The DOJ Terrorism Report the Trump Administration Doesn't Want You to See
The report is about politically motivated violence
The Department of Justice (DOJ) quietly deleted a government-funded report about politically motivated terrorist attacks from its website on September 12th (you can verify this yourself). The report’s findings were very similar to my own. See the blurb below:
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. Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives. A recent threat assessment by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security concluded that domestic violent extremists are an acute threat and highlighted a probability that COVID-19 pandemic- related stressors, long-standing ideological grievances related to immigration, and narratives surrounding electoral fraud will continue to serve as a justification for violent actions.
Why did the Trump administration remove DOJ research contradicting their own claims about terrorism while being bombarded with my viral DOJ-consistent research? We’ll just never know.
Regardless, here’s the DOJ report. Happy reading.
Look, I’m not the smartest person, I had a knee-jerk reaction to this news that thinks the removal of the DOJ paper was mostly not a bad thing. Not saying we shouldn’t have data on acts of terrorism, but that it might be skewed by bad politics.
A couple recent instances stand out to me:
One is the dismissal of terrorism charges in the Luigi Mangioni murder case. Would this be in the DOJ report since it’s not legally a terrorism case anymore?
The second is the BLM protests. Left wing extremism laid siege to entire cities. Massive groups of people attempted to set fire to federal buildings while people were still knowingly inside, and the designation of “autonomous zones” in downtown Portland - CHAZ / CHOP - that directly contributed to violent criminality.
These seem like petty glaring instances that the data misses, or that the study is too narrow to draw any legitimate conclusions. It just feels like the report suffered from Left leaning bias, it was removed for Right leaning bias, and is made another battleground for Left leaning bias to “prove” definitively that the Right is more violent.
It just all feels so dumb.