FACT FOCUS: Heritage Foundation leader wrong to say most political violence is committed by the left

FenrirIII@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 574 points –
FACT FOCUS: Heritage Foundation leader wrong to say most political violence is committed by the left
apnews.com
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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.

The only ones I've heard using that term were equally nuts Marxist leninist. Not a good term or a good Association unfortunately.

So it’s like covfefe?

No it is a reference to the fake performative nature of professional wrestling. Juvenile reductive and not really applicable.

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.

This is a direct results of consolidation of the media. Mass media is all owned by just a few people/groups. Who despite claims otherwise absolutely practice editorialism over what their organizations present and how they present it. It is increasingly less possible to find what passes for mainstream American left getting actual proper representation on corporate media. And actual left-wing left gets zero or negative representation. Which is all by Design. Because it serves those people and groups and not the public as a whole.

So they realistically do live in an alternate reality. And short of taking them out of that media Echo sphere. There is nothing you individually can do to change or help that. You cannot help those who are not looking to be helped. So unless they come to you with concerns over breaking cognitive dissonance. There is basically little you can do. Other than push back respectfully or not.

Doublethink is real!

Also, I'll have him know, as a liberal, I rarely even commit one genocide a day...so...

Note: as an ex-conservative that has been pushed to Vote Blue No Matter Who since trump, I still have a real, if tiny, physical reaction to calling myself a liberal....WHEN THE FK DOES THAT GO AWAY‽

Liberal just means centrist these days, maybe that term would work better for you?

Just wait until a socialist slips you estrogen 😉 /jk It will take time, lots of it. As long as you're aware of it (I also feel it when "communism" is mentioned) you're ok. Please don't beat yourself up over it, love.

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?

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?

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.

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.

Sadly true; brains are pattern-matching rationalization engines more than anything else. It's a pretty simple, but very effective hack once you know the neural paths.

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!

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.

Not true. Groups that are made up of altruistic individuals who work together are more successful than groups made up of individuals out for themselves. That's part of the reason why democracy has prevailed over monarchy and despotism.

But it prevailed through … checks notes… violence.

Not just violence, ultra-violence. All rights are won through violence.

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.

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).

It's the same with petty theft being a fraction of what pay wage and time clock theft is yet widely more reported on.

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.

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.

They keep lying, and maybe we should make it come true if they want a dictatorship.

MAGA is their name. Projection is their game.

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.

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.

Disinformation is a powerful tool, that's all this is. He knows better.

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.

I don't entirely disagree. However, if enough of the active evil doers were removed, it would be easier to change the system. Like, we could fund education better if we didn't have Republicans constantly trying to gut it.

I think that makes sense, but I think when you try to remove those people who are obstacles to change using violence, you run the risk of making them seem sympathetic to the average person. I think that can end up bolstering those people and their opposition.

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.

Common misconception. He was actually saying most political violence is committed by people politically to his left, which I think is undoubtedly true.

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.

I want to change the world. (you have to kill people) I want to affect the world. (you have to kill people) I want to make the world a better place...(you have to kill people) GIVE ME MONEY TO KILL PEOPLE!

The progression here...

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.

#PizzaGate #neverforget #nonexistentBasements

You forgor the Bowling Green Massacre smh head😞

Oh snap. What a tragedy. Lighters out for those poor lost souls... (swimming in a fishbowl... Year after year...)

You counted that as an act of right wing violence.

i didn't count it at all.

edit: aw fuck. you got me.

If you want to be a crazy conspiracy person like you are acting at least believe in the conspiracy that epsteins kiddy partners (like trump) were the ones who ordered the hit on him.

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.