their own citizens.
With a majority of trans women being on the left, shouldn't we be winning this by ubermensch margins?
He is projecting
GOP
His lips are moving.
Q: How can you tell when Donald Trump is lying? A: The tip of his ear is missing.
There should be consequences to blatant lies from the media and our politicians.
There are, already; their preferred candidates usually get a bump in polling. Why let the truth stand in the way of that?
It impresses me that people haven't gone to Fox News HQ or any other to do something about it
They'll just flip it and go see, we were right, the left are terrorists!! There needs to be enforced legislation. News should be news. It has to be factual and unbiased. Instead, we have corporations saying whatever the hell they want so their guy gets in and hurts the people they hate while giving them tax breaks.
I can't find anything in the article that suggests a reporter called out his lies to his face.
We need some real journalists covering these ghouls, not stenographers.
Got to find a way to pay them well tho
Yeah, revenue from click farming isn’t it or we’re doomed to drivel.
If the Left perpetrated violence the way the Right says we do, we'd have executed most of their leaders by now.
I'm anti-violence, fwiw. It's one of the reasons I believe we're gonna lose in the longterm. We have fucking morality and ethics to contend with and they just lie and cheat openly and shamelessly.
Yes, but that's not going to change the minds of the people he was talking to.
As usual, the lie gets halfway around the world, before the truth has got its boots on.
One must really be missing more than few bricks off a wall to buy any of the statistics a right-wing think tank spits out.
Even the work "think tank" is disingenuous.
I think a lot of humanity just has a deep seated need to hear their own opinions repeated by somebody they think is better than them, be it an important man in a tie, a newspaper headline, or even just an influencer on TikTok.
And once they hear that one opinion, it leaves them wide open to accept pretty much anything that comes out of their mouths.
The old media, the TV networks, social media... It's all there to push their own ideas masquerading as your own. Find an opening and shovel it in. I can't claim immunity to it either. I'm perfectly happy to see "Brexit voters had lower levels of education" as a headline and think "yup, that makes sense", while for all I know it could be complete bollocks.
There's so much shit being thrown at you 24 hours a day, that you can't even begin to fact check all of it.
No, they think. They think up lies to tell.
Facts
1: Young people are predominantly left-leaning
2: Instances of criminal violence decline with age
3: Police/Military can't commit criminal violence, because they are our friends. So nothing they do counts.
Conclusion
The majority of violence must be committed by The Left. I'm sorry, but facts don't care about your feelings.
A missing /s? I guess pointing out one of many reasons, #3 is blatantly false. There are countless cops who have been charged with crimes that they commited while on duty, same for the malitary.
I hear the right are called the right because they're always right.
Checkmate atheists!
Abortions are political violence according to the right.
They would probably agree with you on that one.
And murdering abortion providers are actual murders
Uh, January 6th? I'm pretty sure the sum total of political violence on that day swamps everything else for years.
Everyrhing else was already still swamped by the Oklahoma City bombing.
The people listening to him don't give two shits about the truth.
Even if heritage was correct and left-wing terrorism was more common, it wouldn't change the fact that left-wing terrorism is often way more moral than right-wing terrorism.
Targetting ultra-wealthy, alt-right or similar organizations in assassinations/kidnappings/robberies is infinitely better than committing ethnically-driven murders and mass shootings.
It's the same with petty theft being a fraction of what pay wage and time clock theft is yet widely more reported on.
I think the reason why they say "most political violence is left-wing violence" is because they want to convince their actual audience, the donor class, into supporting a fascist takeover by appealing to the "class warfare" concept that conceptually might frighten them more than a fascist USA.
Exactly along the same lines that you're thinking, the targets of right-wing political violence tend to be protestors, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, low-level government employees...left-wing political violence if it were directed properly would be more targeted on things like the ultra-rich (aka Republicans' real constituency).
Um, of course it's wrong. The DHS (correctly) identified the right wing domestic terrorist threat wayyyyy back under Bush.
Naturally, the radical right wing freaked right out over this revelation.
This is the “bloodless revolution” psycho.
They keep lying, and maybe we should make it come true if they want a dictatorship.
If sick burns and pointing out logical fallacies are political violence, he's absolutely right, GOP gets brutalized daily.
Don't forget about how Huckabee was denied her CHEESE PLATTER!
It was just like the Holocaust, I tell you.
MAGA is their name. Projection is their game.
Ah yes the extremely violent left which is failing because its always trying to play by the rules and be politically correct while the right does whatever they want.
AP is doing the Heritage Foundation's work with this article.
The unhinged fascists don't need to be right. They don't need to be taken at face value. They don't need anything but publicity, and AP is giving it to them.
I want the left to have the hit the most fascists with milkshakes award.
So far we know of Kellie-Jean bingbong whatever her name is and Kim Jeong Gnome the right wing camera gremlin so I'd say the odds are in our favor.
