Hello Downriver,
Down through our American history, there have times of great political unrest, culminating in violent acts — not the least of which was our descent into Civil War 164 years ago.
We’ve had other moments in which disagreements led to violence, but our nation has endured.
That doesn’t mean we learned from these times; instead, in many instances the angry words of one moment led to physical violence in the next.
Which brings us to the here and now and growing questions and concerns that we may not survive this current maelstrom of political warfare; battles that have resulted in violent acts against our very government and the deaths of Americans.
Of course, as is to be expected, each side of the political spectrum points fingers at the other, blaming violent acts or even the escalation of violent language on those at the other end of that spectrum.
A case in point was the murder of Charlie Kirk and the nearly immediate accusations about which faction influenced the murderer: was it the Left or the Right?
It didn’t help, of course, that the president and his minions were quick to blame the “radical left” for Kirk’s murder, with Attorney General Pam Bondi blaming “left-wing radicals” for the shooting, adding that “they will be held accountable.”
And when Trump condemned Kirk’s killing in a video message, he mentioned several examples of “radical left political violence” but ignored deadly attacks on Democrats.
Indeed, when asked for his examples, The White House pointed to demonstrations where police officers and federal agents have been injured.
Which ignores the hypocritically obvious: On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump encouraged his followers to storm the Capitol Building, attacking police officers with American flags and other weapons — leading to Trump pardoning and commuting the sentences of more than 1,500 insurrectionists.
And that brings me to this — which doesn’t fit with the Trumpian view: A 2021 study published in the journal Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society that analyzed ideologically motivated extremist killings from 1990 to 2020.
“The results were clear,” the report said. “Only 42 incidents of politically-motivated homicide — 15.6% of all incidents — involved far-Left extremists.
“In contrast,” the report went on, “far-Right extremists were responsible for 227 incidents—84.4% of the total.”
But don’t take that journal’s word for it: in a just-deleted report from our own Department of Justice, a National Institute of Justice study found that white supremacist and far-right violence is currently outpacing all other types of domestic terrorism in the United States.
The report — “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism” — said in part that “militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States.”
“In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”
“Since 1990,” the report continues, “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically-motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.”
But you can’t read that study anymore because it was taken off the DOJ website on Sept. 13.
(You can still find it here, though web.archive.org/web/20250911012550/https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/what-nij-research-tells-us-about-domestic-terrorism)
The twin reports confirm what many of us have suspected — even before Jan. 6: the far Right is the far more violent arm of American discourse.
And Trump can’t make that fact go away, as much as he’d like.
Not that long ago, I again explained the best way to visualize socio-political behavior is by imagining a circle drawn on a blackboard.
At the top of the circle is, not surprisingly, the middle, home of the independent voter, and non-partisan actors and organizations.
As you slide left and right along the curve of the circle, you move into the associated social and political beliefs and movements; and the further you move down around the circle in either direction, the more pronounced those beliefs, the more extreme the language.
Then you reach the bottom of that circle.
There, the two extremes meet, a fusion point of anarchy and nihilism; a place where meaning and value have been rejected by both sides; where there is no inherent purpose to life or morality, everything replaced by a belief that all existing social institutions and governments should be destroyed.
If that sounds familiar, it should: the extremists on both the Left and the Right preach anarchy and a takedown of our government — and accuse the other side of preaching the same.
It’s a nihilistic stalemate that leads to violence — even among those who aren’t otherwise that extreme — and death.
But does it have to?
Well, let’s take a look at a word that’s tossed around every time there’s a death attributed to political violence: hate…
To read the rest of this essay and my nuanced take on the word “hate,” check out Substack.com and look for me at “Farrandipity.” It’s free. Craig Farrand is a former managing editor of The News-Herald. I can be reached at craig.substack@gmail.com
