9-27-25 The Weekend Hour 3: Is Right Wing Violence Really Dominant or Are Being Lied To With Statistics?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
To night. Michael Brown joins me here, the former FEMA
director of talk show host Michael Brown. Brownie, no, Brownie,
You're doing a heck of a job the Weekend with
Michael Brown broadcasting Life in Denver, Colorado. It's the beacon
of Michael Brown. Glad to have you joining the program today.
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(00:21):
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(00:44):
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Seems to me that our discourse in the public square
about political violence is now driven by one single claim pregnant. Pause,

(01:08):
what do you think about it? Yes, that right wing
conservative actors commit most of the political violence in this country.
That theory has migrated from activist reports into mainstream journalism

(01:30):
within the cabal, and then it's made its way into
the official talking points. If you're listening to anybody in
an elected position, well, they're quick to tell you that
most of the political violence in this country is committed
by right wingers. But have you ever thought is that
true or not? I know you probably think intuitively that

(01:51):
it's not true. Well, the proposition that it's right wingers
that commit most of the violence depends on data sets
with definitions that move around, and scope of inquiries that
get very stovepiped and selective. It also depends on the
habit of turning non political crime into political intent if

(02:16):
the offender, the person committing the crime happens to be well, oh,
it's a Democrat. And then at the same time you
have to discount ideologically charge defenses when they flow from,
or are caused by, or acted upon by a left

(02:37):
winger or say a pro Palestinian cause. If you examine
how the numbers get built, you'll see a pattern definitions, inclusion, criteria,
coding choices. It's almost like a doctor filling out you
know posts, his notes get handed over to a transcription

(03:00):
in a medical office, and then they start coding things.
And if it doesn't get coded right, your insurance may
or may not reimburse you. And if you deliberately miscode something,
maybe you're just because you're going to get more from
you know, the insurance not paying. I mean, coding becomes
so important when you start tallying numbers, start at the

(03:22):
very basic. If you're going to do a fair account,
a fair accounting a political violence, you got to attract
two ideas, two pretty simple ideas. First, political motive, not
the identity of the offender, Not the identity of the criminal.

(03:43):
The motive is what makes an act political. Two comparable
acts must be counted on comparable terms. If a conservative
actors ordinary bar fight, you know, you're a conservative, You're

(04:06):
minding your own business, you're having a drink at a bar,
and sudden you find yourself in the middle of a fight,
Well that bar fight is listed as political because he
once shared extremist memes. And I tacked the word extremists
to memes because well, that's whatever the meme was, even

(04:29):
if it was a humorous meme. Well, it's got to
be extremist if a conservative did it. If you're going
to do that, then a left winger that offenders riot
linked arson has to be counted as political when it
was plainly obviously undertaken for an ideological purpose. Do you know,

(04:50):
just as a footnote here, do you know that the
people that track school shootings have now listed the assassination
of Charlie Kirk's assassination as a school shooting? Yeah? Do
you think of Troy Kirk's assassination as a school shooting?

(05:10):
Was it technically on the campus? Yes? Was it what
we think of as a school shooting? No? No, But
it certainly fits their agenda, doesn't it. If a database
counts propaganda stickers as violent extremism on the right, did
it has to count left wing vandalism of statues or

(05:33):
memorials as violent extremism on the left. If you've got
a study that focuses only on fatal attacks, then you've
got to explain why a non fatal bombing, a non
fatal arson, a non fatal beating, or just an attempted
assassination many of them left coated but not counted. I'm

(05:53):
not making a partisan demand here, I'm making a basic
standard of in dice clan like cases ought to be
treated alike. Gee, what a concept right. The most aggressive
inflation starts with what gets labeled right wing by a

(06:18):
theme rather than by a motive. Some of the people
to compile this data treat any identity biased crime as
quintessentially right wing, even when the offender's own rhetoric and
associates place him in a say, pro palestinine or left
wing circle. In other words, facts no matter in that

