Tag: politics

The ‘Study’ You’re Citing About Right-Wing Violence Is Full Of Fake Data

fter Charlie Kirk was assassinated last week, conservatives noted that most political violence comes from the left. The left bristles at this fact and has responded by dramatically padding the numbers to pretend the reverse is true.

Consider a Sept. 12 piece from The Economist claiming, “extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”

Right up front, the piece admits it used data “largely compiled by researchers whom sceptical (sic) conservatives would probably dismiss as biased.” The disclaimer is meant to inoculate The Economist’s audience to its sloppy reporting, as if challenges from conservatives will somehow prove The Economist’s accuracy.

Yes, readers should be beyond skeptical of the source in that piece, The Prosecution Project. Its website claims to “track[] and provid[e] analysis of felony criminal cases involving illegal political violence, terrorism, and extremism occurring in the United States since 1990.”

The founder and executive director of the Prosecution Project is Michael Loadenthal, although the links naming the website’s leadership were broken Friday, meaning no names were visible. Google had not yet scrubbed Loadenthal’s name from searches.

Loadenthal is an “openly anarchist Antifa-affiliated … researcher at the University of Cincinnati who, by his own admission, is a far-left violent extremist,” The Federalist reported in 2023.

So we have an Antifa-connected researcher with rabid bias against the right, held out as an expert on deciding who is extreme. It is like using a vegetarian to define which meat eaters are the most humane — none of them, says the vegetarian.  

The Prosecution Project lists January 2024 charges against John Reardon of Massachusetts, who made antisemitic threats against synagogues and the Israeli Consulate. It notes, “Influenced by events in Gaza, he also said, ‘you do realize that by supporting genocide that means it’s ok for people to commit genocide against you.’” The Department of Justice never identified Reardon’s political affiliation, but The Prosecution Project’s own account seems to indicate he was a pro-Palestine fanatic, a cause typically associated with Democrats. Yet The Prosecution Project identifies Reardon’s crimes as “rightist” because they’re “identity-focused.”

The group also lists 2022 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act charges against Edmee Chavannes — even though “Chavannes was found not guilty.”

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The Economist Cites A Study By Literal Antifa To Talk About ‘Right-Wing Violence’

Since the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, legacy media have gone above and beyond to tank what little credibility they had with the broader American public. And that statement could not be more applicable to The Economist.

Late last week, the U.K.-based outlet ran a story attempting to run cover for the spate of leftist-led violence wreaking havoc across the United States. To accomplish this feat, the piece highlighted several “studies and datasets … largely compiled by researchers whom s[k]eptical conservatives would probably dismiss as biased” to “suggest that the killing of Mr Kirk is not representative of broader trends.”

And whom, may you wonder, is among these esteemed “researchers” cited by The Economist? None other than the University of Cincinnati’s Michael Loadenthal, a radical leftist who previously disclosed his affiliation with the left-wing militant group Antifa.

As Eoin Lenihan previously wrote in these pages, “In 2021, Loadenthal spoke at a ‘White Nationalism Workshop‘ and an ‘Extremism, Rhetoric and Democratic Precarity‘ roundtable at [Dayton] University’s ‘Social Practice Of Human Rights Conference.’” It was during the former event, Lenihan noted, that “Loadenthal introduced himself by stating that he is militant Antifa; he then continued his talk by teaching audience members how to securely dox people to their employers.”

“Throughout the talk he framed his work in explicitly ‘antifascist’ terms, explaining how he employs ‘antifascist intelligence‘ to dox individuals online and in real life,” Lenihan wrote.

In its article, The Economist noted Loadenthal’s work on the “Prosecution Project,” which purportedly “analyses felony criminal cases involving political violence to see which ideologies are most common,” according to the outlet. The project’s data ostensibly “show[s] that extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”

As 1776 Project PAC founder Ryan James Girdusky recently observed, however, the Prosecution Project’s “data” appears highly questionable (if not flat out inaccurate), as it “ties in people with no political affiliations to conservatives or political motives to make the case that right-wingers are responsible for an overwhelming number of politically motivated crimes.”

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Lawmaker proposes web blackout for Russians

Russians should be forced off the internet on weekends or even entire weeks, Nikolay Arefyev, an MP with the Russian Communist Party (KPRF) has proposed. Doing so would have a positive impact on people’s health, he argued.

