When a fervent Bernie Sanders supporter shot at GOP congressmen on a baseball field earlier this month, injuring four, including House majority whip Steve Scalise, Brian Levin’s darkest suspicions came true.
Levin heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. And while he’s noted the rise of right-leaning hate groups in recent years, he’s also seen a slow-but-sure rise of the radical left. He’s even tracked symptoms of future left-wing violence in online recruiting and flyers at college campuses in Southern California.
The horrific shooting, was confirmation of what he’d been expecting.
“Left-wing extremism is now officially on the radar,” Levin said.
On Facebook, James T. Hodgkinson, 66, of Belleville, Illinois, called President Donald Trump a “traitor” who has “destroyed our democracy.”
Levin — and many others who study and research extreme ideologies and behaviors — see Hodgkinson’s shooting spree as a poster child for how political anger can morph into violent acts, and how that anger isn’t limited to one side of the political spectrum.
The ideology and rhetoric may differ, the experts say, but hate is universal. And the feelings and situations that lead an individual to indulge in extremism — by joining a gang or a hate group or a terrorist organization — are similar; a sense of disenfranchisement and a lack of belonging.
“There’s a lot of dry timber out there, and it ain’t just on one side of the forest,” Levin said.
Still, Levin and other experts caution equating the radical left to the radical right — for now. Dozens of variants of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and white separatists, among other conservative leaning hate groups, are well organized and well-funded throughout the United States. What’s more, crime statistics nationally and in Southern California show a recent rise in acts of violence, threats and vandalism against individuals and groups — Muslims, immigrants and racial and sexual minorities — targeted by some conservatives.
“One shooting is tragic, but it doesn’t necessarily constitute a trend,” said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism in New York.
“(Hodgkinson) is not representative of a left-wing movement, and what’s on the right is not on the left.”
But Segal, like Levin, says the public must be mindful of hateful rhetoric on the left that has the potential to crystallize into violent action. “We cannot ignore the potential or violence or the reformulation of left-wing extremist groups.
Recent history proves as much. From the 1960s through the 1980s, American political violence was often dominated by left-wing groups. The Weather Underground, the Symbianese Liberation Army and some elements of the Students for a Democratic Society were left-leaning organizations that committed murder, bombings and bank robberies that they described as political acts. Their causes included everything from the Vietnam War and racism to capitalism itself.
Rhetoric aside, presidential elections also have been responsible for birthing a large number of hate groups, from every corner of the political spectrum, said Erroll Southers, a former FBI special agent and director of Homegrown Violent Extremism Studies at USC’s Safe Communities Institute.
“When Barack Obama won in 2008, there was an uptick in activity on the right,” Southers said. Membership in anti-government groups jumped more than seven-fold during the first three years of Obama’s presidency, he said, adding: “Now, the pendulum is swinging the other way, and these left-wing groups are getting more organized. They are online and communicating with one another.”
He noted that the left is particularly fueled by a simple fact: Twice so far this century, the left’s preferred presidential candidate got the most votes (Democrats Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016) but didn’t win the election, a quirk of the Electoral College system. Historically, when mechanisms of government don’t respond to popular will, some people turn to other means.
“That definitely plays into it,” Southers said.
Southers also noted an interesting sub-trend in the world of extremists — rising frustration — is sparking a few odd coalitions. A left-wing organization, he said, recently reached out to Three Percenters, an anti-government group. “They’ve found they have something in common.They (both) don’t trust the government.”
But regardless of rationale, the prospect of more violence from extremists on the left is creating some anxiety among those who study hate groups.
Levin pointed to recent activity by the organization Antifa, a name that stands for anti-fascism.
“This group is still splintered and very small,” Levin said. “But the more violent part of that movement is recruiting for violence actively…. (Violence that) goes beyond going to a Trump rally.”
Antifa members were among those arrested during a Make America Great Again event in March in Huntington Beach. Some Antifa protesters blocked Trump supporters from continuing with their march down Bolsa Chica State Beach, and two protesters were arrested on suspicion of pepper-spraying some of the marchers.
Antifa members, who are usually masked and dressed in black, also showed up at a June 10 protest in San Bernardino, loudly rallying against hundreds who were on hand to protest Sharia Law.
While those on the left tend to be pro-Muslim, pro-immigrant and anti-Trump, the tactics they use are similar to tactics used by extremists of all stripes, Levin said.
“They all rely on disenfranchisement and (demonizing) to recruit people,” he said. “Today, we have a lot of people who are feeling disenfranchised, who have access to knowledge of building bombs through the Internet, and the ability to get assault weapons.”
Levin added that American society is seeing “an unraveling of the threads of civic and social cohesion that have held us together in the past.” That, in turn, is creating what he termed “a logjam” of extremist groups.
“People are in a position where they can pick from a buffet of extremist ideologies and tactics.”
The current vitriolic environment is fueling groups on the left, right and everything in between, Southers said.
The left and right are also feeding off each other, he added.
“An incident like what happened in Virginia is like oxygen for right-wingers because they can latch on to it and use it to give legitimacy to their concerns,” Southers said.
These types of incidents, regardless of who perpetrates them, become recruiting tools for the other side.
Southers and others also point out that the most recent acts of violent extremism — in San Bernardino or Orlando, or in London or Paris — involved home grown perpetrators. He believes that’s likely here, too.
“These groups on the left and right are all American,” he said.
“So what we’re dealing with now is the problem of Americans killing Americans.”