(06:39):
frame of reference. Antisemitic offenses are assigned to the right
by definition by definitional fee up because the target is
a protected group. So if it's a protected group or
a favorite group on the left, there's got to be
the right that's doing it. And also because all of
us on the right are presumed to be bigots, racist, transphones, homophobes,

(07:04):
whatever whatever pejority of you can think of, it is
naturally assumed that if by by those who keep count
that those of us on the right are all those
horrible things. When you understand that, then you understand that
that reverses the direction of any explanation. We're supposed to
infer political ideology from the identity of the victim. Oh okay,

(07:33):
that method equates theme with motive and then motive with
right wing identity. That kind of reason would be rejected
in any other domain area of study, any empirical state
would summarily reject that kind of logic. It lets the

(07:56):
idea of preconception fix the labels in advance, and then
it protects the labels from correction when the facts of
a case prove otherwise. Then you have the tactic of
counting everything around the white around the right, while counting
only a narrow set of events on the left. One

(08:17):
wildly sided stream of reports counts every homicide committed by
a person with a white supremacist interest, including domestic violence
or intra gang murders that have no political purpose. It's
just gangers, gang bangers shooting gang bangers. And in the
same breath, it excludes left wing violence that doesn't produce

(08:41):
a dead body a corpse. So you get a double filter.
Add ordinary crime to one side, subtract ideologically driven crime,
non fatal violence from the other side. Add enough of
the former, subtract enough of the latter, and the headline
becomes inevitable. Then your data, if you're a lefty, will

(09:05):
perform as you've designed the compilation of the data. That's
what's going on. There's a third move too, and that's
the curated time window or the one off outlier exclusion.
In some tallies, a single Islamist mega attacked that reshaped

(09:25):
modern history is removed because while that was exceptional, if
you remove that, it reduces the non right body count
by thousands. And when that happens, that predictably enlarges the
relative share of the right wing violence. Because the rationale
is presented as a methodological prudence, but the consequence is

(09:51):
political math. The new denominator makes right wing violence look
like the dominant fraction by construction. So if the goal
is to measure danger in reality, there's no justification for
erasing the single most consequential terrorist attack in American history.
If the goal is to win a talking point, then excluded.

(10:13):
That's why these numbers are skewed. So begin with Michael Brown.
Text the number, text, questions or comments whatever to three three,
one zero three, keyword Mike or Michael. Me be right back.
Welcome back to the weekend with Michael Brown. Let have
you with me. The theory of this hour is that

(10:37):
the data that we keep being told that most of
the political violence in this country is committed by right
wingers is manipulated data, and I've walked through the different
ways that they manipulated. But to see how what I've
just described previously how that works in practice, let's look

(11:01):
closely in a few studies that shape the public conversation.
Because some academic databases operationalize political violence by category instead
of by motive, identity, focused offenses are called right wing,
regardless of the offenders, the criminal's own statements, trivial or

(11:25):
non violent acts such as you know, flyers or stickers,
that's counted alongside serious violent crimes, and then ideologically driven
left wing violence gets discounted when it occurs during a
riot or in a you know, a no go zone

(11:46):
somewhere that you know, government officials prefer to frame as
some sort of spontaneous unrest or mutually even mutual aid.
The effect is this spectacular asymmetry. The right swallows even
a political crime by offenders with the wrong associations, the
left shed's political motive in cases where violence was plainly

(12:11):
part of the cause. Inferences about national danger are then
built on this misaligned scaffolding. The foundation of which even
itself is crumbling. And then you get a second cluster
of reports that focuses on murders by extremists and then
treats all killings by a person with extremist ties as

(12:32):
extremist killings. Consider what that means. If a white supremacist
gang member murders his girlfriend in a domestic dispute, that
death is credited to right wing political violence. There's no
political action whatsoever. The gang banger and his girlfriend for

