The ADL Murder Report That Cried 'White Supremacist'

SayMyName

Well-known member

But a closer examination of the statistics compiled by the ADL – which did not respond to multiple requests for comment – casts doubt on their use as evidence that African Americans or any other Americans are under increasing or serious threats from racist white zealots. The report was publicized in a month of back-to-back massacres by mentally disturbed young men, the latest by a member of a heavily Hispanic community in Texas, which suggest mass killings defy such pat analysis.

Critics cite other problems with the ADL report. Like other organizations tracking extremism, the ADL rarely offers context to claims regarding extremist murders by comparing them to broader homicide statistics. During the same 10-year period cited by the ADL in its 2021 report citing 244 murders by white supremacists, there were at least 165,000 murders in the U.S., meaning those the group attributes to white supremacists accounted for .001% of such violent deaths in that decade.

That statistic pales in comparison with those of major cities that have seen shocking increases in bloodshed, with recent annual murder totals breaking or nearing records set in the 20th century. Chicago had 797 murders in 2021, the highest total in 25 years, while much smaller Minneapolis, one year after George Floyd died in police custody there, had 96 murders, one shy of the city’s 1995 record. Huge jumps in murders also occurred in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other metropolitan areas.

“The FBI has not issued the official number of murders in the U.S. in 2021, but it is expected to exceed the number of murders in 2020: 21,570 -- of which, according to ADL, 23 were committed by extremists,” Carl Moody, an economist at the College of William & Mary who studies crime, told RealClearInvestigations.

“The data presented by the ADL could also be characterized as follows: the number of murders committed by extremists is very small, only 29 in 2021, of which less than half were committed by white supremacists,” Moody said. “It is also 63% lower than the maximum number (78) in 2016, so extremism is down since 2016. In 2020, according to the CDC, 1080 people were killed falling out of bed. Therefore, you are 47 times more likely to be killed by a bed than by an extremist.”

“It’s important that we get the numbers right and in perspective,” said John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. “And we’ve had mainstream narratives that make it sound like they are all like the Buffalo killer. But there are very specific circumstances to a number of these shootings. If there is a significant threat to blacks from these kinds of mass attacks they need to know that. Otherwise, you’re creating divisions that don’t need to be there.”

Crime experts also note that many of the killings cited by the ADL – such as the slaying committed by Shawn Lichtfuss, the New Jersey man who killed his wife, or John Hilt and Justin Murphy, the allegedly lethal members of the Family Values prison gang – were not hate crimes aimed at terrorizing blacks or other minorities.

At the same time, critics say the ADL overstates the percentage of white supremacist murders because it omits some high-profile crimes committed by non-whites. Lott provided eight examples of mass killings – traditionally defined as those with four or more fatalities – excluded by the ADL in its decade-long tally. One of those was the 2016 attack a black man launched against white police officers in Dallas that killed 5 and wounded 11.

The ADL report also does not include the more recent carnage in Waukesha, Wisconsin, last November when a black man with a history of racist social posts drove into a mostly white crowd in a Christmas parade, killing six and injuring 62. For 2021, the ADL lists just two murders by people it classifies as “black nationalists.” If the Waukesha victims were included, black racist murders would account for 23% of extremist murders (8 of 35) for 2021.

"The Wisconsin car attack is one that is very hard to miss," Lott said. "It is such an obvious and well-known case that you have to wonder if they omitted it because it goes against 'their narrative.'"
 
 

But a closer examination of the statistics compiled by the ADL – which did not respond to multiple requests for comment – casts doubt on their use as evidence that African Americans or any other Americans are under increasing or serious threats from racist white zealots. The report was publicized in a month of back-to-back massacres by mentally disturbed young men, the latest by a member of a heavily Hispanic community in Texas, which suggest mass killings defy such pat analysis.

Critics cite other problems with the ADL report. Like other organizations tracking extremism, the ADL rarely offers context to claims regarding extremist murders by comparing them to broader homicide statistics. During the same 10-year period cited by the ADL in its 2021 report citing 244 murders by white supremacists, there were at least 165,000 murders in the U.S., meaning those the group attributes to white supremacists accounted for .001% of such violent deaths in that decade.

That statistic pales in comparison with those of major cities that have seen shocking increases in bloodshed, with recent annual murder totals breaking or nearing records set in the 20th century. Chicago had 797 murders in 2021, the highest total in 25 years, while much smaller Minneapolis, one year after George Floyd died in police custody there, had 96 murders, one shy of the city’s 1995 record. Huge jumps in murders also occurred in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other metropolitan areas.

“The FBI has not issued the official number of murders in the U.S. in 2021, but it is expected to exceed the number of murders in 2020: 21,570 -- of which, according to ADL, 23 were committed by extremists,” Carl Moody, an economist at the College of William & Mary who studies crime, told RealClearInvestigations.

“The data presented by the ADL could also be characterized as follows: the number of murders committed by extremists is very small, only 29 in 2021, of which less than half were committed by white supremacists,” Moody said. “It is also 63% lower than the maximum number (78) in 2016, so extremism is down since 2016. In 2020, according to the CDC, 1080 people were killed falling out of bed. Therefore, you are 47 times more likely to be killed by a bed than by an extremist.”

“It’s important that we get the numbers right and in perspective,” said John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. “And we’ve had mainstream narratives that make it sound like they are all like the Buffalo killer. But there are very specific circumstances to a number of these shootings. If there is a significant threat to blacks from these kinds of mass attacks they need to know that. Otherwise, you’re creating divisions that don’t need to be there.”

