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Notes -
Lies, Damn Lies, and X
A lot of conversation after the Charlie Kirk assassination has revolved around whether the left or right wing is more violent. See here, here, here, here, and here (this one an actual politician, Rep. Seth Moulton). I won't belabor the point by finding everyone with a blue checkmark that's said something on the subject recently, I'll just say it's a conversation that is happening. Much of the conversation revolves around repeating a claim made by the usual suspects (various left-wing think thanks, policy centers, and some from academia) that right-wing violence is significantly more likely than left-wing violence. See here ("“I think the data suggests that we should be taking right wing domestic terrorism way more seriously than many have done,” he said. “The ‘Fox News angle’ that Antifa is just as dangerous as the Proud Boys just doesn't hold up right now.”), here ("In both datasets we find that individuals and attacks associated with left-wing causes are less likely to be violent."), here ("Heritage Foundation leader wrong to say most political violence is committed by the left"), and so on. Many commentators will pull up graphs from the ADL or the Economist (I did see one using graphs from Reason magazine to my surprise), showing that no no, the right is more violent, see? The experts say so! This is, in a nutshell, the left-wing argument.
The right-wing argument is that these studies and articles consist almost exclusively of methodology errors that would make a first year polysci student blush, such as counting prison violence by the Aryan Brotherhood as right-wing political violence. This seemed... reasonable to me, but to my frustration it took a long time before I could actually find anyone publishing raw data that I could download and take a look at.
Enter The Prosecution Project, "a long-term, open-source intelligence research platform tracking and analyzing felony criminal cases involving political violence in the U.S. since 1990." All of their data is available for download online for free, which I promptly did. Thank you Prosecution Project, very cool. If anyone would like to check my work, there's the resources to do so. Many, not all but many, of the various articles being linked on X during this discussion, after a long and torturous path, lead back to either this database or a similar one. So I decided to do a little digging of my own, and see what I could find.
To fully state my biases before moving on, I am right-wing (shocker I know). But, and this is important, the right-wing argument made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Anything that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside gets my hackles up because I assume it means I am being lied to. Not necessarily on purpose, I am fairly sure most of the commenters on X espousing one side or the other fully believe their own arguments. I've found most people are usually wrong, not deceitful. Sometimes they are deceiving themselves by refusing to dig deeper and cocooning themselves in the soft blanket of ignorance, but I still consider that being wrong, not lying.
Anyway turns out the right was more-or-less correct, subject to a big caveat at the end.
I started by limiting myself to the last 20 years. First, because any American political violence data-set that includes 9/11 is inherently skewed. It's the outlier to end all outliers. Second, because I wanted it to be a nice round number and 25 years included 9/11. Thus, 20 years. From January 1, 2005 to the last data point in the set, 8/15/25. This left me with a table of 3874 entries. Holy cow that is a lot! Well first things first let's clean up the table a bit. I don't need most of the headers that the project has such as separate columns for full name, first name, last name, aliases, name of the case, jurisdiction, location county, location state, location city, whether the defendant was a federal informant (820 such instances for the curious), and so on. The very first case in the data-set was from January 6, 2005. It was an indictment for orchestrating the killings of three civil rights advocates in 1964.
Sigh.
Okay, let's filter out all indictments. I'm looking for acts of political violence that occurred between 01/01/2005 and 08/15/25. Not the slow wheel of justice grinding on to a then-40 year old crime. In fact let's limit the data set to actual crimes, attacks, and just in case "unknown/unclear" so as to also filter out pleas, complaints, arrests, arraignments, and sentencing. Now we're down to 453 incidents out of the original 3874. Wow that is a change.
Next I'll filter out "planned but not attempted" crimes. I really don't care about the FBI catching Syed Haris Ahmed's "conspir[acy] to join jihadist terrorist organization, Toronto 18, by providing them with material footage of the U.S. Capitol Building and the Canadian Parliament Building." Attempted, carried through, or unknown only. Down to 409 entries.
Next, since first I'll specifically be looking at what is termed right-wing violence, I'm going to, well, limit the table to the varieties of right-wing violence. Shockingly, of the 409 entries there are 194 coded as "right-wing". Almost half! Except, when I start going through the table, something jumps out at me. A group of black men beat up an elderly woman and her disabled son for not paying a "white person fee." I'm not joking, that's on the table. Rows 344-347. That's... not really what we're looking for so I'm going to take a bold step and filter out everyone who is not classified as white. Allow me to explain. The bailey with this claim is that there is a simmering undercurrent of white nationalist violence in the United States that the GOP is tapping into because they are all racist/xenophobic/homophobic/sexist Nazis just itching to break out the jackboots. 309 incidents left. Then remove "unknown/unclear" targets because a guy who was jammed up for lying about sending funds to a foreign terrorist organization is also not an act of political violence. Down to 307. Now actually filter by right-wing. Down to 113 rows. That seems like enough to start going through more individually. Filtering out things that look like gang violence, prison violence, domestic violence, anything that does not look like "right-wing white violence." This includes things like a 2008 bank robbery by someone who claimed the IRS seized his accounts after he didn't pay income tax, or a 2009 incident in which a man had a domestic incident with his mother and decided to go down shooting when the cops arrived. Then filtering out multiple rows for the same incident, I don't think that fire-bombing a mosque should be counted four times just because three other guys stood around and cheered. Also because leaving it in will fuck up my total casualties number. Filtering out a surprising number of incidents that appear to be run-of-the-mill unhinged people acting unhinged and sometimes shouting a slur while they do so, we're left with 41 incidents, for a total of 86 people harmed, broken down further into 19 killed and 67 injured.