(12:53):
having a fight. The gang banger acts as a gang
banger does. He kills his girlfriend that old bad was
you know, aroun around. I'm just thinking tied of her.
Boom blows her away. Oh oh, that's white supremacist. Because
he was a white supremacist gang then, so that's counted
as white supremacist political violence, and he gets thrown over

(13:15):
in the category with conservatives. The political story that follows gets
a data point. But remember there was no political motive
in that crime. There was only a crime that would
have occurred regardless of ideology. Do you think there's a
chance in hell that if a black gang member gets

(13:39):
into a domestic dispute with his girlfriend or lover or
whatever and executes her that that's going to be counted
as black supremacist violence. Of course it won't, not at all.
And then you multiply those examples across an entire year,
you get a lopsided pie chart. Then look at the inverse.

(14:04):
Left wing attacks that injure, burn, intimidate, terrorize, but don't
result in death. Those get completely omitted because nobody die.
So the chart doesn't move. The public sees the chart.
The chart says the right is the problem. The construction
of the chart does the work for those who want

(14:26):
to maintain the narrative. This kind of stuff drives me baddy.
There's a third tranch of analysis that focuses on the
narrow category of terrorist murders. In one prominent version, only
events with at least one fatality get counted. Plots are excluded,
Foiled attacks are excluded, attempt attacks are excluded. Arsons are

(14:49):
excluded unless somebody dies. Riots are excluded unless a specific
homicide is tied to political motive defined in a very
narrow way. The September eleven attacks are placed in a
separate box altogether. In addition to the classification of several
offenders as right wing is made on loose criteria, sometimes

(15:13):
in the presence of a racist posting or a confused
manifesto that doesn't really articulate a political plan. So when
the critics just scratch the surface and recoded ambiguous cases,
the big gap, the giant gap between right and left,
nearly vanished. Correct a few design choices, and the headline

(15:34):
dissolves into parity or into a more complex distribution that
simply resists resists the media's sloganeering. In any rational inquiry,
the cure for definitional bias is actually just hardcore case work.

(15:57):
Test the rules against any particular act that we've been
taught to treat as an example of right wing political violence.
I would challenge you to go do that, because when
you do, many don't fit. They're either left, they're they're
left coded, they're mixed, or they're non political, and they

(16:19):
often show untreated mental illness rather than doctrine. In other words,
it's the mental illness. It wasn't a political motive. They
often show how radical milieus that have that have little
to do with conservatives. But they'll often show offenders who
never voted in a Republican primary, who never donated to
Republican candidates who told friends they had progressive for anti

(16:42):
establishment views. And there's a there's a really good case
that I think would help explain exactly how this gets
implemented in the real world. Dance Luther Bolter, write the

(17:04):
name down and then go, I want you to go
look this up. Lance. I'm sorry Vance Luther Bolter. He
was appointed by a Democrat governor to a state workforce
development board. He moved and operated in Democrat circles. When
he erupted in murderous violence, he targeted Democrat officials who

(17:25):
had voted with Republicans on a very specific immigration measure.
He didn't hunt down Republicans, he hunted Democrats who, in
his brain, had betrayed the cause of illegal immigration the
material that was recovered from his car. Wait to hear

(17:47):
what that was, and then tried to tell me that
he was a right winger. So be came with Michael
Brown text line still opened three three, one zero three.
He worred Michael Michael, I'll be right back tonight. Michael
Brown joins me here, the former FEMA director of talk
show host Michael Brown. Brownie, No, Brownie, You're doing a

(18:10):
heck of a job The Weekend with Michael Brown. Hey,
so the Weekend with Michael Brown. Thanks for tuning in.
We shouldn't go follow me on x formerly Twitter at
Michael Brown USA talking about Vance Luthor Bolter. I'm gonna
give you four examples. So Bolter gets appointed by a
Democrat governor to state workforce board. He moves around in

(18:30):
Democrat circles. He erupts some murderous violence, and he was
targeting Democrat officials because they had voted with Republicans on
a very specific immigration bill. He did not hunt Republicans,
he undered Democrats because he believed the Democrats had portrayed,
had betrayed his cause. In his car, they got anti