People even slightly left of center and minorities should exercise their constitutional right to bear arms. When the proverbial hits the fan, milkshakes while delicious won’t cut it.
Right-wing extremists were just as likely to commit violent acts as those motivated by Islamic extremism, the researchers found. Left-wing extremists were a distant third.
I can't speak for every leftist, but I don't think anything can really be accomplished through individual, random acts of violence. Then again, I don't really think very much of anything can be accomplished through any means, really. I've come to see hope as futile and change as impossible. But, I do think acts of violence are especially futile. Plus, I don't really want to hurt anyone, even people I don't like very much.
I'm pretty sure if you, like, locked the doors at cpac and filled the rooms with carbon monoxide so they all died, you'd accomplish quite a lot. It wouldn't fix everything, but a lot of evil doers would be gone.
I don't know, I'm not so sure. The problems are systemic, not necessarily a result of a few people of poor moral character just doing evil things. So, even if you eliminate all the evil-doers, because they were products of the system, new evil-doers will emerge to take their place, so long as the system remains unchanged.
Several things can be accomplished: instilling fear, forcing disproportionate responses, provide thinly veiled excuses for... well, almost anything.
It's just that there's nothing positive that can be accomplished that way.
Lasting change only comes with compassion and understanding. Violence does not create either of those.
I fuckin wish
Disinformation is a powerful tool, that's all this is. He knows better.
Remember that word for political violence?
Terrorism.
Every time they say it, they add to the 'evidence' of it being true. This is the purpose of the Heritage foundation, who wrote Project 2025.
Common misconception. He was actually saying most political violence is committed by people politically to his left, which I think is undoubtedly true.
So I have very, very long copy-pastas I made from my reddit days detailing that this is pure and utter bullshit. Not just in recent history, but throughout our history. There was a momentary blip where leftist eco terrorism spiked but it was nothing comparable in terms of the homicidal violence of the right at any point in our history.
For every left-wing act of serious violence, I can name 3 or more from the right.
there are wikipedia articles about both of these topics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_terrorism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_terrorism
and, of course,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_violence
edit:
this is only one metric, but i think it's notable that there are about 80 references on the left wing page and approximately 3.5 times that many on the right wing page.
That's just the notorious Wikipedia Far-Left bias.
Like, consider the Comet Pingpong Shooting. You counted that as an act of right wing violence. But what about all the cases of adrenochrome harvesting that happened in the basement? Why aren't Hilary Clinton and John Podesta on this list?
Hell, not a single victim of the Hilary Clinton Death List is anywhere in these articles. Why aren't we counting the brutal murder of Jeffrey Epstein as an act of Left Wing Violence, eh?
Pretty suspicious if you ask me.
No but it will be if they continue FAFO is coming.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
THE FACTS: Roberts’ remarks came in response to questions about comments earlier this month in which he said the country was in the midst of “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Increasingly, he said, many of those responsible for political violence espouse “muddled ideologies” combining a rejection of authority with conservative views, for instance, or supposed anarchists who say they support a strong central government.
Questions about political violence and its place in American democracy are getting renewed attention following Saturday’s attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, a Republican.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was gravely wounded in a 2011 shooting outside an Arizona grocery store, had been threatened and windows of her congressional offices in Tucson knocked out after she voted in favor of President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform.
Last year, a man with a history of mental illness went to the Fairfax, Virginia, district office of Democratic U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly, looking to kill him with a baseball bat.
People typically overstate the violent intentions of those with different ideologies, too, Westwood said, with one party believing the other is far more willing to commit violence to further their political agenda.
The original article contains 848 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Specially when the left is virtually nonexistent
I don't think that's true. The "left" as I understand it, is a largely heterogenous, loosely united coalition of all kinds of different factions beset by a mountain of conflicting interests and decades of infighting. Some factions are united by choice, and others are there because they would have died out once the USA became consumed by the dominant two-party system we currently languish under.
The Right isn't like this, or at least it's not as bad. Despite having just as many if not more factions with just as many if not more differences and conflicting interests, they value loyalty and in-group cohesion, which keeps them coming together every 4 years to form a surprisingly unified front. It also helps that they all fucking hate anyone even slightly left of center and most will vote for a Republican they despise over a Democrat they kinda sorta like on a personal level.
Consider your average Democratic Senator/Representative. They lean left on many things and have the backing of party leadership. To win their election, they need two things, votes and funding. They know that there are many things their voter base is passionate about, such as healthcare reform, police reform, campaign finance reform, housing and income inequality, and so on. They know their voter base has no hope of ever getting these things from Republicans, but unfortunately they are things that the donor class tends to despise. When faced with the challenge of appealing to all the different factions of the left while staying within the good graces of the wealthy donor class, the Democrat will pivot away from "policy" and focus more on "process". Generally uncontroversial things like bipartisanship, decorum, and compromise. They don't really take stances on wedge issues unless they run in a solid blue district where they can take that stance and not break up the coalition or lose donor support.