Well, that's a pretty big drop. Now let's filter by left-wing affiliation and... 12 incidents, totaling 19 victims of which 6 were killed and 13 injured after doing roughly the same work there in terms of filtering out duplicates. Note, I did not need to do any kind of sanitizing of the left-wing incidents for DV, generic crazy people, etc. For whatever reason no incidents matching that descriptor appeared in the data-set. Possibly because the number of people who would shout "FAGGOT" at someone who cuts them off in traffic is significantly higher than the number of people who would shout "CISGENDERED WHITE MALE!" Possibly because the data collectors are biased. I'm not going to make a fuss of it since both possible explanations ring rather true to my ears.
Okay this post kinda got away from me. So to summarize. The right accuses the left of being more violent. The left accuses the right of being more violent. The data points at the right being more violent, but the right claims that the data is flawed. The claim of the data being flawed appears to be more-or-less correct, however, once that has been controlled for to the best of my ability the right does appear more violent generally. That said, 19 deaths over 20 years is less than 1 a year, and is being pulled up rather significantly by the Club Q shooting which claimed the lives of 5 people. I did not run into many incidents of prison violence in this particular dataset, but I believe that those are counted in other datasets. Ultimately it appears that for the most part, politically motivated violence is still extremely rare in the United States. I sincerely hope this stays true.
Edit: Upon further review of the data, my sanitizing methodology was flawed. Several real attacks, including the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting, and the 2015 Charleston Church shooting, were all included in the dataset under "indictment" instead of "crime/attack." Presumably this also affected the left-wing data as well though I haven't gone back and checked. A systematic review of the incidents, all 3800 of them, will reveal different numbers, though presumably in roughly the same overall ratio.
I don't think this is a good method. If you look at indictments for the recent years, it includes entires like this: "On October 5, 2023, Philip Jerome Buyno, 73, of Propheststown, Illinois, accepted a guilty plea of attempted arson. In the early morning of May 20, 2023, Buyno attempted to burn down a building set to become an abortion clinic in Danville, IL. According to the DOJ, Buyno "admitted that...he brought several containers filled with gasoline with him and used his car to breach the front entrance to a commercial building... for the purpose of burning it down before it could be used as a reproductive health clinic." (DOJ)" Buyno is not listed anywhere else, so this is a case of a recent crime that is listed just in the indictments, meaning that you'd be filtering out many other similar cases. Clearly this category doesn't just list people convicted of decades-old cases.
I also tried to check out whether the dataset includes the Allen, Texas - what seems to be an obvious case of right-wing terrorism - shooting with Mauricio Martinez Garcia listed as Hispanic or White to check whether just limiting cases to white people leaves out essential right-wing terrorism cases perpetrated by, say, Hispanic people with clear far-right ideology, but I couldn't find it... at all?
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How did you manage to exclude the pittsburgh synagogue shooter, the el paso walmart shooter, and the Charleston church shooting?
... well shit. Upon going back and reviewing the table, it looks like all three of those got included as an "indictment" instead of an "attack." So they were filtered out when I chose to limit the data set to attacks. That's incredibly frustrating, thank you for pointing it out.
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A prosecutions database won’t include unprosecutable, i.e. dead, perpetrators.
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Thanks for doing the legwork here. Too often political discussion proceeds purely on narrative/subjective grounds and so the effort to at least attempt to inject some objectivity is greatly appreciated!
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How many "left-wing violence incidents" go unprosecuted or otherwise unrecorded and therefore never end up in any dataset. Quite a lot I'd wager.
The problem with trying to take this "scientific", "quantifiable" approach to measuring and comparing left-wing and right-wing violence is that the right believe that institutions at virtually every level are structure in favour of the left and against the right. At every step right-wing violence is further monitored, scruntised, highlighted, pathologised etc etc while the inverse is true for the left. There is no clean, unbiased dataset. Your own scrubbing of the dataset only proves the bias exists, not that you've managed to produce a useful or accurate dataset after cleaning out all the garbage.
People need to understand that the institutions making these claims have lost all credibility and authority with the right, and that appeals to them are meaningless.
This is in addition to basic issues like trying to quantify "level of violence" by counting the mere number of incidents, when it's really a qualitative phenomenon (do 3 mild cases outweight 1 major one?), and in isolation a narrow definition of violence incidences would exclude other forms of political repression or harm.
See BLM violence (the arson, the murder, the felony murder associated with Rittenhouse self defense, and the numerous beatings) which almost certainly dwarfs probably a decade of RW violence.
I agree some of it should be counted (almost everything done by antifa/black blocs), but a lot should be counted as opportunistic violence committed under the cover of ideology.
And on J6, a lot of the people were probably unaware of the violence or if they were opportunistically took a tour of the Capitol.
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Which - to everyone’s point - this sort of post would never have been written about anything from the right.
Not saying you did it for a nefarious reason of course I just mean I immediately chuckled reading your point.
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I really think that Conservative v. Neutral indirectly but adequately explains why this is not a cut-and-dried issue. People readily get caught up in the minutiae ("why did you include J6 but exclude the Floyd riots? why do you count white gang violence but not black gang violence? what do you mean, 'trans is not an ideology?'"). But in many people's (especially, academic researchers') minds, violence motivated by right wing thoughts or policies is ideologically driven, while violence motivated by left wing thoughts or policies gets parsed as neutral. Combine that with the historical emphasis on combating Nazi-style authoritarianism, and we (Americans) just live in a world where right wing political violence is more legible than its counterpart.
Plus, we live in a liberal nation; even Trump is basically a lib. American society is racially integrated, and as a matter of law we often actively oppress efforts to argue or demonstrate that this is working out poorly for us. The leftist position is the "neutral" position; there is no ideological violence available to them to strengthen their position. We live in a secular society, and more than that, as a matter of law we actively oppress efforts to argue or demonstrate that this is working out poorly for us. We live in a nation that requires and enforces gender egalitarianism, prosecutes numerous historically attested heterosexual norms while protecting and even privileging what was once illegal sexual deviance, and imposes exorbitant taxes to fund dubious redistribution schemes. The leftist position in all these cases is treated as the "neutral" position; there is no ideological violence available to them to strengthen their position!
