Starting off, they determine that the audience for “far right” content online is vastly greater than “far left:”
In terms of audience size, Hard Core Right illiberal sites averaged about 186 million visits monthly. That’s about 31 percent the size of the audience for sites representing the mainstream Right and 19 percent the size of the audience of mainstream Left sites. … Unlike the Hard Core Right illiberal sites, the audience for Left illiberal sites is miniscule. Left illiberal sites received a monthly average of about 2.5 million visits.
Which is about 1.3 percent the size of the Hard Core Right illiberal audience.
Let’s just assume for the sake of argument that their data is accurate, *and* that the size of the far right vs. far left can be accurately assessed based on the visits to public and clearly acknowledged extremist websites. Based on that, their judgement is that the far right is something like 76 times bigger/more dangerous than the far left. Their final conclusion:
Those of us who seek to conserve and defend American liberalism should act accordingly, which involves recognizing that the illiberal threat comes overwhelmingly from the right.
The threat comes “overwhelmingly from the right.”
Uh-huh.
Look at the last couple of years. The left can point to one single “riot” by right wingers that largely involved people milling about harmlessly in the halls of power, with a vanishingly small number of knuckleheads busting windows and acting the fool. But on the other hand… the left gave us summers of cities in flames, cops assassinated, Trump supporters ambushed and murdered, cities occupied, books burned, death, destruction, fire and filth.
If there are fifty times more far right types than far left, but the far left actually carries out fifty times more actual violence, doesn’t mean that the lefties are 2,500 times more dangerous per capita? Couple that with this:
The summary *here* is that Antifa showing up is a clear indicator that a protest is going to involve violence, destruction, arrests and injuries… while far right groups showing up statistically does nothing to make a protest more or less violent. It’s almost like people visiting “far right” websites doesn’t actually say anything about whether or not they’re going to be actually violent. I’m reminded of all the moral panics about how Dungeons and Dragons is going to make kids into Satan worshippers, and how video games will make kids into violent psychopaths. Rather than basing the level of threat on what people read, how about basing it on what they *do*?
Plus, their methodology may well not be very good. Do their “far left” websites include Facebook and Twitter? The far right (the *real* far right) has to go to Daily Stormer and such because they’ll get kicked off FB and Twitter and the like. The far left, on the other hand, is welcome there.