Crime experts also note that many of the killings cited by the ADL – such as the slaying committed by Shawn Lichtfuss, the New Jersey man who killed his wife, or John Hilt and Justin Murphy, the allegedly lethal members of the Family Values prison gang – were not hate crimes aimed at terrorizing blacks or other minorities.

At the same time, critics say the ADL overstates the percentage of white supremacist murders because it omits some high-profile crimes committed by non-whites. Lott provided eight examples of mass killings – traditionally defined as those with four or more fatalities – excluded by the ADL in its decade-long tally. One of those was the 2016 attack a black man launched against white police officers in Dallas that killed 5 and wounded 11.

The ADL report also does not include the more recent carnage in Waukesha, Wisconsin, last November when a black man with a history of racist social posts drove into a mostly white crowd in a Christmas parade, killing six and injuring 62. For 2021, the ADL lists just two murders by people it classifies as “black nationalists.” If the Waukesha victims were included, black racist murders would account for 23% of extremist murders (8 of 35) for 2021.

"The Wisconsin car attack is one that is very hard to miss," Lott said. "It is such an obvious and well-known case that you have to wonder if they omitted it because it goes against 'their narrative.'"
Always when information or an event is not helpful to the narrative.
 

Democrats have always used racial division as a pathway to power. During slavery and Jim Crow, their leaders stoked false and ugly fears about the “Negro menace.”

Today, they use similar language about an alleged white menace to malign their opponents and frighten their supporters. In highly partisan and divisive remarks delivered following the racist May 14 mass murder in Buffalo that took 10 African American lives, President Biden asserted, “White supremacy is a poison ... running through our body politic ... And it's been allowed to grow and fester right before our eyes.”

This claim, which echoes those of so many other Democrats – including Attorney General Merrick Garland, who says white supremacists pose “the most dangerous threat to our democracy” – is false.

Much of their “evidence” comes from groups with long histories of misinformation, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose business model depends on ginning up fears about supposed threats. In the aftermath of the Buffalo massacre, the New York Times trumpeted a 2021 “Murder and Extremism” report from the Anti-Defamation League to make the case that the “political right has a violence problem.”

But, as my RealClearInvestigations colleague James Varney reports, this characterization is as misleading as it is inflammatory. The ADL reports that white supremacists accounted for 244 (55%) of the 443 killings that the ADL “documented” between 2012 and 2021. Fifty-five percent – that sounds big! Varney notes that during that same period, there were about 165,000 murders in the United States. Thus, white supremacists accounted for 0.001% of the total.

Even that miniscule figure overstates the case because the ADL admits most of those murders were not hate crimes aimed at terrorizing minorities. “Over the past 10 years, only 86 of the 244 white supremacist killings (35%) were ideological murders,” the report said. “The remainder were group-related but not ideological attacks, were related to traditional criminal activities, or were murders for which no clear motive could be determined.”

Put another way, over the last decade the ADL reports that white supremacists committed an average of 8.6 hate-fueled murders per year during a period when 16,500 homicides occurred annually in the United States.

One murder is, of course, one too many. And the terror sparked by the four massacres that account for half of the white supremacist tally – Dylann Roof’s rampage at a black church in Charleston in 2015 (nine dead, one injured); the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018 (11 dead, six injured); and the 2019 attack at the El Paso Walmart (23 dead, 23 wounded) – resonate beyond their numbers. But to claim that the evil or deranged people who perpetrated these crimes represent a grave threat to our body politic is a gross distortion. To further suggest, as many Democrats and their media allies consistently do, that they represent the views and violent fantasies of tens of millions Americans is an ugly smear.

Democrats’ focus on the white menace – their insistence that the greatest threat to African Americans and other minorities comes from racists – is especially cynical given the heartbreaking rates of black-on-black violent crime. As Heather Mac Donald recently reported in City Journal, “The typical mass shooter in America is not a white supremacist. He is black and either retaliating for a previous shooting or impulsively reacting to a current dispute. In 2020, more than two dozen blacks were killed every day – more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined – even though blacks are only 13 percent of the population.”


While the Democrats’ narrative is clearly partisan – without a strong record to run on, racial division and fear may be their strongest play – it is hard not to see a racist element at work that echoes the party’s dark history. If they truly cared about African Americans, they would be focusing on the chronic problems afflicting the black community. They would talk forthrightly about the tragic level of violence in our urban cores and seek to address it in meaningful ways. Their relative silence suggests that they think it is inevitable. As such, it is an acceptance of the false and repulsive ideas about black inferiority and violence that informed the party for much of the Democratic Party’s history.

The Democrats’ current racial narrative echoes another aspect of the party’s unfortunate legacy. The lies they spread about blacks during slavery and Jim Crow were part of a massive disinformation campaign intended to rally white people to their side. They damned blacks in order to manipulate whites. This same dynamic is at work today as party leaders manufacture threats about white supremacists to convince their well-off white liberal base to consider conservatives beyond the pale, as if to say, “You may not agree with everything we do, but you can’t vote for those racist (misogynistic, homophobic, etc.) cretins.”

Just as they denied the basic humanity of African Americans, they now do the same to white Republicans to secure their votes. While conservatives see through these easily disproven lies, so many Americans – especially those who consider themselves among the best and the brightest – embrace them. Like their racist predecessors, they are easily misled by dark emotional appeals.

Only Democrats can reject their party’s reliance on racist appeals. It is time they stood up and said, “No more. We’re better than that.”
 
Top