There are still some things leftists get violent about (capitalism, for example) but it is sometimes suggested that political violence is first and foremost the practice of people who feel so excluded from the national conversation that violence is all that remains to them. If more political violence does come from the right, then presumably they are the ones most often being excluded from the national conversation. But by the same token, when people do lash out violently in ways that say, "we do not feel our voice is being adequately heard," we should recognize that is ideological violence. People who think a given act of ideological violence is warranted, often persuade themselves that it is, therefore, not ideological. But that's just wrong.
In short, low political violence depends on a significant degree of ideological homogeneity--or highly functional values pluralism--or totalitarian repression of heterodox ideas. Asking "which side does more violence" is not a meaningless inquiry, but it tells us less about the virtues or vices of any particular ideology, and more about how well our nation presently treats its various outcasts.
A short brainstorming session comes up with the following norms which will be actively prosecuted:
In short, "historically attested heterosexual norms" is the weakest possible defense short of "attested in the fiction of de Sade". If someone wants to legalize having sex slaves being raised in a brothel, (first catering to pedophiles, I would guess) before being bred to get more whores (with male infants being killed at birth), guess what, that is a "historically attested heterosexual norm".
And I do not think that the law has it in especially for the heterosexuals, either. There are plenty of attested homosexual norms around boy-fucking which are just as outlawed.
I don't think this is a particularly fair portrayal of historical norms. Two examples of the sort of historical analysis I take issue with:
Here is the text of Deuteronomy 22.
"[22] If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel."
"[23] If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;"
"[24] Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour's wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you."
This describes adultery. If she were being raped she would have cried out, and in a city, someone would have heard her. She would have witnesses to testify that the sex was not consensual.
Notice here, both the woman and the man receive the death penalty. The sex is assumed to be consensual on both parts, therefore they are seen to have committed the crime together, and they are punished equally for their mutual participation in a criminal act.
Then:
"[25] But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die:"
"[26] But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death: for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter:"
"[27] For he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her."
This describes rape (or alleged rape), and an adulterous violation of the woman by the man. There is no evidence of complicity in the act on her part, because there was no one in the open country to hear her cry out for help, and therefore no one can know that she did NOT cry out for help or resist.
The passage plainly describes this as a he-said she-said allegation of rape where there are no corroborating witnesses, and it dictates that in such a case, the woman should be believed. Keep in mind, the punishment for this crime is death for the man.
Then:
"[28] If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;"
"[29] Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days."
She is not betrothed, so there is no adultery here. Note the different verbiage for 28 vs 25, "lay hold" vs "force". Note also the usage of "they" in "they be found" here, implying mutual complicity in the act.
So in 23, the two parties are punished equally for the same crime (adultery).
And of course, if she does cry out and there are witnesses who will be able to testify to this, and if so, as suggested by the next verse, she will be held blameless.
In 25, there is no corroboration - only he said-she said. No way to know. And wouldn't you know it? The default for belief is to believe the woman.
In 28, this describes fornication, not adultery OR rape.
And keep this in mind: "If they be found." It does not designate a location (within or outside of earshot of others). If she cried out, there would be a witness to that. She is not promised or married to another, so there is no adultery - no violation of a third party (the betrothed or husband).
And look at the punishment: the man must pay her father (who might have been able to make a better marriage for his daughter), and then he must marry her and is never permitted to divorce her under any circumstances. She faces no consequences, since she COULD have cried rape the moment she realized the act was being witnessed, and if it was not rape, she's now locked a man down by law into marriage with no possibility of divorce.
In the moment when the act is witnessed, she has the right under biblical law to claim to that witness that the man is raping her, at which point he will be sentenced to death. If she makes no such claim, she and her family can force him to marry her and deprive him of any right to divorce her.
In each of these scenarios, the man is punished by default with either death or a lifetime obligation to her. In one, the woman is punished with the same penalty as the man.
The law as written here actually favours the woman. While there are possible failure modes inherent within this system, I think it does show that historical societies did make this distinction between extramarital sex and rape, and levied different penalties based on it. Note also that these protections surrounding rape only applied to the protection of women.
This is a half-truth, and there's an implied selectivity within this comment which I find to be misleading. The idea at the time was that there could not be such a thing as marital rape because as a married person you are owed sex from your spouse, i.e. conjugal rights. This applied to both men and women, and was exercisable in law in a marriage.
1 Corinthians 7:
"[1] Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman."
"[2] Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband."
"[3] Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband."
"[4] The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife."
"[5] Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency."
Married couples were literally required to have sex. And in line with this, in pre-modern societies, impotence on the part of the husband, or otherwise inability or unwillingness for the man to have sex was grounds for divorce/annulment (the inverse was true, but extremely rare in practice). But how did the pre-modern legal authorities determine whether such a claim for divorce was baseless or grounded? Why, the husband had to prove his ability to perform for the court of course! This would often entail either actually having sex with his wife in front of the court or a physician, or have his genitals fondled (basically masturbated) by volunteer women to prove his potency, or something similar. For example, some of the cases are described like this:
"the member of the [husband] is like an empty intestine of mottled skin and it does not have any flesh in it, nor veins in the skin, and the middle of its front is totally black. And said witness stroked it with her hands and put it in semen and having thus been stroked and put in that place it neither expanded nor grew."
"[the examining woman] exposed her naked breasts and with her hands warmed at the said fire, she held and rubbed the penis and testicles of the [husband]. And she embraced and frequently kissed the [husband], and stirred him up in so far as she could to show his virility and potency, admonishing him for shame that he should then and there prove and render himself a man. And she says, examined and diligently questioned, that the whole time aforesaid, the said penis was scarcely three inches long."
