They Don’t Want It to Stop

Where would you like to begin with the horrific events in Buffalo last week?

Let’s start with the most obvious and urgent aspect.

There is an epidemic of right wing domestic terrorism in the United States — especially against people of color — one with no analog anywhere else on our political spectrum, and it is being eagerly fomented and fanned by right wing politicians and media figures.

You can tell how true that statement is by how ferociously those politicians and media figures are trying to deny it.

Last week, The New York Times’s David Leonhardt wrote an extremely coherent, non-hyperventilating piece that laid out the facts very clearly:

Over the past decade, the Anti-Defamation League has counted about 450 US murders committed by political extremists. Of these 450 killings, right-wing extremists committed about 75 percent. Islamic extremists were responsible for about 20 percent, and left-wing extremists were responsible for 4 percent.

Nearly half of the murders were specifically tied to white supremacists.

Leonhardt duly notes that “not all extremist violence comes from the right — and that the precise explanation for any one attack can be murky, involving a mixture of ideology, mental illness, gun access and more…..But it is also…