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The only change I see is that Cato is excluding the Oklahoma City
bombing in some analyses, possibly because I criticized Nowrahsteh for
this last month on stack.
More importantly, THERE IS NO DATASET. Cato doesn't provide the data, so
there's nothing we can do with this. (There are no links and the
Appendix section is mysteriously blank.)
Cato is a trash outlet now, and Nowrahsteh is a charlatan, not a scholar
of any description. All he does is list several "sources" for his
undisclosed dataset, but there's no way to know what he did or how he
coded anything based on that. We need the actual data file. This is
science, not a swap meet.
Incredibly, Cato includes "incels" as right-wing. He claims it doesn't
make a big difference, but that's irrelevant given that we can't see the
data and that it's still completely unjustified. You don't do invalid
things, no matter what the numbers are or what difference it makes.
This is Nowrahsteh's justification for counting incels as right-wing. He
asserts that they're anti-women and socially misogynistic. What does
that have to do with conservatives? Are conservatives anti-women? How?
Are they more anti-women than leftists who want to let predatory men
stand naked in a high school girls' locker room, let men crash women's
sports, and support the mutilation of over 5,000 girls age 12+?
More fundamentally, what does being "involuntarily celibate" have to do
with conservatism, or any political ideology? It's not a conservative
ideology, at all.
Nowrahsteh cites one source, another leftist crackpot at Penn State, but
the study he cites doesn't back his claims. It's a junk study about
"incel beliefs" and support for political violence – it doesn't report
anything about their "pro-hierarchy", "anti-outgroup" or "anti-women"
beliefs. It has nothing to do with his claims. It's possible that the
crackpot made some assertions in the paper's introduction that lined up
with Nowrahsteh's claims, but those would just be his opinions – the
paper reports a study, and the study's findings had nothing to do with
Nowrahsteh's claims.
It's clear that he just really likes to insult conservatives (and often
the American people as such). Nowrahsteh is best understood a leftist
provocateur and crackpot. A libertarian would not use so much
proprietary and collectivist leftist language and mis-cite crackpot
leftist academics. A serious scholar would not do those things either.
We can't see his latest data, but I'm extremely confident that he's not
counting many leftist-driven murders, since he didn't count them before.
For example, 19-year-old Berkeley undergrad Seth Smith was murdered by a
black man driven by the new leftist race ideology in the midst of the
fraudulent leftist "antiracism" riots of 2020. The man walked right up
to Seth – a complete stranger – and shot him in the head and walked
away.
No robbery, nothing stolen. The killer complained to police about "black men killed every day", so it's clear what this was.
A serious researcher would look for more of those murders. I think it's
likely that several white people are murdered every year simply for
being white, by killers driven by the new leftist race ideology, false
propaganda about police slaughtering innocent black men, etc. Since
politically motivated murder is rare, this alone could be enough to put
leftists at the top.
Nowrahsteh did a couple of things to cover the enormous amount of
leftist violence out there. Leftists are clearly more violent than any
other camp in the US, and have been for years. The right could never
compete with the left's sustained riots, all the assaults of law
enforcement around the country, or antifa activity in just one city.
Just the trans activist assaults againt Beth Bourne might equal a
month's worth of violence by the right nationwide.
1) Nowrahsteh ignored almost all the violence by focusing on murders, which are rare.
2) He then specifically narrowed it
to "terrorism" which is even more rare, though with Nowrahsteh there's
no telling how he defined it in practice since we can't see his data.
Was the murder of Seth Smith "terrorism"? I don't know. I'd say yes, but
I can see the counterargument that it was apparently spontaneous and we
tend to want to define terrorism as planned.
In any case, Nowrahsteh isn't going to enlighten us on any topic. He
doesn't do valid, rigorous research. Nor does Cato. He and Cato just
tried to scam the public by claiming immigrants use less welfare by
**excluding their children**, and his work on political murders is
similarly junky.
NOTE: We should rarely cite leftist academics on anything to do with
politics. We cannot treat their assertions about any group as credible,
since they're normally just expressing leftist dogma and opinion. That's
not anything.
Moreover, social science and psychology research should rarely be cited,
since it's almost always invalid and usually false. This era's social
scientists – especially in psychology – don't know how to do valid
research and they're too caught up in cult leftist ideology to be
impartial researchers on anything to do with politics.
And Nowrahsteh can't read a study and understand that it's invalid. He
didn't notice that the Penn State crackpot study wasn't about incels per
se. He didn't notice that there wasn't much support for violence or
"incel beliefs" in the study. He's probably not aware of how correlation
and other inferential statistics can hide substantive standing on
variables – the problem of running correlation on multi-point response
scales that include several options for each diametrically opposed side
and that count "no opinion" or "neither agree nor disagree" as a
substantial increment of agreement.
Not many academic types have noticed those problems, their training is
poor, and they usually don't attend to the actual items on surveys and
where participants landed in their responses. So Nowrahsteh fell for a
study claiming that "incel beliefs" are correlated with support for
violence when there wasn't much endorsement of those beliefs or of
violence. (And some of the violence items are basically "sometimes
revolution is justified", which is obviously true and why America
exists. It's a useless junk study.) And then he mis-cited this
ridiculous study for completely unrelated claims it had nothing to do
with.
That junk Penn State study is here. As usual, you have to look at the
Supplemental Materials to know what happened – the paper itself is a
deception tool: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00…
