Sides

 Things have a way of going missing. My wife, though she has at least six pairs, loses her glasses with alarming frequency. Luckily she has someone who can be trusted to scour the house, yard, car and other potential hiding places to bring them back. I would like to provide this same service to those of you who went to the Department of Justice web site looking for a recently released report on domestic terrorism. 

In the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk, conservatives have been falling over themselves to point out that the shooter in this particular case was a liberal. Kudos to the investigative minds who made this connection, and just a dollop of shame on those who may have wished that this was yet another instance of a radicalized Neo-con with a manifesto. Tyler Robinson's motivations were pretty clean cut, allegedly having texted his partner, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” And there it was. The "hate" speech. The convicted felon at the top of The Trumpstein List said, “The radical left poses tremendous violence, and they seem to do it in a bigger way. They’ve caused a lot of problems for this country. I really think they hate our country.”

Which is why the National Institute of Justice had their January 2024 report scrubbed from the DOJ website, the one that starts, "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." Over the course of thirty years, the study found that far right extremists committed more than two hundred acts of terrorism resulting in the loss of more than five hundred lives, while far left extremists were involved in less than a quarter of those kind of events with a body count of less than eighty. 

"Bigger way?" 

Not according to the Department of Justice, or at least not until they decided to try and hide those numbers. By declaring "war" on antifa (anti-fascists for those etymologists in the room) the convicted felon is attempting to create a false equivalency between hate in the name of MAGA and hate in the name of, well, antifascism. So the suggestion that hate is bad and killing is bad and we should all stop is lost in the myriad of fingers pointing to the opposite side. Some hate, it seems, can't be negotiated out.