What if the directors of the DEA or the FDA said that Tylenol and aspirin were the most deadly substances consumed in the US today? Would a layman be called a fake-news, pseudo-scientist for pointing out the excess of 100,000 deaths per year from opiate and amphetamine overdoses? We can no longer be sure.
Should any authority be heeded when they speak ex cathedra without citing the evidence for their claims? What if the pope asserted that Holy Communion cures cancer? Would there be any uproar from the public and the press? And, if a leading protestant cleric said the opposite, that the wafer caused the malady, would either statement go unnoticed in major media forums?
What kind of debating environment prevails in the US while clearly established and relevant facts get buried under the weight of livid, emotional statements from high-ranking officials? When someone with a title spiels on about threats that should keep us awake shouldn’t hard numbers of description be the first thing off their lips?
Does anyone know how many people in the US make a living watching out for violent threats? When their primary focus is on a particular one that accounts for less than .13% of deadly bloodshed each year, are they earning their keep? Or are they doing more harm than good?
The reason we are supposed to be confident in institutions like the DOJ, Yale, Stanford and The House of Representatives is that those entities, supposedly, are manned by people who amass evidence and maintain standards of proof before they come to conclusions.
Dan Goldman is a grad of both universities listed above. Next, he served ten years as assistant US attorney for south Manhattan. Today, Goldman represents New York’s tenth district in the US congress. It includes the Wall Street financial district and the wealthiest chunk of Brooklyn.
It has been tiresome for a few years now, to have to keep bringing up the fact that there were over 70 murders per day in this country in 2021. There is no reason to believe things have abated much since.
This is copied and pasted from the ADL’s site “Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2022”:
- In 2022, domestic extremists killed at least 25 people in the U.S., in 12 separate incidents. This represents a decrease from the 33 extremist-related murders documented in 2021 and is comparable to the 22 extremist-related murders in 2020. It continues the recent trend of fewer extremist-related killings after a five-year span of 47-78 extremist-related murders per year (2015-2019).
If “violent domestic terrorism” is really on the rise, why hasn’t anybody clued the ADL in? They give us statistics that show the amount of domestic extremist related killings per year, rarely reaches the daily total of “domestic” homicides – it is less than half that for at least the last three years. How is the word “extremist” defined? Do we really have exclusive proof that none of the hundreds of thousands of other slayings in nearly 30 years had any ideological motivations? And if any of those motives happened to be of a kind that certain officials and journalists don’t like publicizing?
The DHS, the FBI, newsmouths and others manning watchtowers find “white supremacism” everywhere they look. If even one person is victimized by that ism it is worth our attention. When over 365 times as many are fatally victimized by criminals with other aims yearly, that “ism” should move down the priority list accordingly. Anyone who purports to go by “scientific” standards is in a weak position to disagree.
Does crunching these kinds of figures make the cruncher a defender of Dylann Roof, Robert Gregory Bowers or Payton Gendron? What does holding up these three maniacs and their victims, so high above the well over one hundred thousand other killers and killed, say about the holders? Slaughtering another human being is always extreme. It doesn’t matter if you kill for pocket money, lost love, a cumbersome spouse, an insult, car damage or simple wanton disregard for human life. Admittedly, some revenge whackings aren’t quite as bad as others. If somebody related to a victim got to a guy like Bernie Madoff before the DOJ did, their motives would be more worthy of sentencing consideration than your average cutthroat’s.
When the perspectives and decibel levels are this far out of joint with hard realities on the ground – it is time to ask: Don’t those making so much noise and furor actually prize such criminals as Roof, Bowers and Gendron for their political value? How ideologically extreme and clueless would you have to be to have missed the crushing disappointment when Jussie Smollett’s “lynching” fell apart?
