The Right is Making a Huge Mistake

What blood quanta of Scots-Irish is required to belong to that group?

Boomers can do google fu too. I had to look up the history of the Aryan Nations for a refresher.

"The Aryan Nations gained significant public attention in the 1980s because of the actions of a splinter group called The Order. In a series of dramatic bank robberies, The Order stole more than $4 million to fund the overthrow of the U.S. government and a race war, borrowing ideas from William Pierce’s 1978 novel, The Turner Diaries. The Order collapsed in 1985 when 25 of its members were sent to prison.

In 1987, with many of its former members in jail, the Aryan Nations began to publish a prison newsletter called The Way. The newsletter was used to spread Christian Identity beliefs and to connect the Aryan Nations with its prison faction, a prison gang known as the Aryan Brotherhood. It was also used to recruit new members, a growing concern for the organization because its membership had begun to decline. In the early 1990s several key members left the Aryan Nations. At that time the Aryan Nations had only three chapters in the United States."

And hence how Aryan Nations got established in the prison system.

I drove by the former location of their Idaho headquarters a few weeks ago, on my way to something else. Recently, there was some sort of white supremacist festival or something that was organized in that area. Not sure if it actually happened or not.

TLDR, political violence is political violence. One side doing it doesn’t justify the other doing it.

The irony is a civil lawsuit is what brought them down.

Fascinating stuff…

I’m not writing that one side justifies the other, but that if we are talking about “overthrowing the US government” one side was more active, more prevalent, and in the end more successful because their leaders and core cadre were already the children of power. And those right wing groups were largely led and had core cadres who weren’t children of power in the US system.
And this is true globally as well; left wing movements were largely led and staffed by the affluent and often children of elites of the states they claimed to want to overthrow, they were more active, had higher memberships, and in the end largely disbanded their direct action arms to go into the institutions.
The big narrative push that “right wing terrorism is the most prevalent threat” isn’t an objective assessment, it’s the (seeming) victors pulling the ladder of revolution up behind them to stop the counter revolutionaries.

This is not “google fu”, this is analysis based off of academic research and experience with CT topics.

Aka made up meaningless garbage.

It’s not even good fantasy.

Uh…
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-TWELVE…
[to the tune of Sesame Street counting songs]

You’ve already proven you have nothing of value to say on any serious topic.

My experience with CT is not solely academic in nature. But academic research was part of it. Let’s not pretend like you have some deeply fundamental problem with the academy, you’re a lecturer after all and not working in a steel mill or coal mine.

One, if you are kind of dying, at an expected rapid pace, teaching is a give back.

Two, it is an easy check, if you have a “full time” faculty position, not as an adjunct. Compared to working for a living jobs.

Three, academics are dirty little whores, who should not be put on pedestals, and the university, and traditional peer review systems are antiquated models that should arguably be replaced, as entrenched power nodes die off, with new and better models.

Four, I will write more later, as I think of things. I had not the time to write the best short note, or long one.

I agree. If it were up to me the endowments of the universities, especially those considered elite, would be seized to pay the truck notes for crackers, rednecks, and hillbillies. That doesn’t change what I learned in the real world and in the fake world (the academy) doing research. What I wrote is based on both: left wing groups were more violent, more active, larger in number, larger in membership, composed of the children of the elite and affluent middle classes, and disbanded their direct action arms when it came time to fold back into the institutions. And they “won”. There are exceptions but you would largely be looking at the MENA for those, not the west/global north.

I don’t consider the labels, “left”, or “right”, as particularly useful, accurate, or consistently applied.
They seem to create more noise, and confusion, than the reverse.

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Can you give one example of a radical organization that committed political violence in the 20th century in a western country that has been labeled as leftist that wasn’t politically leftist? e.g. Marxist, Maoist, Anarchist etc.

Sure on an individual level discussion most people aren’t typically politically consistent, we are all conservative about what we know best after all even the most avowed of Marxists among us. But when describing radical political formations Left and Right are an easy shorthand for delineating the politics of different radical groups in relation to our tried and true Liberal tradition.

The data is not codified, from time period to time period,
or even within time periods, usefully with those labels.
It’s a lot of confounding noise.
They are not only bad labels,
They are not usefully predictive.
Nor usefully explanatory.
They should be abandoned for more specific, explanatory, and usefully predictive labelizaitons.
Otherwise, the opposite of the point is achiveved,
Unless the point is just rabble-rousing mobs and pitchforks.

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Again, can you give just one example of a radical political group that committed political violence in the west in the 20th century that was not accurately described as leftist or right wing? I’m just asking for one real world example where a group committed political violence, it was publicly known that it was this group, and their politics were incorrectly labeled as leftist or right wing.

I’ll even lower the requirement to: is there one example where leftist or right wing did not accurately describe the politics of such a radical political formation? Because I know it can get crazy and ideologically confusing when demos collide when it comes to political violence e.g. Catholic liberation theology

Look towards the blendering of domestic and international organized crime.
Often entangled with terrorist groups.
And domestic gang violence.
Two easy examples.
A third might be anarchists, who tend to be classified as far right, but are just as often far left.
The government reporting, and classification, on these things, as “left” or “right” are a loose bowels production.

Classified by who? I’m not sure I have ever met an Anarchist who considered themselves right wing nor anyone who has ever considered Anarchists of any flavor as right wing. I don’t think I’ve ever met even an Anarcho-Capitalist (basically just an edgy way to say libertarian, and libertarians are liberals when rubber meets the road) who considered themselves right wing.

In what way specifically? There are often transactional relationships between radical political groups that commit political violence and criminal organizations but I’m not sure how that affects their stated or perceived ideology.

What are you claiming here? That political violence is misclassified as gang violence? Or gang violence as political violence?

I’m honestly not even sure what this has to do with the original question.

Yes, which is the point I was making here:

If you’re interested in how leadership in the Senior Intelligence Service, FBI, State Department et al could have a political motivation to push a “right wing political violence is the greatest national security threat” narrative you might want to check out the declassified Venona cables.

You might need to read more gov’t reports.

I’m asking you to better state your point. Is it that the US government misclassifies political violence?

If so, I return to:

I already gave you a gift.

Use it or don’t.

I am eating now.

Cartoon Reaction GIF by lilcozynostril

Number of handjobs per political science degree is the units, I would guess, that are the standardized measure of the left/right scale for politics.