DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing
404media.coIs there anyone monitoring US government websites for deletion of pages beyond what people may notice in an ad hoc way? I feel like this should be automated.
There's an Archive Team project for the government, although it's just trying to get as much of a snapshot as possible: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/US_Government Detecting changes across all pages in real time is going to be difficult to accomplish.
You can use a combination of the website capture data available in the Internet Archive along with what the Internet Archive and ArchiveTeam crawl to analyze and track when page status changes (both content and http codes, 200->4xx for example). Look for the diffs across the .govs of interest. Crawling continues.
(no affiliation, friendly reminder to donate to the archive)
Memory hole anything inconvenient
The party insists that political violence, by definition, requires a suitable leftist minority identity to apply.
Any violence by a member of the party is just sparkling patriotism.
Link in case the MAGA flaggers take it down: https://www.404media.co/doj-deletes-study-showing-domestic-t...
Other than the Weather Underground, I'm having trouble thinking of left wing groups.
If significant armed left wing groups actually existed, we might actually get meaningful gun control legislation, like happened during the rise of Black Panther.
It's gone a bit out of fashion but FARC were big in their day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Armed_Forces_of_...
The US' DOJ would not be concerned about Colombian revolutionaries like this though
They're the only "recent" very active left wing group that I can think of that operated for a long period of time ... even then a pretty small group.
Strawman Front
I think most organized and militarized western leftist groups were probably defunct by the end of the Cold war.
I’d assume it’s mostly a product of who the enemy was during the Cold War. Though I understand the far right made a large shift in how decentralized they operate around the end of the 20th century too after the feds started picking a lot of various KKK and other organization members off.
There is a wiki for that. You will find it supports your position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Left-wing_militant_gr...
antifa
Maybe I'm biased, but I don't think antifa has been relevant for the past... five years? My mind puts them in the pre-COVID bucket.
They've remained a continuous feature of right wing scare media.
That doesn't make it true though. Just like 300 million Americans died from overdosing on drugs according to POTUS. They just say things knowing people in their base will not verify anything they say. If someone does, they clearly are opposition just making a stink.
No, it certainly doesn't. But lies are the only relevance "antifa" has, and if you ask the people caught up in it, they'll adamantly insist that antifa is an extensive organization with identifiable leaders and cohesive plans that are executed widely by a unified member body.
None of that's true. But we should be aware of the lies being told, at least the ones told widely.
Generally, when someone says something like "left wing groups" they mean something with a formal organization.
"Antifa" is less of an organization than even some loose collective like "anonymous"
Are there left-wing agitators? Sure, black bloc and other "direct action" protestors have been around since at least the world trade protests in the 90s.
But to the best of my knowledge there isn't really a formal "antifa" organization to dismantle or anything.
If you believe Antifa exists, then I guess it’s fair to say MAGA exists.
Are these flagged posts just buried if you're not using Algolia/API to view HN?
Glad that I am using the former.
> Elon Musk, who owns X, recently tweeted that he was going to “fix” the platform’s AI assistant Grok after it cited research that showed right-wing violence was more common than left-wing violence: “My apologies, we are fixing this cringe idiocy by Grok,” he said.
I understand why it's hard to make AI that's accurate, but Musk's elite engineers can't even make it push a preferred narrative consistently. Sounds like it should be a much easier problem to solve.
I think the last time they tried it ended up going mechahitler
Regardless of the bias inherent in Grok, it wasn't a good experience to me. I tried it for some time before going back to ChatGPT (this was before GPT-5 though, I'm also not super happy with GPT-5 UX)
What issues did you have with Grok/are having with GPT5?
I find it quite amusing that Grok tends to contradict Musk's untruths.
Curious - which facts did Musk refute specifically that Grok had pointed out? I don't have a twitter account so I can't really go see this thread.
The last time they tried to make it agree with Elon consistently, it proclaimed itself to be mechahitler so...
I think this is not too surprising? Both the result and the action of hiding it?
From my understanding, right-wing usually means more pro-gun. If you already have guns, the threshold for terrorist actions is likely lower.
> I think this is not too surprising?
I don't think we should normalize cover ups like this especially when it comes to political violence studies. POTUS immediately blamed the "radical left" after the attack without evidence. Not only is that reckless, it's not even the most likely scenario.
> If you already have guns, the threshold for terrorist actions is likely lower
Guns are easily accessible to everyone in America.
Guns are accessible, but prior gun ownership is skewed, and prior gun ownership is one less barrier to cross when attempting political violence. In theory, that should mean increased attempts for that high-gun-ownership demographic.
Exactly, because owning a gun and being trained are very different things.
I own guns but I am not capable of performing a Charlie Kirk style assassination. Nor could I actually carry out a school shooting with high rate of fire across many weapons.