Here is an illustration of such an impotence trial from the Decretium (which is a collection of 12th century canon law, written by Gratian). If we apply modern definitions to what these men experienced, then their experiences in court would have at least qualified as sexual assault, and the requirement to perform for their wives or face consequences may very well be considered a form of marital rape. Some remnants of this mindset have survived to the modern day, and you still find weird cases like this where a B.C. judge annulled a marriage in which the husband could not perform.
I will also note that there's an increasingly large corpus of data seeming to indicate that forced sex in relationships is not actually nearly as asymmetrical as people think, and even in multinational samples people end up finding similar rates of sexual assault victimisation by sex within romantic dyads. Here is an example.
Ultimately, while I've long accepted the idea that history is a set of lies agreed upon, I'm always surprised at how much purchase this idea of historic female oppression has among the userbase here, since this forum is ostensibly full of contrarians.
My interpretation is that having sex with a woman who is betrothed or married to another is primarily seen as a crime against the husband. If the woman is found to be an accomplice, she is killed, if not, she is seen as an innocent bystander. The fields rule reads more like in dubio pro reo than believe women to me.
There is some dispute about what behavior is covered by 22:28, with WP (which is likely leaning woke, especially given the lemma of the article in question) citing a Rabbi Moses Maimonides who clarifies that 28-28 definitely mean rape, I have not followed the sources to see if this is a true representation of modern scholarship.
Of interest is also Deuteronomy 20 and 21, which regulate the legal status and rights of female civilians captured in wartime. Spoiler alert: they have precious few rights -- mostly you can just not sell them into slavery after trying to make them your legitimate wife.
I do not think that the bible mentions gay rape very much, presumably the standard of 22:23-27 could be transferred to male victims, but I do not know if that case has ever been made to avoid getting stoned as a male victim.
Your point with regard to male marital rape equivalents is well taken. Just because being the median woman in the ancient world would have sucked, that does not mean that being the median man in the ancient world would not have sucked too. Oppression is not zero sum, the fact that women were generally oppressed did not mean that being a guy was great, because the rigid social expectations which resulted in the oppression of women also constrained most men.
I don't agree with this point at all, because no third party actually witnesses the sex happening under the circumstance envisioned in Deuteronomy 22:25 - meaning the woman is not the defendant. Rather the man is the defendant in this situation, since the woman is essentially alleging two things which cannot be substantiated - 1: that the sex happened in the first place and 2: that she was blameless in it (inevitably, the woman would be the one to levy such accusations, since nobody else witnessed it and the man would be punished regardless of complicity or lack thereof). To adopt this stance is a violation of in dubio pro reo, not an expression of it.
There's also the fact that 22:25 describes the rape as being analogous to the situation "as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him" with the woman being in the position of the neighbour, which would seem to suggest that the woman is also seen as being the victim of the crime in question.
I have read this Wikipedia page and pretty much disagree with most of their conclusions. With regards to that Maimonides text, this is the passage it cites: "Every maiden expects to be married, her seducer therefore is only ordered to marry her; for he is undoubtedly the fittest husband for her. He will better heal her wound and redeem her character than any other husband. If, however, he is rejected by her or her father, he must give the dowry (Exodus 22:16). If he uses violence he has to submit to the additional punishment, "he may not put her away all his days" (Deuteronomy 22:29)."
But note he was a specific scholar from much later on whose interpretations of Biblical law were by no means universally accepted or agreed upon in his time. In addition, this portion of the Maimonides text was initially in Judeo-Arabic, whereas now it is being presented as an English translation which probably obscures some of the textual nuances within the original thing. So I don't think this is sufficient to prove the point. In contrast, I have looked into the textual analysis of the original Hebrew of Deuteronomy 22:28 to an extent, and definitely find the idea that it's a marry your rapist law to be... questionable at least. I think the use of the Hebrew word taphas in 22:28 creates a meaningful distinction - the passage 22:25 that's just before it uses a different and more serious verb to connote the force of a rape: hazaq.
Note also that Deuteronomy 22:29 says nothing about her right to reject! The man must take her as a wife, but it is only concerned with his obligations and states he may not divorce her all his days, it says nothing at all about her ability to renege on that. Interpreting that as a section of the Bible forcing a woman to marry her rapist requires a lot of logical leaps that doesn't necessarily follow. And note that even the Maimonides passage explicitly appears to synthesise and interpret Exodus and Deuteronomy in a way which acknowledges the right of the woman to reject the man: "If, however, he is rejected by her or her father, he must give the dowry (Exodus 22:16)." So even if we are to trust that picture of Maimonides' interpretation, the woman is not being forced into marriage; she can refuse and receive compensation for it instead.
Also on the Wikipedia page is this claim: "The Hebrew word used here for "violated" is עָנָה anah (or inah[35]), which (depending on the context) can mean "to rape, to force [sexually], to defile, to violate, to ravish, to mistreat, to afflict, to humble/humiliate, to oppress, to subject/submit/subdue, to weaken".[23][36] Especially when a Hebrew verb is in the pi'el (intensifying) form, this adds force,[23]: 120 and in Deuteronomy 22:29 עִנָּ֔הּ ‘in-nāh is in the pi'el.[23]: 141 " But I don't agree with this either; here is scholarship that Wikipedia left out, suggesting that the inclusion of "inah" in the pi'el form does not in fact indicate a "rape" occurred.
Your source then refers to this passage: "14 But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee." But that then raises the question: what about the legal status and rights of male civilians captured in wartime?
Why, the passage that details this comes right before the one they're citing. "13 And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword".
Androcide of the entire male population is quite the moral commandment. The right to life is basically the foundational one upon which all the others rest.
