Tyranny always begins with the manipulation of information. The people have to be controlled, and the first step is to dominate the information they can access. Historically, this type of control mechanism required the same three ingredients as it does today:
1) Stop unwanted information (censorship)
2) Propagate desired information (propaganda)
3) Justify this control using whatever narrative is necessary.
This article exposes the narratives being used to usher in a new authoritarian regime and how normal working people can stand their ground and debate these topics against the most indoctrinated of statists and devout Marxists.
The Counter-Violent Extremist (CVE) community produces reports on extremism, terrorism, and hate crimes. The goal is for policymakers and corporate elites to enact certain policies to combat these threats. Unfortunately for the agenda, extremism, terrorism, and hate crimes are rare events. As a result, CVEs and left-wing media have to produce and disseminate highly flawed reports to make these threats appear more significant than they are.
Before dismantling these narratives, we should ask an obvious question:
What happens if left-wing think tanks get what they want from such narratives?
If we can convince society that those violent ideologies are a grave threat to public safety, we can justify tyrannical policies and techniques, whether it be public or private sector tyranny.
The West can (and already does) enact:
• Censorship campaigns
• Redirection methods that alter what people see online
• Utilizing internet resources to indoctrinate at-risk audiences, such as youths and the mentally ill.
• Election interference and targeting of people based on political belief
• Medical mandates, curfews, and social gathering limitations
• Oppression of certain groups under “affirmative action” guises
• The expansion of digital marketplace monopolies onto “extremist” start-ups and competition, creating an even more constricting bottleneck on information.
(Note: Tech platforms are not ‘de jure’ monopolies in their entirety yet they maintain a certain level of ‘de jure’ monopoly status. This ‘de jure’ status is what causes many of our problems)
The participating tech platforms seize this opportunity to argue for more economic control of the digital space by claiming that start-up platforms are unsafe for not using censorship and redirection software produced by the CVE community. Eventually, any dissent will be squashed before others can even see it; indeed, the majority of content censored online is removed or hidden before other users ever see it.
Reports conducted by the counter-violent extremist and leftist think tanks rely on a critical assumption: that rightwing extremism is a networking issue. In other words, rightwing extremism is organized and group-based (or “affiliated”).
When CVEs first came about in the early stages of the War on Terror, they were originally meant for Islamic extremists. “Islamic extremists” is a category of extremism that is networked and affiliated because there are very few “lone wolf” Islamic extremists. They tend to carry out attacks from a centralized group. They are an affiliated type of extremism. The CVE community’s methods were developed for this type of extremism. Censorship; the targeting, profiling into groups, redirection of users; and various CounterSpeech initiatives only work on group narratives.
However, rightwing extremism is not an affiliated extremism – it is lone wolf extremism where most arbiters are radical individuals acting on their own agency. Also, rightwing extremism is extremely insignificant statistically. So the goal of the CVE community is to mislead the public in order to implement their methods on an entire population, in which case, these methods become a type of digital governing.
The Extremism Myth
Hate
Using the Uniform Crime Reporting Program and the Statistical Atlas data, I have shown that hate crimes are vastly insignificant compared to total violent crimes in America. There are only 3900 hate crime offenders in a country of 330,000,000 people (2019).
In 2020, there were about 2200 hate-motivated simple assault cases and about 1400 hate-motivated aggravated assault cases in a country of 330,000,000 people.
In 2020, there were 22 hate-motivated murders/manslaughters…in a country of 330,000,000 people.
Violent hate crimes don’t even make up 1% of total violent crimes, meaning the leftist think tanks focus on the most insignificant category of violent crimes.
Terrorism & Extremism
The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) released a 100-page study on global extremism and terrorism which demonstrated that:
“far-right terrorism remains a small fraction of total terrorism worldwide. Even in the West, historically nationalist or separatist, Islamist, and far-left terrorism has been much more common.”
Far-left terrorism has been more common than far-right.
The report’s findings are critical blows to the think tank/CVE community. The IEP citation showed that “Deaths from terrorism are now 52 percent lower than their peak in 2014.” Most of this decline is due to the decline of Islamic terrorism and the NATO wars waged on it with the help of past CVE efforts. Now that the CVE community is focused more on North America and the West, let’s examine terrorism from different regions of the world:
The above graph of terrorism by region stands in stark contrast to the incessant anti-American and anti-West rhetoric circulating online and in the media, particularly the narratives of these regions being hateful and full of domestic terrorists.