(18:50):
Trump flyers, tied to a coordinated protest theme, and just
the standard progressive paraphernalia. Now sympathetic report tried to rebrand
him as a Republican or at least a marginal Trump voter,
based on contested claims by acquaintances with obvious motives to

(19:12):
try to sanitize the politics of those murders. The uncontested
facts tell a very simple story. It was a politically
motivated attack, but it was intra Democrat retribution over immigration policy.
In any balanced and objective data set, that incident would

(19:34):
be counted as left leaning. Left coded certainly is non right.
It has instead been recycled as an example of right
winging violence because the victims were Democrats. That's making your

(19:55):
definition based on the target, not based on the modive.
That's the first example. The second example is David Deppe.
That's the attacker in the Paul Pelosi case, broke into
Nancy and Paul Pelosi's home in San Francisco. Now we
were sure that that was an example of right wing

(20:17):
rage within that claim began to fall apart when we
started learning his history. A Canadian national living and voting
in the United States. He lived in a progressive enclave
with left coded partner, known for street protests and for
really far out radicalism. His home had a Black Lives

(20:40):
Matter flag, It had LGBTQ imagery. He registered to vote
with the Green Party. He once cast a Green vote
for a socialist candidate. He drifted into psychosis, into conspiracism,
telling people he thought he was Jesus. None of that
suggest a coherent right wing identity. What is it does

(21:05):
suggest is a volatile mixture of mental illness, fringe ideology
with leftists antecedents, followed by a paranoid fixation that eventually
incorporated anti Pelosi fantasies. Now it's not hard to see
why the media ecosystem was primed to find a maga
archetype fastened on that you know, fastened squarely on that angle.

(21:28):
But it's really harder to explain why serious compilers continued
to code that event's right wing. Why if modive and
MILU matter, the classification should be mixed or indeterminate at best,
if the presence of a partisan target is enough to

(21:49):
fix the label. Because here the target was left wing,
the assailant was fringe at best, and I think clearly
more left wing than certainly right wing. But if the
presence of a partisan target is enough to fix the label,

(22:09):
in other words, because the target was a Democrat, then
the attacker must be a Republican. Then we're back to
definition by victim, not definition by motive. This is why
you cannot trust these numbers. Let me be a third example,
Cody Allen Balmer. That's the ar arsonists that attack Governor

(22:33):
Shapiro's home in real time. If you remember that story,
commentators and officeholders offered their ritual line. Another example of
far right wing political violence, but the details contradict the
talking points. Bamber described himself as a Marxist, he was
pro Palestinian. He targeted the governor because he believed that

(22:57):
the governor would harm Palestinians. The governors, you remember, his
record shows serious mental illness, problems, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia. He
had left behind him a trail of domestic violence and
criminal charges. He never registers a Republican, never voted in
a Republican primary, there's no regular Republican donations. And when

(23:19):
precise facts become inconvenient, the narrative somehow jumps on ambiguity.
Maybe he has some right wing sympathies, Maybe he saw
some posts on x Maybe he was disturbed by current
events in a way that aligned with conservative anger. The
problem with all those theories is the facts still remain

(23:41):
the same marks the self description, pro Palestinian motive, a
mental illness which maybe I'm saying I repeat myself, and
zero partisan ties to the Republican Party. So if you're
going to code that incident, placed that event on the left,

(24:03):
and you would certainly market as non right. Yet that
particular case continues to be invoked in the public sphere
as evidence for the thesis that right wing violence predominate predominates.
That's not data, that's just simply branding. Oh, he attacked
a Jewish Democrat, therefore he must be a Republican. Let's

(24:28):
go to one closer to my home, Anderson Lee Aldridge,
the Club Q shooter. That was the gay night club
in Colorado, Spring, about fifty five miles south of where
I'm sitting. The almost instant narty nationally and locally labeled
the attack anti LGBTQ political violence from the right, but

(24:52):
then with the record began to emerge, the record doesn't
cooperate with those talking points. Because the shooter identified as
non binary, he has to be addressed as mix Mix Aldrich.
He frequented that club and other gay venues, never voted Republican,

(25:12):
never participated in the Republican primary, never donated to a
Republican candidate. His life, based on testimony from friends and relatives,
shows a serious dysfunctionality, suicidal ideation, and arrests following threats
involving a homemade bomb, a traio psychiatric treatment in the courtroom.

