This week Mother Jones posted a story headlined "The Rise of Violent Right-Wing Extremism, Explained."
Alas, some of its explanations are a bit off:
• The article quotes a 2012 paper by Arie Perliger of West Point's Combating Terrorism Center to establish that "there has been a dramatic rise in the number of attacks and violent plots" from the far right since 2007.
This would be more persuasive if the Mother Jones piece didn't go on to include a chart from Perliger's report that very clearly shows a lower number of incidents when Perliger was writing than in 2007:
I should note that Perliger's figures have come in for a lot of criticism, and that Perliger's paper itself points out that it isn't clear to what extent the apparent growth from 1990 to 2011 reveals a real increase in the number of incidents and to what extent it just means our measurements are more accurate. (Bear in mind that his tally includes things like racist vandalism, which is tracked much more closely now than in the past. As Perliger puts it, "the quality of, and accessibility to, data on hate crimes and far right violence has improved during the last two decades.") But whether you buy his numbers or not, his total for 2011 is less than his total for 2007.
...• The article notes that in "February, CNN reported that [the Department of Homeland Security] circulated an intelligence assessment that focused on the domestic terror threat posed by right-wing extremists."
Well, yes, CNN did report that.
And then someone leaked me the intelligence assessment in question, and I posted it here at Hit & Run.
If you read it for yourself, you'll see that it focuses on one narrow subculture (the "sovereign citizens"); that rather than seeing an increasing threat, it says it expects the group's violence to stay "at the same sporadic level" in the coming year; and that it never once uses the word "right-wing..."
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