We’re in an Epidemic of Right-Wing Terror. Won’t Someone Tell the Press?

 In These Times -  As researchers have repeatedly found, the right is where political violence in America overwhelmingly originates. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies — an eminently respectable, bipartisan think tank — right-wing political violence accounted for more than 90% of all attacks or plots in the first half of 2020, far outpacing terrorism from any other source since 1990. And since 2020, it’s gotten increasingly worse. A Reuters investigation published in August found that U.S. political violence is worse than it’s been at any point since the 1970s. Of the 18 fatal acts of political terrorism they counted since the Jan. 6 insurrection, only one came from the ​“Left” (involving a Democratic county official who allegedly murdered a reporter investigating him for corruption).

But you would never know about this emerging crisis from listening to the mainstream media for most of the past three decades. And as calls to violence metastasize into a routine component of Republican politics — as when former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee made the H. Rap Brown-like declaration that, should criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump continue, 2024 will be the last U.S. election ​“decided by ballots rather than bullets” — that denial may soon be among the biggest problems we have.