The legislator floated the idea on Thursday while speaking to the news outlet Abzats. While acknowledging the importance of the internet for work and easy access to information, Arefyev argued that it should be restricted for extended periods of time.

“The internet currently does more harm than good,” the MP stated. “The thing is, it seems to me that 70% of the internet is used to harm one’s own health, because people sit there for hours, days, years, ruining their eyesight and nerves.”

The lawmaker also lamented “gaming addiction” that is plaguing “millions of people.” Many end up in mental institutions due to playing games, Arefyev claimed.

“Therefore, we probably need to shut [the internet] down for weeks at a time, or [do it] on weekends so people can rest,” he suggested.

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We Are Not Going To Have A Debate About Free Speech

he national conversation we need to have right now is not about free speech.

The conversation we need to have is about the normalization of political violence on the left. We need to be talking about left-wing Antifa/trans terrorists gunning down Christians in broad daylight while Democrats and the corporate press justify it and the online left celebrates it.

That’s the only conversation that matters right now. The manufactured outrage over ABC canceling Jimmy Kimmel’s show is an attempt to change the conversation, to flip the script so that instead of talking about the first major political assassination in America in sixty years, instead of talking about the mainstream left’s embrace of political violence and the institutional ecosystem that foments and funds that violence, we can talk about whether President Trump is using Kirk’s murder as a pretext to crack down on free speech and silence his enemies.

What nonsense — and what a tell. It speaks volumes that Democrats, liberal media, and online leftists are so desperate to pivot away from talking about Kirk’s assassination that they have chosen to take up the transparently stupid cause of Kimmel’s free speech rights. Remember, these are people who don’t care at all about free speech. Some of those rending their garments this week over Kimmel’s cancellation were the same people who cheered on government censorship during Covid. They love censorship, so long as it’s their side doing the censoring.

And it hardly needs to be said that nothing about the Kimmel story implicates free speech in any way. Kimmel didn’t just mock MAGA or criticize Kirk, he patently lied about the ideology of Kirk’s alleged assassin, and by allowing his comments to air, ABC arguably violated the terms of its FCC license.

During his Monday show, Kimmel said this: “The MAGA gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

Anyone with an internet connection and half a brain cell knows that Kirk’s alleged killer was deeply into Antifa and transgender ideologies, and that he specifically targeted Kirk for speaking out against these things. He was a creature wholly of the left, and to declare otherwise, as Kimmel did, is a deliberate falsification of the facts surrounding the most high-profile political assassination of our time.

That means Kimmel blatantly violated FCC regulations. Public broadcasters like ABC are prohibited from spreading false information about a crime or catastrophe, and they can lose their licensure if they don’t adhere to the relevant federal regulations.

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Louisiana law professor suspended over Charlie Kirk post: ‘I will 1000% wish death on people like him’

Southern University has suspended and is investigating law Professor Kelly Carmena over her celebration of political activist Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Shortly after Kirk’s death, Carmena made a Facebook post stating: “I will 1000% wish death on people like him. He is the epitome of evil, and I have no compassion, not even a minute ounce of it for people like him who go around spewing hate the way he does.”

Her Facebook profile says “protect trans kids” and “show love.”

Carmena did not respond to requests for comment from The Fix.

University Board Chairman Tony Clayton told news outlets that Carmena spread speech that “is tantamount to participating and inciting violence.”

“Distasteful statements should not be tolerated particularly as it relates to death,” Clayton said. “That is tantamount to participating and inciting violence and spewing hate.”

Southern University is located in Baton Rouge. Its director of communications, I’Tyonnie Jackson, sent The Fix a statement saying the “Law Center is aware of a recent social media post involving one of our employees that has raised concern.”

“The views expressed in that post are the individual’s own and do not reflect the values or positions of the Law Center. We are reviewing this matter in accordance with the institution’s personnel policies and procedures. The Law Center is committed to fostering an environment of respect, inclusivity, and professionalism both online and offline.”

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told reporters the “comments posted by this individual were abhorrent.”

“Whatever your opinion is of Charlie, his assassination marked a dark day for all Americans and should be resoundingly condemned,” she said. “This individual has a constitutional right to have opinions and social media amplifies them. But she does not have a right to teach at a public law school.”

Murill also condemned similar celebrations of Kirk’s murder, calling for “consequences.”

