The news cycle had slowed to a trickle, until a crescendo of stories–Google memo, North Korea, and Charlottesville–all hit in the span of a week. I’m so sick to death of the virtue signaling and spiraling–both by the the NRO right and predictably the left–in the wake of the Charlottesville ‘terror attack’ (yes, that is what the media is calling it). To put this in perspective:
1. Although the victim, Heather Heyer, was white, the left is trying to turn this into a black v. white issue. As discussed earlier, black-on-white and black-on-black crime is far more common than white-on-black crime.
2. Racial violence by whites at blacks is exceedingly rare. A black person is more likely to die of lightning than by the Klan or Neo Nazis.
Since 1995, 60 people have been killed by white extremists. That’s 2.4/per year.
There have been 100 deaths in America from either Islamic or right-wing extremism since 911:
…But 32 people are killed every year by lightning:
3. The vast majority of Klan and Neo Nazi rallies are uneventful. Since the 60’s, there have been thousands of these rallies and protests, and the vast majority of them do not end in fatalities.
4. Racism directed at whites gets less media coverage, especially on social media.
If it seems like America is broken it’s because the media (both social media and MSM) is putting a megaphone to everything. Every singe occurrence of unrest is amplified, so bad news seems more common or worse than than it really is. That’s not to downplay the suffering of the victims, but the context is lost in the reporting.
From Why There Isn’t More Civil Unrest in America, and Why I’m Not Worried:
Going back to the Wikipedia article, when adjusting for populations and absence of social media, it’s actually kinda remarkable there isn’t more unrest now. Had social media and smart phones existed in the 60′s and 70′s, and had the US population been as large then as it is now (200 million vs. 330 million today), there would have been possibly hundreds more incidents than listed.
Look at it like this: although someone died yesterday due to extremism, for the past year or so, nobody in America died due to political extremism. 364 out of 365 days out of the year all 300+ million Americans were able to coexist without killing each other due to political differences.
As the old saying goes, if it bleeds, it leads. The media can create a ‘crime wave’ , not by encouraging more people to commit crime, but by reporting crime more often. A single act of extremist violence gets considerably more coverage than the thousands of people who die every year in car accidents or other causes of death that are far more common. Since 911, only about 100 Americans have been killed by domestic terrorism, or about the number of auto fatalities in just a single day.
20 years ago, 40, years ago..etc. there was extremism. It has always existed and always will. It’s part of the history of all cultures. In Northern Europe it’s between the Protestants and Catholics; in the middle East it’s between Sunni and Shia, but also other religious extremists and sects; In India, it’s between Hindus and Muslims. In Latin America, it’s between drug cartels. In California, between Bloods, Crypts, drug gangs, etc.