The only passage I am aware of regulating gay sex at all (consent or lack thereof not specified) is Leviticus 20, which imposes punishments for both parties. I can't find anything more specific than that.
I mean, I certainly agree with the idea that both sexes' lives were pretty shit and very circumscribed. But I find the modern portrayal of premodern societies' gender roles to be extremely unbalanced, and IMO either we can consider both sexes as having been oppressed, or neither. The constant and endless focus on female victimisation and almost complete ignoring of the other side of the coin just gets tiring overtime, and is used to justify a lot of questionable modern politicking which also offends (classically) liberal sensibilities.
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I don't think incest is a really royal 'kink' rather a political driven byproduct under a hereditary system where marriage is limited between royal or formerly royal families, further limited by religion (rare Catholics and Protestant intermarriages, and only one royal Orthodox country [though Montenegro punches above its weight before WWI]), and treaty considerations. Which under a paucity of male dynasts can exasperate the situation. So Spanish Hapsburg infantas are marrying Austrian Hapsburgs Archdukes to prevent a succession of their enemies the French Bourbons.
I agree, although I understand how “Genetic Sexual Attraction” (wikipedia, SFW) might make it seem like a kink.
Probably politics first, with GSA helping implementation.
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While I find the "kink" framing distasteful and obfuscatory, there were definitely pagan cultures that celebrated royal incest for its own sake, most notably the Egyptians.
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This is a misrepresentation of ancient law codes around rape; a distinction between forcible and statutory(and these societies tended to define 'minor unable to consent' as 'woman who has never been married') rape generally existed. The distinction was often primitive by today's standards- eg the bible's 'did someone hear her scream' standard- but it existed. What ancient law codes did round off as seduction was what we would call 'date rape' today.
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It's not clear to me what your point is, here. My point was that we do in fact live in a liberal nation; if your point is "and that's a good thing," like--okay? I happen to be a liberal myself! My point was simply that we should presumably therefore expect "political violence" to generally not come from liberals, given that liberals pretty much live in the society they want to live in. And indeed, both right-wing and left-wing political violence appears to generally come from the illiberal factions of those political tribes.
But we did just recently have a discussion on the Motte about the criminalization of heterosexual norms, if this is something of particular interest to you.
Oh, I had no problem with your overall point, it was just that your phrasing in that sentence irked me. I agree that criminalizing all sorts of cat-calling is silly.
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This kind of "social pride" seems really fundamental to pretty much any polity, but I wonder if there hasn't always been an equally strong counter-current, particularly in America. At some point what was "working out for us" one way or the other changed. Racial integration, overall secularity, and the form of gender egalitarianism we see now are not historically American norms. One might argue that liberalism itself is a seed that inevitably flowers into what we see now in terms of "neutral", but I think one of the things that makes America peculiar is that there has always been an incredible ambivalence about how "liberalism" is going to be played out.
A lot of this is simply because liberalism itself is a weird Frankenstein of a political ideology that erupts out of the dis-integration of Christendom, and so we keep seeing grabs for different kind of power emphasizing different kinds of Christian virtue as absolute (mercy, self-sacrifice, autonomy, kindness etc.) But the point is that what is ideologically homogenous now is and always has been implicitly understood as extremely volatile and prone to fragmentation.
It really does feel like we've seen a kind of "natural progression" of liberalism from, say, the 60s up until now with certain kinds of emphasis on civil liberties, but so long as one "virtue" is emphasized to the exclusion of others, there will always be be a counter-current attempting the homeostasis of something like the high Middle Ages. It's like an involuntary immune system response, and it won't change so long as liberalism is our fundamental ideology.
All this to say, it might be that the undercurrent of what the right is feeling right now is that aforementioned autoimmune response to de-homogenize, or to even point out that such homogeneity isn't even real in the first place (ie, fake news, Psy-ops, mainstream media etc.).
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The media pushing this kind of analysis mostly misses the point. You could easily point out differences in base rates, gross issues with misreporting, whatever.
The fundamental problem is that most modern right wing violence is an accident of ideology committed by a fringe with little support. Condemnations are widespread, the people engaging it have been mostly grossly mentally ill, no leading figures are calling for it, no mainstream institutions are calling for it or supporting it (at least up until current events).
In contrast modern left wing violence is demanded and supported by mainstream institutions both directly and by implication. Histrionic rhetoric like "they are going to put us in camps" "literally Hitler" and so on are mainstream positions that are asserted publicly (including at work in some places) that demand and rationalize violent action. Sometimes it's even more direct than that "bash the fash" for instance.
It's a miracle that we haven't had more of it, although that time is likely ended now - and we've already quite a lot, much of which was violence at protest actions is unlikely to be adequately captured in the data.
Usually the response of the left to this sort of criticism is "well X fringe red tribe figure said Y" or "well Trump's rhetoric is divisive because blah blah."
No, no that is not the same as what the left is saying - it's mainstream, blunt, pervasive in multiple domains and in blue tribe milieus almost completely unopposed.
I appreciate the effort to do a data driven approach but it is pointless, and buys into the left's frame, totally missing the heart of the issue and would be required to find solutions.
This is mostly due to the violence as a dial versus violence as a switch view- ask an average red triber and he'll tell you of course the second amendment is there for political violence, it's just not that bad yet to take the gloves off.
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The claim here is obviously false. There is plenty of institutonal and cultural support for violence among the right. Take, for example, conservative fascination with firearms as a political tool. Or greater suport for state sanctioned killing to achieve policy goals, like the death penalty. And, while this is less true now but was certainly true in the very recent past that conservatives were very likey to prioritize violence as a solution to foreign policy as well ("turn the whole country to glass").
The acceptance of violence, or the tendency to see the use physical force as a acceptable or effective solution to problems, seems to be so pervasive among the right that it has become "baked in" to the point where it doesn't even register, like a fish in water.