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Convicted Maine Killer Running For Bangor City Council Hopes Voters Will Give Her A Chance

Twenty-three years ago Angela Walker beat a man to death in an Old Orchard Beach confrontation stemming from an insult the victim had hurled at her.

Walker is now looking – and hoping – for forgiveness as she embarks on a municipal political career.

She’s among nine candidates seeking a seat on the Bangor city council.

Walker was convicted and later imprisoned in the brutal killing of Derek Rogers, a Canadian tourist who had allegedly called her a racist name.

Cops found that Rogers had been severely beaten and then suffocated to death with sand forced down his throat.

“That’s my past,” Walker told the Bangor Daily News as she announced her council candidacy. “I don’t live there anymore and I’m a different person.”

She also said she understands and respects people who have hesitations about her criminal history.

Sgt. Rogers, of Russell, Ontario, was 48, a career officer in the Canadian military.

His lifeless body was found on the beach August 1, 2002 in a section of the popular coastal beach town known as Ocean Park.

He had been a musician who played trombone for the Canadian Central Command Band.

Rogers, whose family had vacationed in Old Orchard for generations, had spent several weeks at the beach with his wife of 20 years, Faith, police said at the time.

She had left Old Orchard to return to work, but Rogers was staying longer.

He was found dead by a fisherman shortly after 3 a.m. on the boardwalk along the beach a quarter-mile from the cottage he rented.

Before cops were able to identify Rogers, police had to interview roughly 400 people to try to find out who he was, how he died and who killed him.

Walker, then 29, later admitted to the killing and lying to cops in exchange for a 10-year manslaughter sentence. The admission was in exchange for a reduced murder charge.

An Associated Press account of her courtroom appearance said Walker, “dressed in gray sweat pants and sweat shirt with her black hair neatly pulled back, admitted her guilt to the judge in a clear, emotionless voice.”

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Woke Illinois gov. posed with ‘violence disruptor’ who days later ‘killed young dad-to-be while fleeing Louis Vuitton robbery’

Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker was seen posing with a man who worked as a ‘Peacekeeper’ in the state, less than a week before he was arrested for allegedly killing a father while fleeing a robbery at a Louis Vuitton store. 

Keller McMillan, 35, was one of seven men charged with murder, burglary, and retail theft after they robbed a luxury retail store and allegedly killed a father who was driving to work. 

It has now been revealed that McMillan was working as a ‘Peacekeeper,’ a trained community member who is sent to violent hotspots to de-escalate conflicts. 

Pritzker met with the Peacekeepers at the start of the month, sharing photos in a press release from the event, including one with McMillan. 

The photo was removed after McMillian’s arrest, but had already been circulated on multiple media websites. 

Pritzker shared a video on his social media from the event, where he sat at a roundtable and listened to the Peacekeepers describe their experience in the program. 

The governor noted that the Peacekeepers create a safer community and wrote in the caption, ‘It’s folks like these that we need more of doing the hard work of community violence prevention, not troops on the ground to undermine efforts fighting crime’.

‘The Governor meets hundreds of people in communities every week and is often asked to take photos,’ Pritzker’s office said in a statement.

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Sick: Oberlin College Student Leader Wants to “Bring Back Political Assassinations” Following Politically Motivated Murder of Charlie Kirk

Julia Xu is a radical leftist student at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, who serves on the college’s advisory board of the school’s Gender, Sexuality, and Attraction Initiatives and participates with Students for a Free Palestine.

Following the politically motivated murder of Charlie Kirk, Julia voiced her support for political assassinations as a way to silence political opponents.

In a social media post under the handle @bringbacktheguillotine, she said, “We need to bring back political assassinations.”

She continued, “I don’t feel bad and I don’t think that everyone deserves the right to free speech. Some people should be afraid to express their opinion in public.”

The Post contacted Xu, who appeared to backtrack, saying she apologizes and is “deeply remorseful” for her statements.

Although Oberlin condemned Xu’s apparent support of political violence, it does not appear that she will face any formal consequences.

Oberlin’s President Carmen Twillie Ambar said, “Last week, in an open letter, I wrote ‘there is no place for political violence in the America that I love.’ It threatens our sense of safety and well-being and it violates the sanctity of the nation’s civil discourse.”

“I want to emphasize that the views expressed in the student’s post do not reflect those of the faculty member who teaches the class referenced. Nor does the student’s post reflect the views of Oberlin College.”

The college has not addressed how it will keep conservative students safe on its campus in the face of a fellow student advocating for executions.

