President Obama recently got into an off-the-cuff debate with Tea Party activists in Iowa. Most of this back-and-forth focused on Vice President Biden allegedly saying Tea Party Republicans “acted like terrorists” in holding the credit of the United States hostage during the debt deal. The video is below:
However, we’re going to focus in on another, brief point that was brought up by the female Tea Party activist around 47 seconds into the video.
She said this:
“You do realize that 90 percent of the domestic terrorist attacks are done by the left-wing environmental radicals and not people like me.”
The number — a whopping 90 percent — seemed a bit high. So I did some fact-checking. I do not know which source she is quoting (and would be interested to find out), but all evidence I’ve reviewed pointed to one conclusion.
(Diniverse Major has moved to mikegaudini.com/diniverse. Please proceed to http://mikegaudini.com/diniverse/?p=835 to continue reading this particular post).
Thank you for this unbiased, well-researched information. I, too, questioned the woman’s 90% statement, and my research led me here. I now have the facts for those who repeat her misinformation.
Thanks again.
Thank you for this analysis. A quibble: I thought destruction of property was vandalism, not terrorism. What, then, is not terrorism?
Good point, Mr. Valentine! The difference, as far as I understand it, is that terrorism is executed with the intent to intimidate people or a government, to try to force change via violent acts of intimidation. So I suppose it is inherently political or ideological, and that may be one of the key differences.
I’ll look a bit more into the distinction and update this post.
Thank you for pointing that out!
for your information, you have your facts wrong, the KKK was a domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, NOT republican or Conservative, it was created circa 1866 to “discourage Blacks from learning how to read, and become independant, it was formed right after the Republican Party was formed in 1854, which was built on anit slavery platforms and has always been the best friends to Blacks, their biggest single issue is, they dont check the democrats stories out for truthfulness, so the democrats lie and promise money to Blacks to get their Votes……and it worked well, till this Black President ignored them and took that vote for granted…..
I suggest you and your readers google the “missing 52 years of democratic history…..
I’m sorry, Chief_Cabioch, but my facts are not wrong, because they are just that: facts. Your sense of history is extremely warped. First of all, the classifications are as defined by the FBI. And under those criteria, the FBI noted the KKK was a right-wing terrorist organization.
The mistake you make is in assuming that Democratic and right-wing cannot overlap. In fact, they can. The reason for this is that for years the Democratic Party was the “conservative” party in the United States, most obviously on social issues. The Democratic Party favored slavery and “states’ rights,” as well as low tariffs. The Republican Party, as you noted, was founded on the issue of freeing the slaves, but additionally advocated infrastructure spending, high tariffs, etc…
You ignore pretty much everything that happened during the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson’s income tax took the tariff reform debate off the table. Various periods of globalization before World War I and after World War II occurred.
FDR forever changed the Democratic Party. At first, he held together a huge coalition of traditional southern conservatives from the “Solid South” (named so because they all voted Democratic, reliably), along with liberal Democrats from the Northeast.
However, the Civil Rights movement and racial tensions broke chipped away at the New Deal Coalition. During the 1960s, a broad shift occurred in U.S. politics — conservative Democrats fled the party in droves and became Republicans, and many black voters became Democrats. Key events from this period include LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Richard Nixon cemented the social conservatives in with fiscal conservatives by stressing law and order issues, laying the foundation for a broad conservative coalition base upon which Ronald Reagan would further build.
This is very evident just by looking at the electoral figures from the 1964 presidential election, forward, and by noting the various figures (like Strom Thurmond) who switched parties during this period. Incidentally, Strom Thurmond
Some of the exact same people who were right-wing on social issues as Democrats were right-wing on social issues as Republicans.
A better grasp of history fixes everything.
I don’t really have to google “52 missing years of democratic history,” mainly because it’s not missing. Anyone with an understanding of U.S. history knows all about these broad shifts of ideology.
@ Chief_Cabioch
I suggest you Google apostrophes and their usage.
Let’s not forget about Bill Ayers, Terry Robins, Bernardine Rae Dohrn, Ronnie Lee (ALF).
Also the BLA (Black Liberation Army)( for the murders of 13 police officers. They were nvolved in over 60 incidents of violence between 1970 and 1980.
United Freedom Front (UFF),between 1975 and 1984 the UFF carried out at least 20 bombings and nine bank robberies in the northeastern United States, targeting corporate buildings, courthouses, and military facilities. Brent L. Smith describes them as “undoubtedly the most successful of the leftist terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s.”
The bombing of the Los Angeles Times killed 21 people. The perpetrators of this crime were the McNamara brothers (James and John McNamara), two Irish-American brothers who wanted to unionize the paper. The McNamaras became a cause célèbre amongst the labor movement in the United States, though their support eroded when they admitted their guilt.
Leftists can be pretty wacky, too.