(25:36):
The picture was really a really sick, mentally sick young
person with violent fantasies and a warp relationship to identity.
Not one single doctrinaire actis activist from any organized right
wing group. No fair reading of his history yields the

(25:58):
conclusion that he was a conservative extremists, but the rush
to brand him as such flowed where or from what.
It flowed from the theme of the attack and the
identity of the victims people engaged in dancing, singing, drinking,
whatever at a gay club. So the method is the

(26:22):
same as before. Reverse engineer the motive away from the target,
then paint the act with the broadest possible brush. Four
prominent examples. They're prominent illustrations of a broad tendency. Where
the facts point left or toward non political pathology, the

(26:46):
coders within the cabal and commentators still push everything to
the right, where left wing or pro Palcini attacks are unambiguous.
Then it gets reframed as criminal violence with no ideology,
and then disappears into the gray spaces of the data
design and the database. The data set and in the

(27:09):
aggregate that skews compounds trivial propaganda acts that inflate counts
on the right non fatal left wing attacks are excluded.
Ambiguous loan offenders are labeled right wing by default. Islamis
and eco extremist events are minimized by either time slicing
outlier exclusions, and once everything gets assembled, the conclusion is guaranteed.

(27:34):
The right looks like the prominent source of political violence,
even if the underlying reality is mixed or the greater
share of routine street violence has flowed from the left.
What you may think sounds like methodology, No, not at all.

(27:54):
Look at the coding motive, not the identity. Require clear
evidence for political intent. If you can't if the offender,
If the criminal can't articulate a political goal, and there's
no credible public record of one, then don't count it
as political treat Like cases alike. If domestic homicides by

(28:17):
an extremist affiliate counts on one side, the count them
on both sides, or better yet, I would say exclude
them all together unless there is evidence the killing was
carried out for a political reason. So a white supremacist
murders his girlfriend, a black supremacist murders hers girl his
girlfriend absent any political motivation, exclude them from the database

(28:42):
data set. Then I would challenge all these people to
collect all this data, list all the coding rationales so
that when I go to audit the classifications, I can
see if your conclusions depend on on hidden spreads, spreadsheets
or shifting labels, because those are not conclusions. You're just

(29:06):
giving out talking points. So don't buy into the idea
that this skew behind this claim that the right wing
is responsible for most of the violence. Those four examples
alone and how they get skewed should cause you to
question that. It's the Weekend with Michael Brown. Hang tight,

(29:29):
I'll be right back. Welcome back to the Weekend with
Michael Brown. I want to say thanks to everybody for
tuning in this weekend. I always appreciate you tuning in.
I know that on Saturdays you have many other things
you could be doing, and you choose to listen to
part of all of this program, and I greatly appreciate it.
Don't forget you can always text me throughout the week anytime.

(29:52):
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(30:13):
and then that will download to your podcast all five
days of the weekday program plus the weekend program. So
to tie in that segment about how the cabal wants
you to believe that right wingers commit most of the

(30:37):
political violence in this country, let's go to a suburb.
Let's go to Broadview, Illinois, because far left activists yesterday,
I don't know what they're doing today. I checked. We're
swarming a Department of Homeland Security and ICE vehicles outside

(30:57):
of ICE detention facility, Rodview, Illinois. Now, in recent days,
federal officials have been constructing reinforced fencing around the facilities
just west of Chicago as an increasing number of violent
leftist demonstrators kept gathering in that area. Then yesterday the

