Americans Need to Focus on Far Right Violence, Not Immigrants

Since launching his campaign in 2015, Donald Trump has demonized racial and religious minorities and, of course, Hispanic immigrants and refugees.  This demagoguery has played well with aging whites and poorly educated whites terrified at the prospect of a loss of white privilege in a changing nation and global economy.  The reality, however, is that the largest threat to American lives comes from far right extremists who kill more Americans every year than any other group.  Looking past that, gun violence - thanks to America's insane gun laws - kill more Americans every year than auto accidents, yet Republicans and Trump oppose any meaningful gun reform.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the reality of the true source of terrorism in American and argues that Americans need to shift their focus and cease allowing themselves to be played by Trump and those like him.  The sad reality is that far right extremists are almost without exception white males. Here are highlights:

[T]here’s one spike in violence that [Trump] rarely acknowledges or even mentions, and it’s the rise in far-right terror that has accompanied his ascension to the White House.

On Wednesday, the Anti-Defamation League released a report finding that attackers with ties to right-wing extremist movements killed at least 50 people in 2018. That was close to the total number of Americans killed by domestic extremists, meaning that the far right had an almost absolute monopoly on lethal terrorism in the United States last year. That monopoly would be total if, in one case, the perpetrator had not “switched from white supremacist to radical Islamist beliefs prior to committing the murder.”

The number of fatalities is 35 percent higher than the previous year, and it marks the fourth-deadliest year for such attacks since 1970. In fact, according to the ADL, white supremacists are responsible for the majority of such attacks “almost every year.”

The 2018 attacks include the one at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue by a man who blamed Jews for the migrant caravan, the mass shooting at a yoga studio by an “incel” obsessed with interracial dating, and the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, carried out by a student who wished that “all the Jews were dead.”

From 2009 through 2018, right-wing extremists accounted for 73 percent of such killings, according to the ADL, compared with 23 percent for Islamists and 3 percent for left-wing extremists. In other words, most terrorist attacks in the United States, and most deaths from terrorist attacks, are caused by white extremists. But they do not cause the sort of nationwide panic that helped Trump win the 2016 election and helped the GOP expand its Senate majority in the midterms.

It would be immoral to collectively punish white people for the actions of a few extremists—and it would only raise the stature of those extremists, partially legitimize their grievances in the eyes of potential followers, and strengthen their ability to recruit future operatives for further attacks. But that’s not the reason none of those things happen. They don’t happen because, as America’s largest demographic group, white people have the political power and influence to prevent such proposals from even being contemplated. This is a form of political correctness so powerful that it shapes behavior without being mentioned or publicly acknowledged; it is simply the way things work.

By contrast, when religious or ethnic minorities commit such acts, they are seen not as individual extremists, but as representative of the groups to which they belong. As such, collective punishment is believed to be justified. This is, in a basic sense, how American bigotry works: White Christians are simply individuals, while everyone else is vulnerable to demonization by demagogues prepared to exploit the fear of those who are different in exchange for political power.

The correct response to the rise in right-wing terrorism is not a nationwide panic that mirrors those that accompany terrorist attacks by religious or ethnic minorities. It is to extend the same benefit of the doubt, the same proportionate, measured response with which Americans meet attacks from right-wing extremists, to attacks of all sorts. It is to recognize that the constitutional rights of minorities are no less inviolable than the constitutional rights of white Americans, and that anyone who would run on a platform of disregarding those rights is not fit to hold public office.