The abject denial of left-wing violence in the media and the correlating hysteria about right wing violence is disturbing and is obviously fueling the false sense of self-righteousness that is driving that very violence. Anyone with a shred of integrity denounces ALL violence, even if the perpetrators share your ideology.
To help burst anyone's delusions, here's just a few recent left-wing violent incidents off the top of my head.
You're blaming left-wing rhetoric for right-wing violence. That doesn't compute. The voices shaping the narrative on the right have agency. They are not puppets of the left, and they don't get to simply point at woke Twitter and say, "They made me do it."
There is a rot in American culture that is giving rise to anti-democratic and racist violence, it needs to be rooted out, and it has found shelter and succor not in radical university campuses or woke social media, but in right-wing America.
See what I mean? There's always an excuse for leftist calls for violence; whereas right-wing calls for peace like Trump's recent tweets are akshually dogwhistles for violence. I'm disgusted.
It just jumps so easily to your mind how to defend, defend, defend leftist violence; you don't even consider yourself doing it. You too have trained yourself well as an ideological crusader.
If there is far more violent rhetoric coming from the left, then you would expect to see the rise of said nutjobs committing murder and what not.
Yet curiously, we've seen the rise of mass murders and hate come from the far right. How does that work with the idea that the left is somehow more violent than the right? Why is it okay for the right to normalize violence?
Violence can come from the left or the right. Sure, there might be a "reckoning" where the 1% are punished for their alleged misdeeds. Their might also be a "reckoning" where leftists are punished for spreading an allegedly subversive and counterproductive ideology. Both have certainly happened in the past.
The problem with your reasoning, is that you have already assumed that you've won the intellectual debate and so your opponents are only acting from self-interest. But the main "reactionary" posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796842 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796746) contain good counterarguments to the article that you haven't addressed.
Yes, it is extremely difficult to believe that you "routinely have to hear from left-leaning friends about how [you and your] family should be killed". It's so comically exaggerated that I must assume you're either trolling or delusional.
Most charitably, my guess is you've developed a persecution complex which has you hearing a comment like (as an example) "the US would be better off if the GOP just disappeared" as "we must murder all conservatives".
Meanwhile, one side of the political spectrum appears more likely to inspire actual politically-motivated violence, and it's not the one you seem to be pointing the finger at:
> In short, our individual-level examination found that among radicalized individuals in the United States, those adhering to a left-wing ideology were markedly less likely to engage in violent ideologically motivated acts when compared to right-wing individuals.
...
> When compared to individuals associated with a right-wing ideology, individuals adhering to a left-wing ideology had 68% lower odds of engaging in violent (vs. nonviolent) radical behavior (b = -1.15, SE = 0.13, odds ratio [OR] = 0.32, P < 0.001). On the other hand, the difference between individuals motivated by Islamist and right-wing causes was not significant (b = 0.05, SE = 0.14, OR = 1.05, P = 0.747). Expressed in terms of predicted probabilities, the probability of left-wing violent attack was 0.33, that of right-wing violent attack was 0.61, and that of Islamist violent attack was 0.62.
Which, of course, is just more data backing up the many many analyses that right-wing violence is by far a greater threat than left-wing violence (this is from 2020):
> Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57 percent—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25 percent committed by left-wing terrorists, 15 percent by religious terrorists, 3 percent by ethnonationalists, and 0.7 percent by terrorists with other motives.
...
> Our data suggest that right-wing extremists pose the most significant terrorism threat to the United States, based on annual terrorist events and fatalities.
In fact, it's become institutionalized as this point. A recent poll showed that '30% of Republicans agree with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.' Alarming? I'd say so.
So, hey, let's pretend for a moment that you are in fact surrounded by crazed lefties that talk to you about exterminating you and your family over your political views. There's one big difference between them and folks on the American right: They're far less likely to actually do anything about it.
It’s not “blame”, it’s looking at causality to try to understand how to get us out of this mess. I’m looking at why race ideologies (and violence) have exploded over the last decade in the same way we would look at the causes of a crime surge.
It doesn’t absolve individuals, but it gives the rest of us an idea about where to focus our efforts: on the influential institutions who are driving race ideology on the left and right. It’s better to plug the leak than try and save the boat by scooping water out.
Anyway, right-wing violence isn’t the only threat—left wing people campaign against liberties (especially free speech and equality) and they have their own violence (nationwide riots, property damage, assaults, and even the occasional terrorism). Moreover, left-wing people have their own anti-democratic bent: the “not my president” stuff in 2016 and calls for revolution, agitating for and rationalizing political violence, etc. I’m not comparing left-wing and right-wing sins, but rather noting that we want to defend against both and mercifully the solution is the same: deradicalize institutions.