Both of these crimes require that the shooter have training and practice in this style of shooting. You need specialized equipment beyond what a casual gun owner will spend. Buying a 9mm and going to the range every couple of months isn’t cutting it.
Gun culture creates the environment where folk are prepping for combat situations. Go watch any guntuber and you’ll see them train for military situations that your hunter, farmer, or even family defense gun owner is not concerned with.
In fact, I learned that there’s a pejorative term “Fudds” for gun owners who aren’t militarized like this. As in, Elmer Fudd; an actual hunter that uses guns for game. Somehow this is not a respectable person for a gun nut.
When gun ownership becomes a hobby and personality trait you see a lot more people optimizing their habits toward maximum lethality
True, but if you already have them at home and you’re raised in a family that uses them, presumably the barrier to using one is lower.
Not surprising, and absolutely newsworthy.
Oh yes, I didn’t mean to say it should be ignored. Just more expressing that sadly I’m not surprised by this action with the current government.
Since 1975, right-wing terrorists have killed 5.5x as many people as left-wing terrorists.
Non-american here: if you get to the point where you want to kill another person or groups of people, it doesn't really matter whether you are left/right/pink/blue/whatever. You are unwell. To blame an entire group for one person's mental break is silly. You have no idea what is in another person's head, what their beliefs are, which of those beliefs are conflicting with each other. You might as well say that because the person ate pizza on the day, that we should blame and ban italian pizza places. Silly.
I live in a very broken country too, but our people are not shooting up random places/people. We have many guns too, so we cannot attribute it to that.
I think the kind of person that is willing to kill others (in the american sense, shootings), typically are highly suicidal but since they are able to blame the society or some aspect of society, they come to the conclusion to not commit suicide but to rather attack the system as a final punishment / giving up moment or to assert that they have some form of control. They ofcoarse find no relief there either.
Meanwhile your media and politician use these people as scape goats and cheerleaders for their own agendas. Disgusting in its own right.
Killing innocents is for the unwell, but assassinations have been a staple of politics for as long as humanity has had politics.
It also doesn't follow that an entire group can't be held for a single person's actions. There are plenty of organizations that go out of their way to shape individuals' ways of thinking in order (or otherwise compel them) to harm groups of innocent others. Those groups can and absolutely should be held accountable.
On HN there was another post about DOJ going against the guy who made the anti-ICE app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44496458 and it's also flagged, which is a pity.
This book might be relevant for those trying to understand why and how fascists attempt to control the narrative by suppression of the free press, erasure of documents, and nowadays hiding and flagging posts on social media and popular RSS feeds: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/207294076-erasing-histor...
While it's important to note they are trying to delete stuff like that
it's way way more alarming they are deleting cancer research, for many decades to come
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/magazine/trump-administra...
and the weird thing is no-one quite understands why, this is not even vaccine related
The most likely explanation that I've seen so far is that the trans-humanists believe that they will solve the aging problem and that that will solve cancer as a byproduct, so we should pour lots of money into their pet subject. It's pretty obvious why they would want to solve aging first as long as they don't have cancer, after that it is going to be a toss-up.
Ignoring the obvious, you mean?
Robert Fico, Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, Solomon Pena, Fumio Kishida, Andriy Parubiy, Alejo Vidal-Quadras Roca, Shinzo Abe, Jair Bolsonaro...
All of them represents of right orientated politics and are a victims of assassination in recent years.
What does that have to do with US domestic terrorists, which is what the study concerned?
Trump is the only one on your list where it was a US domestic terrorist.
The shooter in that case seems to have been more right-aligned than left-aligned but there is nothing definitive. He donated $15 to Democrats when he was 17, but a few months later when he was 18 and registered to vote he registered as a Republican. A social media account that is thought to be associated with him had a lot of anti-immigration and antisemitic content.
Obama, Biden, Hillary were all sent pipe bombs by Cesar Sayoc. The Paul Pelosi assailant was celebrated by people like Don Jr and Charlie Kirk.
Jair Bolsonaro is still alive at least according to mainstream media, do you have any links to where he was killed in an assassination?
The only two of those I know of were shot by far-right conservatives...
Joe Biden, while he was POTUS, went on national television and proclaimed that "Extreme MAGA Republicans" were the greatest threat to our democracy.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/02/1120690193/bidens-speech-walk...
They attempted a coup. Yeah, that's an extremely reasonable take.
Are you implying he was wrong?
Why were the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and cop-beaters pardoned by the party of "law and order"?
Why is Ashli Babbitt getting a funeral with military honors and a $5m settlement for her family?!
For years the FBI had right wing extremists as the most dangerous domestic threat.
Apparently, not wrong.
I’d say MAGA is as well defined as antifa.
I mean they tried to hang Pence, and killed some cops along the way. So yeah.