'Partisan garbage': The Federalist takes on WaPo's claim there's been a surge in right-wing terrorism

Brett T. | 6:37 PM on November 26, 2018

There are plenty of progressives on social media who love to point out that white men are responsible for more deaths by terrorism in the United States than Muslims — with the single caveat that you start the clock on Sept. 12, 2001, for some reason.

Now the Washington Post is reporting that there’s been a surge in right-wing terrorism recently, a claim taken apart by the Federalist’s David Harsanyi.

WaPo's claim that America experiencing a 'surge' in right-wing terrorism is partisan garbage. https://t.co/v5ZeAU6pKV

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) November 26, 2018

Harsanyi consults the same source as the Washington Post — the Global Terrorism Database — which shows zero terrorist acts by right-wing groups in 2002 but a “surge” since then to 36 acts resulting in 11 fatalities.

Harsanyi continues:

Or, in other words, fewer homicides were committed by political terrorists of any stripe in the United States in 2017 than were committed by illegal immigrants in the state of Texas alone — which I am assured is an incredibly low number that shouldn’t worry us very much. If one of these is scaremongering, why not the other?

So the same media who told us the “ghost caravan” didn’t exist and was just pre-election scaremongering by Fox News and Republican politicians is now trying to paint the picture of a “surge” in right-wing terrorism?

Oh, and …

Even if we were to accept the numbers, The Post decided to bury the lead. According to their own data, there were more fatalities due to domestic Islamist terrorism than to all other types combined over the past three years. In 2017, there were 16 fatalities due to Islamic extremism. Fatalities from Islamic terrorism in 2016 — which includes 49 killed in a gay Orlando nightclub by an ISIS-inspired jihadi — and 2015 were higher than all alleged right-wing terror attacks. There’s just as strong a case to be made that there has been a “surge” in Islamic terrorism in the United States since Donald Trump ran for president.

Then again, none of the three authors of the article take the time to mention a single one of those Islamic attacks.

Good read. Truly shows the spewing of propaganda from the lefty outfit WAPO. This is exactly how they also come up with the falsly high #’s of mass shootings every time they publish about gun crimes. They incorrectly report the #’s to bolster their insane narratives. https://t.co/7yk8VPPVg2

— TheAmericanist (@SanityReign) November 26, 2018

@washingtonpost lying.
As usual. https://t.co/0HECsQk2gC

— Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) November 26, 2018

We’re old enough to remember the Washington Post stepping up and debunking gun-control group Everytown’s wildly inflated stats on school shootings, and that certainly didn’t end the gun control debate. Now maybe the Post should have a second look at this “surge” of right-wing terrorism.

Related:

WHOOPS! Washington Post updates error-filled comparison of student vs. military deaths https://t.co/dtJksgBC0P

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) May 19, 2018