Julio Rosas, a writer for Townhall, recently testified at a congressional hearing. Both he and his questioner, Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona, characterized “white supremacist extremism” as a low safety priority for people on city streets. That invoked the righteous wrath of Goldman, who responded:
“Well, I really appreciate the lecture from my colleague from Arizona. The problem is that he is speaking, of course, anecdotally. So let’s look at what our actual executive branch agencies in charge of overseeing white supremacy, overseeing the homeland. Let’s look at the homeland threat assessment. ‘Among DVE’s, domestically violent extremists, racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically white supremacist extremists will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.’ Confirmed!” Hand slaps table, “by the director of the FBI.”
If Congressman Dan is so enraged by the anecdotal, why didn’t he immediately step beyond it citing statistics? One recent stat by the ADL tells us about 1 in 15 million people were slain by white supremacists in 2021. The odds of winning 1 million or more playing Powerball are about 1 in 11 million. For Megamillions, it’s about 1 in 12 million. What is rather “confirmed,” is that anyone playing both games would be over twice as likely to hit for a million as get killed by a neo-Nazi or his ilk.
The latest official stat says 25 Americans were killed by “extremists” in 2022. Twenty of them fit the “WS” bill of fare. Listening to the rhetoric of those who make a living keening over such crimes, it is very hard to believe they don’t wish for a steadier stream of them.
The only reason to ever accept the word of authority figures is that their claims are backed by solid evidence. When homicides that account for one per thousand, or less, outweigh the rest of the corpses, are any questions in order? Columbo, was famously “big on motive.” Going by the amount of press inquiry into this skewed DHS obsession, proprietors of 4th estate organs are averse to hiring that detective’s kind.
Part of this PR campaign is a rhetorical trick. Using the word “terrorism,” defined by Google as: “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims:” allows Goldman et al to rule hundreds of thousands of other murders out of their equation. But even using that ruse the Wall Street rep can’t refrain from lying, “specifically white supremacist extremists will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.” A former prosecutor making a public statement this far from the truth should be having all his past convictions rifled by defense counsel.
The focus of the House hearing referred to above was so-called “left-wing terrorism.” There’s no doubt the emphasis on it can be taken out of proportion too. Who wins when standards of literalism, empiricism and exact description get tossed by media, the Hill and academia? It is the very apologists and proponents of “mostly peaceful protest” who find such standards examples of “white supremacy.” If you believe that notion has no traction, explain how high ranking government officials get away with leaving off the first 3 digits of the 26,031 known murders of 2021?
When the rhetoric goes off the rails of reality there are consequences. During the hearing Eli Crane of Arizona said “if you guys want to keep beating that drum, you’re more than…that’s your right, that’s your right, but it’s a reason a lot of Americans don’t take you guys seriously.”
Skewed coverage of other violent occurrences isn’t improving media credibility.
The Tuesday, April 18, 2023 Washington Post front page featured “White man charged after shooting Black teen in Mo.” Eighty-four-year-old Andrew Lester shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl who was knocking on Lester’s door at the wrong address at about ten P.M April 13. It has all the earmarks of an old man’s undue fear of blacks on his porch. As far as daily shootings in the US go, however, it is provably far from commonplace, but rather an anomaly the people who decry it appear visibly hungry for.
It was followed by another cover piece, “In Mo. Shooting fear of Black teen fits a pattern,” two days later. The example in this “pattern,” that was chronologically closest to Yarl’s wounding, was Michael Brown’s death in 2014. With hundreds of thousands shot, well over 100,000 of them fatally, in the 9 years separating Brown and Yarl that “pattern” is a lot weaker than any to be found in the goofiest conspiracy theories. That’s before we look at how much difference separates Yarl from Brown in circumstances.
A third front page article came on Sunday, April 23rd, “We don’t want to exist in fear,” by Lauren Lumpkin, Emmanuel Felton and Mark Shavin. This time it was above the fold. It is curiously lacking in any stats on gunplay where black youth take the fire, or who is holding the piece, in well over 90% of the cases. The public is expected to believe that deranged white people are responsible for more than a tiny fraction of them. What is gained by such departures from the facts? The number of black teens shot in the ten days between Lester’s crime and the WP’s Sunday center front page feature isn’t included. It’s the shooters in those cases that fit a “pattern.” Do editorial forces exist that would characterize it “racist” for asking, statistically, what your average black kid should be afraid of? If so, are they the kind you would want on your “side”?