I am not claiming that the left does not have problems with violence, it clearly does (especially and perhaps exclusively the woke illiberal left), but this thing I keep seeing where conservatives are casting themselves as constitutionally cherubic peaceniks against the bloodthirsty violent and demonic left is just flatly wrong.
What I notice is that when conservatives talk about using firearms to defend from an oppressive government, they don't actually tend to call for people to actually go do that. In general, I would classify almost all of them as LARPers, who fancy themselves heroes in a fantasy. That doesn't make them violent revolutionaries.
I see acceptance of violence against individuals in self defense, or as legal retribution, but again, neither of these make one a violent revolutionary.
Killing political opponents as a way to get your policies enacted is very different from violence being part of the policy itself.
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One could model this as the right having an interest in violence that they rarely if ever indulge, and the left blinkering their jaundiced eye to carefully ignore a higher rate of violence and destruction. The right barks, the left bites, as it were; matching relative tastes in dogs and what should be done about pitbulls.
Such a model is a little too self-serving and pat, of course. And yet, I can't shake the grain of truth in it.
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I don't agree with the rest of what you are saying but you are missing the point. Any mismatch or parity on violence in the political realm is completely overshadowed by everything else.
Traditional politics is a small portion of most people's interaction with the world.
Media, education, social media, and corporate employment are all very aggressive with pushing "silence is violence" "the personal is the political" "speech is violence" "they are going to put you in camps" "they are literally Nazis" and so on.
These things have nearly zero pushback and are firmly water for the vast majority of Americans.
I have to work very hard on Reddit, on Facebook, on TV shows to find the most mild of conservative views but I am going to see left wing violent extremism on the same unless I work very hard not to.
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The reason the left isn't assassinating Tommy Robinson in the UK is because they can have him arrested and imprisoned instead.
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Trump literally pardoned people who beat up cops
Some of them had a history of rape, manslaughter, possession of child porn, didn't matter. If a rapist beat up a cop, he was still pardoned
Domestic abuser with history of attacking cops throws a bomb? Acceptable behavior apparently.
Most Jan 6th protestors were peaceful and were never even arrested yet alone convicted, that is true. It's true of basically every group, something I've said since forever. Most people are peaceful.
But not every single one. Why pardon rapist cop beaters? That's the exact opposite of condemnation.
My understanding is that the Trump pardons for Jan 6th are based on the (IMO correct) belief that this was a political persecution, where people were persecuted for non-crimes, and those that actually committed crimes were usually given excessive sentences. Many people who were pardoned did serve time, so it's not like they weren't punished.
I feel that it is a mistake to interpret a blanket clemency as individual pardons, where only the specifics of the case matter, rather than the desire to rebuke the establishment in general.
Even if it's correct that some crimes were unfairly prosecuted, assaulting cops on video is a genuine crime deserving of long punishment. Unless there's proof that they went past legal guidelines in sentencing, it's just letting cop beaters off early because what, other people didn't beat up cops?
This is even worse than guilty by association IMO, it's innocent by association where you can drag a cop around and tase him to he passes out and it's fine even as an individual as long as you can claim a peaceful neighbor was treated unfairly.
He was not forced to do a blanket clemency that covered violent crimes. The campaign even said before election that violent criminals would not be released.
Even Vance agreed it's obvious that violent criminals should not be sent into the general public. Yet what happened? Cop beaters with long rap sheets were freed. It sends a message that if you do violent crime in the name of the president, he'll be soft on it.
It is a crime, but did the perpetrators actually serve less time than others who have beaten up someone? I don't really agree that abuse of cops should result in much longer sentences, since cops themselves are protected from prosecution to an absurd degree and cops often violate people's rights, so then also give extra high punishment for assault on cops, makes the injustices in the way the police interacts with the populace, even greater.
Besides, I think that equal crimes should result in equal punishments, not that perpetrators get off much easier if they abuse the 'right' people.
The problem is that when there is a legal 'conspiracy*', the process we have to determine that what the actual proper sentence is, is broken, so it is not reasonable to expect justice on the individual level. There is no parallel justice system that is free from these immense biases and that can determine an actually fair sentence. And Trump does not have the ability to change sentences.
It is an established legal principle that legal injustices can result in sentences that are not actually fair in the individual case, like people going free over illegally gathered evidence that does actually prove the guilt of the person. In those cases, we value the long term view more, where we accept an injustice in an individual case to maintain global standards in the prosecution of people. We draw a line in the sand that we will not allow it.
So I see nothing wrong with Trump drawing a line in the sand against political persecutions.
* Really just collective bias.
Vance is not the president. Get back to me when Vance is president and something similar happens.
No, it sends the message that if the legal system commits political persecutions, politicians are going to intervene (of course).
Also, the claim that these people committed violence 'in the name of the president' is not a framing that I accept as fact. Trump did not call for violence.
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I will copy my response to the other guy-
"I don't agree with the rest of what you are saying but you are missing the point. Any mismatch or parity on violence in the political realm is completely overshadowed by everything else.
Traditional politics is a small portion of most people's interaction with the world.
Media, education, social media, and corporate employment are all very aggressive with pushing "silence is violence" "the personal is the political" "speech is violence" "they are going to put you in camps" "they are literally Nazis" and so on.
These things have nearly zero pushback and are firmly water for the vast majority of Americans.
I have to work very hard on Reddit, on Facebook, on TV shows to find the most mild of conservative views but I am going to see left wing violent extremism on the same unless I work very hard not to."
Yeah stuff like "This is CIVIL WAR" and "They want you dead!" and "the left is domestic terrorists!" is not receiving much pushback on social media, I'll agree with that. Our rhetoric across the aisle is hyperbolic and charged.
But despite that, we can count the number of explicitly political attacks on our fingers. People are more likely to say they support political violence when they think the "other side" does but it doesn't seem to translate much into anything real. After all talk is cheap, extremely cheap. They're all just being edgelords.
