Dishonest coverage of right-wing violence implies that a sizable portion of the public buys into the deranged outlook of the perpetrators.

One of the few features that distinguishes politically motivated terroristic violence on the right from the same kind of violence on the left are the divergent reactions they inspire.

We don’t have to look far for evidence of the extent to which the psychological derangements that lead to right-wing violence are covered as though they have significant purchase with the public. Indeed, the subtextual goal of that sort of coverage is to convey to readers that most Americans are only just barely sufficiently well adjusted to keep their sympathies with the violent right to themselves.

The racist and misogynistic views expressed by the Hispanic man who killed eight people at a Texas mall in 2023 are “common among white supremacist groups,” the Texas Tribune reported. (“This is a very complicated aspect of right-wing extremism,” CNN correspondent Juliette Kayyem observed, insofar as “a lot of Hispanics might identify as being white.”) The Tribune managed to connect that act of violence to a host of ideologically inspired terrorist acts through the years.

Similarly, the 2022 slaughter of grocery shoppers in a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y., was treated as though it were a leading indicator of the wave of racist murders to come. Coverage of that horrific event dwelled on the degree to which the shooter might have been inspired by antisemitic and racist memes as well as the conspiratorial notion that the Democratic Party sought to “replace” white Americans with non-white migrants. “According to an AP-NORC poll released this week, one in three U.S. adults believes there is an ongoing effort “to replace U.S.-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” NBC News reported — a chilling indication of the scale of the audience for this killer’s delusions.

Some are more explicit in their effort to indict their political adversaries via a strained attempt to associate them with mass killers. “Extremist murders are usually from right-wing actors,” the Washington Post’s 2023 headline read. “In the past five years, there have been three deaths linked to left-wing extremists,” Philip Bump reported. “There have been 176 linked to right-wing ones.”

The disordered thinking that leads sufferers to conclude that ritual human sacrifice might beget positive social change doesn’t lend itself to a coherent political philosophy. Those who subscribe to the center-left political affinities that dominate American newsrooms can recognize this even when a killer’s evil works inspire adulation among progressives — as Luigi Mangione’s act of bloodletting did this past December.

The sort of discretion from which the violent left benefits has been on display since last Friday, following the bombing of a reproductive health facility in Palm Springs, Calif. As Rich wrote of this attack, the bomber, who managed to kill only himself, subscribed to a variety of lunatic creeds — few of which could be credibly described as right-wing. He was allegedly attracted to “anti-natalism,” a philosophy that rejects procreation entirely. The Washington Post reports that he endorsed “pro-mortalism,” adherents of which believe more people should die. He also endorsed “negative utilitarianism,” which stipulates that life should be made as miserable as possible, presumably to make the sweet embrace of death marginally more alluring.

In sum, this guy was an addled lunatic. Indeed, the community of like-minded lunatics on the internet with whom the alleged bomber associated is busily disassociating itself from his delusions — that is, when its members aren’t furiously banning those who confirm that his violent misanthropy perfectly reflects their estrangement from the human race.

You cannot call the outlook of this would-be killer anything other than deranged. If, however, you were a rank political opportunist, you could make the case that this antisocial outlook is a slightly more extreme version of the belief that the planet cannot sustain its current population (an outlook that led to some of the worst eugenicist abuses of the human species since the end of World War II). You could say that it looks a lot like the environmentalist left’s “de-growth” agenda, which is quick to emphasize the environmental benefits associated with less human activity and, logically, fewer people. You might see in “negative utilitarianism” shades of a left-of-center outlook that emphasizes the spiritual fulfillment found in discomfort, privation, and abnegation — at least insofar as those sacrifices advance the left’s broader ideological objectives.

It wouldn’t be difficult for a sufficiently talented polemicist to draw these connections, if only to terrorize Americans in ways this failed bomber could not. It might advance the right’s political objectives to insist that this delusional person and the fringe malcontents with whom he found kinship represent the vanguard of a movement that is coming for you next. But that would be terribly dishonest, wouldn’t it?