Trump Asks, ‘What About the Alt-Left?’ Here’s an Answer<br />Antifa and black bloc — the far left of today — engaging in street brawls<br />and property damage, while reprehensible, is “not domestic terrorism,” said J. J. MacNab, a fellow in the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.<br />“We find that the right groups and the jihadi groups are more violent than the left,” said Gary LaFree, one the researchers<br />and the director of the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.<br />Asked about Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who characterized calls for the firing of Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the president’s national security adviser, as “the same purveyors of hatred<br />and ignorance who precipitated the recent violence in Charlottesville,” Mr. Trump suggested that blame should be shared.<br />The data set is in the process of being updated, so it does not reflect current state of extremism, Professor LaFree cautioned,<br />but “in general, we’ve been seeing this fairly robust trend in right-wing cases.”<br />All of the experts contacted by The Times stressed<br />that extremism ebbs and flows, based on the presence of a charismatic leader, incremental changes in society, seismic events like an election or war, among other factors.
