How much black violence is leftist?

Here are some conundrums that come up when trying to count political violence.

Everybody is making up their own tables of political violence in order to blame the other side for the majority of it.

Here’s the Cato Institute’s list:

Politically Motivated Terrorist Killers

And here’s a careful critique of Alex Nowrasteh’s Cato list by somebody calling himself infiniteloop:

https://infiniteloops.medium.com/debunking-alex-nowrasteh-74d34eeadb89

He has lots of small corrections and a couple of big complaints.

First, the Cato list starts in 1975, thereby skipping the 1969-1974 era of leftist craziness. Of course 1975 was 50 years ago, a nice round number. And if you go back into the 60s to record leftist violence, you ought to go back to, say, 1960 to catch pro-Jim Crow violence like the murder of the four girls in the black church or the murder of the three civil rights activists.

His other big complaint is: Where’s the 1978 Jonestown Massacre when leftist politician and cult leader Jim Jones got 917 other people dead? Jones was much affiliated with Northern California Democratic powerbrokers like Harvey Milk and Willie Brown. (On the other hand, Democratic Rep. Leo Ryan didn’t buy Jones’ act and courageously set off to Guyana to investigate Jonestown. Jones had Rep. Ryan murdered and then had everybody else drink the Flavor-Aid, not the Kool-Aid.)

A few comments on counting political violence:

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