No, we can't. You have no idea how many buildings actually got burned down during the Floyd riots. You have no idea how many windows got a brick through them. You have no idea how many cars were torched or totaled. You have no idea how many people were beaten, nor how badly. Now multiply those unknowns by every other incident of organized leftist street violence, from the Battle of Berkeley on down.
We had at least two billion dollars worth of insurance claims, with no attempt I've ever seen to calculate the necessarily higher uninsurable economic damage.:
Throughout these incidents, the vast majority of that violence never involved an arrest, because over and over again the police stood down and watched people be victimized by organized gangs of thugs, often in broad daylight. On the rare occasion where arrests were made, prosecution was doubtful. When prosecution did occur, fellow thugs have been known to congregate in the courtroom, menacing the jury, and shockingly enough their comrades are found not guilty.
This person's opinion, that people like me need to be killed, is not in any meaningful sense "fringe". I would probably be fired for disagreeing with it publicly prior to the Kirk shooting. You are correct that we have not had large numbers of political murders. These people are trying to change that, and if they succeed, nothing you value will survive.
That's true we don't know how much damage was caused there and by how many people. We also don't know how many, if any, are only politically motivated crimes, and not the actions of typical criminal behavior exploiting large crowds to hide in, or false flags like this or this.
Out of an estimated 16-24 million people participating, the idea that the only people in the crowds are supporters is highly unlikely. But even if they were, 16-24 million is a huge number! Even a fraction of a fraction (a very small percentage) people committing crime would be able to do a fair bit of damage.
Random chest thumping social media accounts from leftists trying to signal how cool they are is just as meaningless as the chest thumping from the right currently calling for "civil war" or for killing judges. It's posturing by edgelords who thinks it makes them look cool, but they don't have an actual violent bone in them.
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Again. If I go about my day minding my own business attempting to avoid politics, or if I engage with politics but don't specifically seek out the few right leaning spaces I know about then I will see no right leaning extremism (unless it is signal boosted by the left as criticism of the right).
I will see tons of left leaning political extremism.
I've spent the last decade having left wing extremism up to and including actual advocacy for domestic terrorism shoved down my throat even while actively trying to avoid it and watched the places I know that are apolitical or the most inoffensive of right leaning slowly wither and die or be outright destroyed.
Ignoring this is a critical failure of objectivity and should trigger significant introspection.
We didn't get here because of the screaming minority on the left we got here because of the people who should have known better shoved their heads in the sand and stated things like "it's just a few kids on college campuses" until it became a pervasive and dangerous problem.
Plenty of people here have been shouting for years that minimizing and playing games was going to make this problem worse. It's worse now. Do something different unless you want it to continue to get worse.
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Political violence is such a tiny fraction of total violence in this country that any signal in the data will be absolutely swamped by the noise of how you determine whether an incident is political or not.
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Yeah, I would assume that's the case even before looking into the data just because of the obvious issues that
Violence itself is incredibly rare, only about 2-4% have a violent conviction.
A good portion of those aren't even directly violent against people. Armed robberies, kidnappings (which are mostly the kids own parent driving off with them), arson.
A good portion of the ones left over aren't extreme like we're imagining, they're assault like slaps and punches and kicks. Domestic violence, drunks getting in a fist fight, sexual assault. Shouldn't be allowed but it's not death.
Even the homicides themselves still contain plenty of manslaughter or heat of passion cases.
And even of those premeditated homicides, they're also almost entirely personal grievances. Spouses, rival gangs, employers, religion conflicts, etc.
And even then, it's largely repeat offenders who do violence on multiple occasions.
Explicitly political violence is so rare that whether right or left wing attacks are more common, it's like arguing which cup of water is more full compared to all the water in the ocean (the general population).
It most likely will, even in less stable countries political violence is very uncommon. When it does happen in a meaningful manner, it's almost entirely an extreme case like Nepal. Mass poverty, wide unemployment of youth (over 20%), extremely blatant corruption, and a government that egged it on by shutting down social media across the country.
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Tangential to your main point, I don't think 9/11 should be excluded. Political violence is not normally distributed, you get a tiny spoonful most of the time. Then one day, a truck shows up and dumps tonnes of it on you.
The vast majority of terror deaths in America died in 9/11, it's not an outlier. Everything else is an outlier, basically a nothingburger in comparison. McVeigh takes a distant second place. And if you include US deaths abroad in wars, Islamic terrorism becomes even more potent. The resources going into squelching left and rightwing terror are insignificant compared with the vast resources that went into fighting Islamic terrorism/Islamism, huge contingents of the US military and national guard were actively deployed in a decades long campaign that largely failed. But it's not sexy to talk about that anymore it seems, people prefer to talk about right and left wing violence instead.
Ehhh. I mean, yes and no. I think for the purposes of this discussion it makes sense to exclude it, because right now we're talking about left/right-wing American political violence. It's (partially) the same reason I excluded an incident of a guy who was fundraising for a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). Yes, FTOs are dangerous, and should be something the government is concerned about. But it doesn't really matter in the context of specifically this discussion. Further, the main concern I have is that the United States is gearing up for its own troubles period, or perhaps I should say returning to its own troubles period. There, political violence doesn't look like one big mother of a terrorist attack, it looks like lots of little attacks nibbling away at the fabric of society on a regular basis.
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Did you do any spot checking to make sure known incidents were included? I saw claims that the ADL dataset didn't include a trans shooter at a Christian school under leftwing violence despite that incident being included in their timeframe, and that sort of miss makes the whole project seem not just methodologically biased but pure BS from top to bottom.