A more recent graph from IEP (2020) shows similar trends, except for attacks in North America which slightly increased while deaths slightly decreased.
To emphasize the bizarre leftist narrative, there have been just over 100 deaths from far-right groups across two years and two continents (Oceana and North America). That’s 50 deaths per year in regions with a combined population of well over 400 million people. Lightning strikes are more common than far-right group attacks in North America and Oceana. Clearly, someone believes we need to be censored, redirected, and treated as threats.
“In 2018, total deaths attributed to far-right groups increased by 52 percent to 26 deaths. By the end of September 2019, 77 deaths had been attributed to far-right groups.”
Even though there was an increase within these two years (it decreased across other years), total deaths are far lower than one would expect if CVEs like Jigsaw and Moonshot were taken at their word.
The Nature of Far-Right Attacks
Far-left terrorism is mostly categorized as affiliated, meaning that most far-left terrorists are part of terrorist organizations rather than solo actors. Affiliated attacks (9/11) are a much more threatening brand of terrorism than solo actors, and ironically, the CVE communities’ techniques were built to handle affiliated extremism, not unaffiliated…yet the CVE community neglects the far-left in favor of targeting the far-right because the CVE community is ultimately interested in simply targeting the right, not the far-right.
“[F]ar-right terrorists are less likely to be formally affiliated with a group than other terrorists.”
The techniques that the CVE community deployed in the past against Islamist extremism will not work with far-right extremism since it is (1) far less significant and (2) far less networked (as opposed to earlier, pre-war versions of Islamist extremism). The CVEs know this but persist in their delusions about the “far-right.”
A mere 57 deaths from this domestic threat are meant to justify the collaboration of leftist think tanks, the tech platforms, and security state agencies. Are the freedom, privacy, and free speech of hundreds of millions of people really the price we pay for just 57 deaths a year? Clearly, this is not about the safety of citizens – otherwise, this collaboration would not be focused on the most insignificant category of violent crimes, the least affected regions of terrorism, and the least affiliated versions of extremism.
“Reaching groups at risk of rightwing extremism is arguably more complex, considering the absence of similar targeting criteria other than white, young and male.” Even IEP, arguably the only credible source of data on terrorism, does not fully understand far-right extremism. The reason is that there is not enough data on it because it is statistically insignificant; and there are no centralized groups involved because this brand of extremism is due to radicalized individuals as opposed to groups.
There is another point to be made about this 100-page IEP article. The next section is about an article from the Newlines Institute that the CVE community retweeted in support of their agenda. That CVE-backed article happened to cite this 100-page IEP article by cherry-picking pieces of it. This is obvious proof that the CVE community does not check the sources of articles that they use to market their agenda. Be prepared to update your list of corrupt organizations by adding the Newlines Institute next to the CVE organizations.
The most recent object of adoration within the CVE community is an article by Newlines Institute, which was important enough that The Soufan Center and the Co-founder and CEO of Moonshot, Vidhya Ramalingam, retweeted it. Newlines Institute cited the 100-page IEP article, which disproves the narratives that the Newlines Institute was trying to push. These leftist think tanks are so disconnected from reality that they cite articles that disqualify their own points. Perhaps they didn’t read the article? Perhaps they think that we won’t check their sources?
Newlines Institute reported “a 320% surge in far-right terrorist attacks between 2013 and 2018, primarily concentrated in North America, Western Europe, and Oceania.” The “dramatic rise” is due to a low number of data points, so any rise is a dramatic rise, which is how averages behave, particularly low-sample averages. For example, if a tree fell in your yard last year and two fell in your yard this year, that is a 200% increase. The stark increase is due to a low number of events, so even a marginal increase can lead to ridiculous “320%…” headlines.
The Newlines Institute argues similar dogma that the CVE organizations argue – that far-right extremism and white supremacy hate crimes are principal threats to our society. The institute even cited the National Intelligence Council after making bizarre claims over “far-right extremism” and “tribalism.” The problem is that the National Intelligence Council citation never even mentioned these topics.
How can anyone take these think tanks and CVEs seriously, and how have they become so powerful, influential, and so well-connected to corporations and governments?
What is their endgame?
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