“Arrest made in shooting of 6-year-old girl, father in North Carolina,” made page 2 on April 21. Robert Singletary shot the daughter and father, purportedly, because a basketball rolled into his yard. Race does get mentioned in the article. Not the victim’s or the shooters. It comes up in an allusion to Ralph Yarl. The word “White” also appears, but only because it is the surname of victims Kinsley and William, who happen to be of that color – and had nothing to do with the basketball. That gunman Robert Singletary is black, writers Maham Javaid and Ellen Francis did not find it headline or even news worthy.
Also cited in the “fit’s a pattern” article is Trayvon Martin. What never arises in such discussions is the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. It tells us that 189 whites killed blacks in 2012 while 431 whites were killed by blacks. The disparity in that imbalance is roughly the same year after year. With carnage at levels the US endures this is a long way from being evidence of genocidal bloodletting from any demographic. It certainly fails to justify the persistent characterization by the media that things have been the other way around for decades on end, however. People who don’t check hard facts are influenced by media and political hype. When fake grievances get served up by the scribing class endlessly, who can say how the violent among their consumers might be swayed?
In any case, there are no facts supporting the idea of masses of white vigilantes out to get minorities. The few who do such things always take PR precedence over killers outnumbering them by 1000 to 1. Later in Goldman’s tirade, we get:
Mr. Rosas, apparently the expert now in organized terrorist activity, has overruled the FBI director, who says, there’s a headline, ‘antifa is an ideology not an organization.’ No, no, no let’s not listen the FBI director let’s listen to, sorry what’s your title, ‘senior writer for Townhall,’ who is gonna’ tell us that the FBI director is wrong.”
There isn’t one single fact cited in Goldman’s rant backing up the conclusion that the FBI director is right. We are expected to accept his word because of his title. As far as details go, the congressman never even reaches the anecdotal level.
Antifa has meetings, communication networks and leaders making plans and strategies for when they assemble in mass. Their actions are coordinated. The first Google hit on the word “organization” goes: “noun, an organized body of people with a particular purpose, especially a business, society, association, etc.” Humpty Dumpty, who said: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less,” now sets glossary standards in academia, bureaucracy and media.
What lies just beneath the surface of propaganda campaigns to place one of the lowest homicidal threats at the top of the list? Isn’t it to render any attempt at correction of farcical falsehoods about white people into the realm of “racism”? If bureaucrats, professors and the race reckoning industry can’t control what people say and make other decisions for them, does that equal racism too?
Goldman holds the Department of Homeland Security in the same kind of reverential awe as the FBI. This is an “organization” – if we are allowed the word – that awarded Paul Guerrero, who led the Border Patrol SWAT team that finally killed Salvador Ramos at Robb elementary in Uvalde, a medal for valor. His men were in body armor and heavily armed but waited nearly 40 minutes after their arrival to take on the lone teenager. To DHS director Mayorkas, that makes them twice as valorous as the local cops who did nothing for 77 minutes. Alejandro must be among those who mindlessly repeated the expression “it’s all relative” in college brainstorming sessions.
Anyone tracking the misadventures, redundancy and extravagance of the DHS and FBI has enough material to go on at book length. Does Congressman Goldman read the newspaper? Does he find the Uniform Crime Report absolute heresy?
The fixation on the would-be enlightenment’s favorite type of crime serves numerous other ends. The first for Goldman and comrades is granting license to unfounded statements made by appointed political hacks. Once their word takes precedence over facts, as a standard, any other viewpoint they’d like rendered politically toxic gathers traction too.
Is allowing the idea that trigger-happy white kooks lurk in shadows everywhere to fly harmless? Or, from there, will the professoriate go on to roll any dissenters on immigration, the debt ceiling, abortion, education and numerous other controversies into the same lump? Hysterical fictions must be shot down in their tracks. That, in theory, is what our free press is there for. Any ideological goal that prevails over reality is, quite literally, a lethal threat.