Good chance it shouldn't even be included, Westman shot up his own school and thus the likelihood it's some sort of personal grievance or other non political motive/fascination with violence like the large majority of school shooters rather than political is really high. Especially with possible O9A connections
Unless we say that anything a trans person does, even if it's for the same exact reasons that a non trans person does something, becomes inherently political just by their identity but that seems silly.
If a tranny shooting up a catholic school isn't leftwing violence then neither is a white guy shooting up a black church, and we both know that would be included.
Their own school, which means they could have done it for generic school shooting reasons like 99.9% of school shooters
If a white guy has a long history of attending that church and could have been targeting it for generic shooter reasons targeting their own spaces, then yes it would not count.
People choose their targets for a reason and politics can be part of that reason. This extends to mental illness. The recent stabbing incident is a good example. He likely had racial delusions as part of the impetus for violence.
If you tell homeless people who are suffering that white people are why they are suffering it will cause some problems.
Guy may have had different delusions including non-violent or less violent ones instead.
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My intuition is that O9A stuff looks left wing to those on the right (Satanism is often coded as left wing due to the anti-theistic libertarian strains) while it also looks right wing to those on the left due to being Neo-Nazi. Truth is no one wants it on their side, which should count for something.
O9A are mostly just a bunch of psychopath chaos loving edgelords who call themselves whatever will piss off the most people while they spread child porn and encourage kids to shoot up their schools.
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I did not, and now I'm kicking myself.
These numbers seem a little low -- are recent-ish events included? I mean, if there are only twelve left-wing incidents I'm gonna guess that the two most recent attempts to assassinate a presidential candidate aren't in there? As I recall there were some other less credible but not insignificant attempts against Trump during his first term as well -- depending on your criteria I think you could get to half a dozen incidents of attempted violence against Trump alone!
Thomas Crooks was not a left-winger, so that assassination attempt wasn't left-wing political violence. In so far as Ryan Routh had intelligible political motivations and wasn't just insane, he was a single-issue Ukraine supporter. While that is left-coded in today's political climate, it isn't actually a left-right issue, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it left off a list of left-wing political violence.
Wikipedia has a section on Routh's politics more broadly, and they pretty much fit the pattern of "angry Democrat" (e.g. accusing Trump of wanting to "make Americans slaves again"). I'd count him, although not Crooks.
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I reject your premise -- you don't need to be a left-winger to do left-wing political violence. If you are trying to kill a (leading) right-wing political candidate, you are doing left-wing violence until proven otherwise. I'm mostly satisfied that Hinkley proved otherwise, although open to the possibility that he was bullshitting about trying to kill Carter -- it's a very unusual case though, and I can't think of any others offhand where somebody just wanted to kill somebody who was President.
Booth probably wouldn't have killed (checks notes) Seymour, and the two that you mention chose not to shoot at Biden.
Crazy though they may have been, they were left-wing and crazy.
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From what I saw the authors seemed to be making a reasonably good effort to include acts of left-wing violence. The J20 protests from January 20, 2017 were included, and before being sanitized made up a pretty hefty chunk of the left-wing table. Most of the... shall we say creative accounting with the dataset I believe will appear on the analysis end, not the data end. For example, doing a quick and dirty =COUNTIF of all right-wing events before removing all duplicate events. Because each individual actor got their own row, so four white nationalists beating up one hispanic guy was four rows, that would give a very distorted number no matter how you slice it. That is however, a perfectly valid way of inputting your raw data just so long as when you do the analysis of the data you account for it. On the other hand, counting four black guys beating up an elderly white woman and her disabled son as "right-wing violence" in the data is very misleading.
How many BLM related violent events were there? What about the dude that gunned down five cops?
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Or you know the entire summer of love. Did they count the killing of the retired police chief? Did they count the felony murder of that child molester in the Rittenhouse self defense? How bout the massive amount of arson?
How about the attempted murder in Oregon when they tried to burn a courthouse with people in it or the literally days of sieges?
What about the people that died in CHAZ.
The dems love to bring up J6 but it all pales compared to the summer of love. Trying to claim right wing violence is more is facially absurd.
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I think I'd count Sanford, Ferrier, Routh, and Monper as left-wing assassination plots on Trump. I wouldn't count Allen (apparently just nuts, claimed to have also sent ricin to Elizabeth II), Crooks (ideology unclear), Casap (neo-Nazi attempting to start a race war), or the various Iranian government operatives - indeed, I'd count Casap, though not any of the others, as right-wing.
Technically, Ferrier's assassination attempt wasn't violent (she mailed him ricin), and technically Routh and Monper didn't get around to taking actual violent actions. Sanford absolutely counts, though, and if you count all attempted murders as "violent" (as many statistics do) then Ferrier/Routh would as well (Monper didn't get around to anything I'd label an "attempt", because he was dumb enough to post on social media that he was going to commit a mass shooting).
TBQH I think that setting up to snipe a presidential candidate at a political rally is in and of itself prima facie an act of political violence -- absent overwhelming evidence to the contrary (as with (probably) Hinkley, for example) I don't see how you can tag it as "IDK, lol -- crazy people amirite?".
Yes, it counts as "political violence". But I wouldn't count it as "left-wing political violence".
I would, again presumptively -- it's certainly possible that somebody might try to shoot a right wing candidate for not being right wing enough or something, but absent some compelling evidence I'd assume that shooting at a political candidate is in itself a pretty good sign that you are on the opposite side of the spectrum.
Crooks was a registered Republican and some people who knew him said he was an outspoken conservative, although he did also donate $15 to ActBlue before that. You're right about the presumption (and I applied it to many of my inclusions), but the above suffices for me to declare it at least partially rebutted in Crooks' case. The obvious possibility raised by that info is "thought conservatism in the 'States would do better without Donald Trump leading it". Again, though, I wouldn't count it as "right-wing political violence" either; it's just not clear what the fuck he was thinking.
Allen and Crooks are the arguable ones, though.
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