Its not false. I see plenty of calls to violence from the left on reddit. Some of it is overt, like calling for summary execution of conservatives and religious officials in the same vein as in many communist revolts. Much of the time it's slightly more subtle, like calling for violence against "Nazis" while simultaneously calling large segments of their political opponents "Nazis".
Just browse a left leaning subreddit like LateStageCapitalism or even just /r/politics and you'll see calls to violence from the left.
You are the one claiming leftist violence is just a fluke, just kids having fun with robbing, beating and arson. At the same time claiming a much smaller right-wing transgression is the end of the world. The are an examples of right-wing terrorist actions that are much much more despicable and truly destructable. Unlike you I have no problem condemning either side when they are wrong.
>> That doesn't excuse it by any means, course, but it's so old as to be irrelevant to today's discussion.
You must be kidding. Should we also not talk about people and ideology that brought us world war 2, since it has been even longer then the Vietnam war?
"They (who?) have a higher headcount so our violence is OK"
Conservatives call out and distance themselves from the far-right and violence. A few deranged lunatics on the fringes of society do not represent conservative views. By attempting to disenfranchise conservatives, as the media are constantly doing, then it's no accident that there are an increased number of incidents coming from the mentally unstable who are the most misrepresented.
The media are complicit in enabling and encouraging far-left violence, and are attempting to push the culture further and further to the left, even disenfranchising moderate liberals in the process who no longer want anything to do with them (who in turn get labeled "far-right Nazi's" for the non-conformance.)
Left/Right violence is still dwarfed by Islamist terror incidents. Christians are still the most persecuted peoples on Earth. There are indeed problems on both the political extremes that we should all be working to tackle together, but apparently, there's no such thing as going too far to the left, as the current democrat candidates are competing for the title of who can go furthest. (I think we know the outcome, but if you live in the bubble of a college campus or in SV, you might not have an accurate gauge on reality).
You might want to examine your priors. What if the issues you see as symptomatic of wide-spread left wing violence don't look the same way when when considered in the cold light of maximizing advertising dollars?
The author of this article is a conservative. Noticed how he went out of his way to appear politically neutral. Notice how one of the two comments to this post is attacking him on a reputational basis.
This is the problem I see and likely the problem the author sees even if he's veiling it. The left wing specifically keeps disregarding other peoples views wholesale on a reputational basis. When I make posts online left-wingers regularly dig into my post history to find a reason to discredit me while right wingers don't even bother looking. If I'm making a right-wing point just like the author I go to pains to obscufate the fact I'm making a conservative argument. Otherwise making the argument is pointless because your intended audience, those with left wing views, won't read it.
I don't mean to make a completely partisan shitting on the left post. I have voted left wing in every election I've been a part of. I blame the uptick in politically motivated violence on the right. I believe "scientific racism" is increasingly becoming mainstreamed on the right through "red pills" as an explanation for say why inequity in employment/crime stats exists and is fair.
However holy shit merely talking to the right these days can cause a whole bunch of people to hold you in contempt. It ultimately will and has backfired because it's entrenching intellectual blindness which is bad for the left and bad for society.
To be fair, whilst the modern, Western extreme left are generally less violent, there's no shortage of extreme left media that's designed to engender hatred of perceived groups of enemies far more than propose solutions, and certain extreme left factions which will go out of their way to defend state use of violence by notionally left wing or "anti-imperialist" governments, offer explicit support or defences for certain militant Islamist groups, or in the context of the modern UK extreme left, identifying "Zionists" to be purged from public life...
There's a reason some portion of the left is pretty intolerant of the current situation - it literally results in violence to people who don't even share their opinions in the first place.
I wanted to stress that I didn't mean it as a leftwing phenomenon. It's just that the GP seemed to describe it as a peculiarly rightwing one, and I think we've seen instances on the left as well (particularly recently). And while the left is generally much more averse to physical violence than the right, it's also more socially accepted and mainstream, so the outrage storms are more pronounced and the calls for censorship and sometimes criminalisation meet much less resistance.
Right wing and left wing violence and divisive rhetoric is at an all time high and each side wants to act like it's not happening despite clear evidence to the contrary.
Generally it gets lost in the "who is worse than who" and some unmentioned desire for a regression to the mean. The problem is that a regression to the mean is either prompted by an event or time.
To help burst anyone's delusions, here's just a few recent left-wing violent incidents off the top of my head.
http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/05/24/berkeley-college-prof...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/us/dallas-quiet-after-pol...
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/17/us/baton-route-police-shooting...
https://www.rt.com/usa/366452-portland-riots-anti-trump/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mob-at-middlebury-148858650...
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