(31:18):
far left activists wearing gas mask in bandanas to obscure
their faces. But oh my gosh, don't let you know.
ICE is getting shot at Dallas, ICE is getting attacked
anywhere in the country. And yet you know Gavin Newsom
comes out, as do many Democrat governors. Oh my gosh,
they're the gestaplo because they're wearing masks and they're keeping

(31:41):
their badges or shields, you know, conceal it. Well, I
wonder why, because they continue to get docksed, they can
continue to get attacked, and the media helps in that
by wanting to film their faces and plasters all over
television screens around the country. Well, here the far left

(32:04):
activists are wearing gas, masks and bandannas to obscure their faces,
and they swarm a Department of Homeland Security vehicle. They
attempted to block ICE agents front ICE agents from exiting
the detention facility. In the latter case, a federal law
enforcement agent positioned on our rooftop adjacent to the facility's

(32:27):
entrance fired tear gas to disperse the demonstrators. Chicago, chas
and Marxist mayor has seen a really sharp increase in
ICE enforcement actions in recent weeks as part of Trump's
Operation Midway Blitz. The operation, which is centered around Chicago,

(32:50):
focuses on illegal aliens who have taken advantage of Illinois
sanctuary policies to evade federal immigration laws. So DHS specifically
criticized the Governor of Illinois Pritzker, for shielding criminal illegal
aliens and then allowing them to remain on our streets. Now.
That protest follows the deadly attack on that ice Field

(33:10):
office in Dallas earlier this week, and according to authorities,
in that case, a twenty nine year old by the
name of Joshua Johns, driven by far left and anti
ICED ideology, opened fire on that ice Field office, sprang
the building with bullets, and of course ended up killing

(33:31):
at least one on whether though that you are still
alive or not, but not killing any ICE agents. Day
before Yesterday, Thursday of this week, the director of the FBI,
in a post on x noted that Johns, who fatally
shot himself after the attack, downloaded a document titled Dallas
County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. That document

(33:55):
contained a list of all the DHS facilities, and then
he searched the app that tracks the presence of ICE agents.
Apple and Google have both refused to take that app
off their platforms. You can still download it from Apple

(34:16):
and Google at least as of last night when I checked.
I do not believe that the federal government should forcibly
shut down those apps. But I believe that Tim Cook,
the CEO of Apple, and Sir Ye whatever his name is,

(34:37):
the CEO of Alphabet, I think they have a moral
responsibility to suspend the apps from their stores because they know.
We know for a fact that app is being used
to target ICE agents, target their locations, target their activity

(34:59):
so that these left wing activists can attack them. In
other words, the apps that are on their platforms are
facilitating the violence against these agents. Now, if I wanted
to get really I refuse to play this game. I'm
not going to get in the in the in the
game of getting the government to force these two companies

(35:23):
to take the apps off their stores. Instead, they should
be shamed into doing so. I don't know much about
the CEO of Google. I know a little bit more
about Tim Cook, and it really bothers me that he's
got to be aware of this. And the fact that

(35:45):
Tim Cook is not suspending that app from the Apple
App Store is horrific. He knows that it's being used
to attack these ICE agents Apple. As a shareholder of Apple,
I'm ashamed of it. I'm ashamed of the fact that

(36:06):
they are actually encouraging and facilitating this violence. Now somebody
wants to develop that app and make it available somewhere
on their own servers, well, I suppose they can go
do that. But for these two publicly traded companies, two
of the largest tech companies in the world, is Apple

(36:29):
still number one or number two in terms of its
capitalization evaluation? It's still a trillion dollar company. Come on,
you can do better than that. At some point you've
got to say enough is enough and we're just not
going to do it. Take it down, mister Cook, Take
it down. So weekend with Michael Brown. I appreciate everybody
tuning in. Hope everybody has a great weekend, and guess what,

(36:52):
I'll see you next weekend.