Tag: violence

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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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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