The Gateway Pundit has reached out to leadership at Oberlin and will update this story if they provide a comment.

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The Unique Evil of the Left

Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in our day?

There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order.

But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level of what the communists accomplished on a good afternoon.

The French Revolution, and particularly its radical phase, was the classic manifestation of modern leftism and served as the model for still more radical revolutions around the world more than a century later.

As that revolution proceeded its aims grew more ambitious, with its most fervent partisans demanding nothing less than the total transformation of society.

In place of the various customs and settled ways of a France with well over a millennium of history behind it, the radical revolutionaries introduced a “rational” alternative cooked up in their heads, and with all the warmth of an insane asylum.

Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined. (These people guillotining statues were the rational ones, you understand.) The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday. The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards.

Punishments for deviations from the new dispensation were as severe as we have come to expect from leftism. People were sentenced to death for owning a Rosary, giving shelter to a priest, or indeed refusing to abjure the priesthood.

We are plenty familiar with the guillotine, but the revolutionaries concocted still other forms of execution as well, like the Drownings at Nantes, designed to humiliate and terrorize their victims.

Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem impossible.

Likewise, it’s no wonder the left needs the total state. In place of naturally occurring groupings and allegiances, it demands the substitution of artificial constructs. In place of the concrete and specific, the Burkean “little platoons” that emerge organically, it imposes remote and artificial substitutes that emerge from the heads of intellectuals. It prefers the distant central government to the local neighborhood, the school board president over the head of household.

Thus the creation of the departments, totally subordinate to Paris, during the French Revolution was a classic leftist move. But so were the totalitarian megastates of the twentieth century, which demanded that people’s allegiances be transferred from the smaller associations that had once defined their lives to a brand new central authority that had grown out of nowhere.

The right (properly understood), meanwhile, according to the great classical liberal Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “stands for free, organically grown forms of life.”

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J.D. Vance Says 26 Percent of Young Liberals Justify Political Violence. Here’s What the Data Really Say.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has elicited egregious reactions across social media. On the left, some have reacted to his murder by calling Kirk a Nazi and likening him to Adolf Hitler. Others callously mocked Kirk and celebrated his assassination. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has assigned responsibility for the tragedy to those who demonized Kirk, and Attorney General Pam Bondi said Monday that the Justice Department will go after those “targeting anyone with hate speech.” The Daily Wire‘s Matt Walsh has gone so far as to say he “cannot ‘unite’ with the Left because they want me dead” and “will spit on my grave when I die and laugh in the faces of my wife and children.”

On Monday, Vice President J.D. Vance echoed this us-vs.-them mentality while hosting Kirk’s podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show. During the episode, Vance said that America must confront the difficult truth that “24 percent of self-described quote, ‘very liberals,’ believe it is acceptable to be happy about the death of a political opponent” and “26 percent of young liberals believe political violence is sometimes justified.”

However, Vance cherry-picks data from a YouGov poll released two days after Kirk’s assassination to paint an inordinately bleak picture of the state of American political discourse.

According to that poll, which was conducted immediately following Kirk’s murder, the majority (55 percent) of “very liberal” respondents said violence is never justified to achieve political goals. An even larger majority of self-described liberals (68 percent) shared this view. Similar majorities of “very liberals” (56 percent) and liberals (73 percent) said it was always or usually unacceptable for “a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose.” (It’s possible that at least some of the liberals who answered “yes, violence can sometimes be justified” had in mind edge cases like armed resistance by Jews against the SS, not the assassination of peaceful political pundits with whom they disagree.)

It is true that larger majorities of “very conservatives” (88 percent) and conservatives (83 percent) said political violence is never justified. Likewise, 90 percent and 91 percent, respectively, said it is “always or usually unacceptable” for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose. While the disparity between American liberals’ and conservatives’ condemnation of political violence and its celebration is notable, the fact remains that a majority of even “very liberal” Americans reject political violence outright and denounce its celebration.

Concern about political violence is bipartisan: 90 percent of Democrats regard political violence in the U.S. as a problem, as do 89 percent of Republicans. Considering that even more Democrats regard political violence as a “very big problem” following Kirk’s murder than they did following the murder of Minnesota’s Democratic Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman, it cannot be said that they only care about political violence when it’s enacted against their political allies.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, it’s important to recognize that the majority of Americans are united in denouncing political violence and those who celebrate it.

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