There Is No ‘Surge’ in Right-Wing Violence

A Washington Post “analysis” of domestic terrorism argues that attacks from white supremacists and other “far-right attackers” have been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency and “surged since President Trump took office.” It’s a familiar storyline meant to assure liberals that yes, Trump-motivated right-wing terrorists are running wild. There are, however, a few problems with this proposition.

For one thing, even if we accept the numbers the Post offers, the use of the word “surge” — meaning a sudden, powerful forward or upward movement — strains credibility. There’s no evidence of a “surge,” either in historical context or as a matter of ideological preference.

According to The Washington Post, which relies on Global Terrorism Database data, there were zero acts of right-wing terrorism in the entire nation in 2002. Since then, we have seen a “surge,” to 36 in a nation of 325-plus million people in 2017. Among those acts, there were 11 fatalities.

In other words, fewer homicides were committed by political terrorists of any stripe in the United States in 2017 than were committed by undocumented immigrants in the state of Texas alone.

Then again, even if we use the criteria offered by the GTD, we need to be exceptionally generous to even get to 36 incidents of right-wing violence in 2017. (I could find only 32.)

For example, although the Post acknowledges that the Las Vegas shooter’s motivations are still unknown, the GTD had no problem categorizing the murderer of 58 people as an “anti-government extremist.” And it takes these sorts of assumptions to get in the vicinity of a “surge” in right-wing terrorism.

Of the 32 incidents I was able to find, 12 featured perpetrators who were merely “suspected” of being right-wing terrorists. Some of these incidents could have been the work of one person, as in the pellet gun shootings of Muslims in New York. In other incidents, we are asked to treat patently insane people as if they had coherent political agendas.

Still other events are even more opaque. In San Juan, Puerto Rico — apparently a hotbed of white supremacy — an incendiary device was thrown into a gay nightclub. No one was injured, thank goodness. Also, no one was caught, and no one claimed responsibility for the act. Yet the episode doesn’t even earn a “suspected” designation from GTD.

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