That’s what violent thugs do

Back in November last year, in When ideological narratives and data collide, I made the point that the mainstream media frequently cites rising white supremacism when in fact there is no such evidence at all. In relative terms, there is virtually no white supremacism reflected in the numbers. Even in absolute terms, where every death is inherently a tragedy, all hate crimes together are no more than a few thousand out of a couple million crimes in a year. The number of violent hate crimes in a year are no more than a couple of dozen and those include hate crimes by blacks and hispanics against other races as well.

So why do we see all this reporting of rising white supremacism when there is so little data to support it? Innumerate, ideologically motivated, and contextually ignorant journalists is the easy answer which is almost certainly also the correct answer.

When the data points in one direction and the endless deluge of mainstream media words points in another, you begin to get a sense of Winston Smith's world.

David Catron has an article out, The Mythical Rise in White Supremacist Violence making similar points as I did in my post.

Catron is responding to an absurd op-ed in the New York Times where a minor league totalitarian was trying to make the case that government ought to arbitrarily imprison anyone who it deems a threat. Well, it was a little more nuanced than that but that is essentially what it came down to.

The only thing to distinguish this position from an Archie Bunker drunk at the bar is that it was being advanced from the Left by Thomas T. Cullen, the United States attorney for the Western District of Virginia. Not too surprising to find an Archie Bunker wanting safer streets. Pretty alarming to find a US District Attorney advocating overturning the first amendment.

Catron adds a couple of points for perspective.

The first thing anyone familiar with cause-of-death statistics will notice about this passage is that the total is infinitesimal. The 71 percent figure the author, Thomas T. Cullen, attributes to “far-right and white-extremist groups” averages 28 per year. Every death is tragic, but this is less than half the annual fatality rate associated with bee and wasp stings. To suggest that this constitutes a “grave threat” to the republic is ridiculous. The author also fails to note that the 71 percent figure attributed to “far right” groups was derived by arbitrarily including every fatality that was not explicitly linked to Islamist or Leftwing groups.

This is no inadvertent error. The source of Cullen’s data explicitly states, “Total deaths include both ideologically and non-ideologically motivated killings.” That is, some of the fatalities that Cullen attributes to “far-right and white-extremist groups” were committed by people with no ideological ax to grind at all.

He finishes with

With regard to hate crimes in general, the FBI reported that they increased by 17 percent from 2016 to 2017. That rise was an artifact of the increased number of agencies reporting. More telling is the ethnicity of the offenders: 25.7 percent were Hispanic; 25.0 percent were non-Hispanic white; 21.33 percent were black; 19.1 percent were unknown; 8.87 percent were mixed race. In other words, there is apparently no “white privilege” when it comes to hate crime. If one checks political bias at the door, this looks like a bunch of violent thugs attacking one another, not for racial reasons, but because that’s what violent thugs do.