Repeated efforts at misdirection have to make you ask why

A reminder that it is better to see the numbers than to hear the political claims. From Who Commits Most of the World’s Extremist Violence? by Seth Barron.

When Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that white supremacists were responsible for the most extremist killings of 2017, she was obviously wrong, by at least two and maybe three orders of magnitude (if she meant worldwide, which is unclear from her tweet). There were at least 8,500 such incidents worldwide that year, and white supremacists accounted for perhaps 15 or 20 of them, depending how you count. But perhaps Ocasio-Cortez was thinking of the U.S. and may be relying on an Anti-Defamation League report, “Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2017,” for her information. According to the ADL, 34 people were killed as a result of extremist violence that year in the United States—eight of them by Sayfullo Saipov on Halloween in lower Manhattan. Another victim was Heather Heyer, who was run over by James Fields during the Charlottesville protests.

Heyer’s killing can legitimately be labeled an act of white nationalist violence, as Fields was an open admirer of Hitler and the Confederacy. But the other murders that the ADL counts as “extremist-related” are fuzzy, even by the ADL’s standards. For instance, Frank Ancona, a Klan member from Missouri, was killed in a domestic dispute by his wife, also a Klan member. And some of the other events, according to the ADL, “include killings stemming from factional disputes, murders of suspected informants, as well as murders committed by extremists in the pursuit of traditional criminal motives.”

The Wall Street Journal, citing the U.S. Extremist Crime Database, reports that the frequency of violent hate crime in the United States has been about the same for 50 years. White supremacy is insane and immoral, and it may be a significant threat. But it doesn’t account for anywhere near the preponderance of global extremist violence, though one might get a different impression from recent coverage.

Prejudice is formed in part by experience. Repeatedly making and entertaining claims which are unsupported by the data discounts the value of listening to those sources in the future. White nationalist violence is a red herring from the real sources of tragedy. It is a cause which, if solved, will not reduce the problem of extremist violence in any material way.