The Czar hates to play the blame game, and he would love to pin that reluctance on someone or something. But once again, we have to argue that the term “Right Wing” is not defined as “Anything the Left Wing hates about itself.” Another case in point is this Anders Breivik monster, who murdered so many people in Norway.

At first, everybody thought he was Muslim until he was caught. Then the world press tagged him as a Right Wing extremist because, well, he mentions Jesus or something on Facebook.

What the hell does that mean? Left wingers use Twitter? Anyway, most Right Wingers raised an eyebrow on this claim, just as we did on Jared Laughner, the gun-totin’ Tea Partier inspired by a Sarah Palin web graphic he never saw; well, he turned out to be an anti-Bush nutjob who was furious the Left kept shutting down his ability to speak. And we raised an eyebrow on Joe Stack, the Tea Partier who hated government so much he flew his plane into an IRS building; yeah, he wanted a radical stunt to lash out against the capitalism and felt the Reagan tax codes were a good place.

So the usual progression of the story is this: we hope the criminals aren’t terrorists (either because we fear they found a way to defeat our wobbly DHS or because it destroys the narrative that only Israel is bad). When we learn it was the act of a crazy person, the left declare him a right wing extremist while the right assumes he was just a crazy nutjob. When you dig into the motivations, the right discovers the guy had huge left wing sensibilities, but the left continues to run the right wing claim through the media.

And now Anders Breivik commits a massive horror. And he turns out to be non-Muslim, only later to be transformed into a right wing extremist because he uses Facebook. The guy isn’t even American and fails to map to our political party spectrum: but the Left declares him to be a Tea Party member. No? At least a Tea Party sympathizer. No? Well, then he wanted to start something like it. Incidentally, the Czar found examples of all three of these claims but like Dr. J refuses to link to these cites because frankly they don’t deserve your traffic.

Fortunately, Dana Loesch has a really good correction at Big Journalism that examines Breivik’s statements and discovers…yes he would, if anything, map to the Left.

What you, the reader, should remember is that Right Wing Extremism is incredibly rare. While it seems to consist of anyone who hates a government person or agency, or uses racism, religion or firearms, the reality is that Right Wing people are almost always conservatives—and conservatives tend not to take extremist actions (almost by definition). Conservatives preserve the establishment to some extent, and do not lash out in anger against it. Probably the only arguable examples of right wing extremism are the folks who kill or injure people in and around abortion clinics. These are people so committed to saving human lives (fetuses) that they elect to kill human lives (doctors, patients, employees, or just passers-by) to get that across. The total number of people killed or injured by these possible right-wing extremists in one year typically is a fraction of the number of people killed by a single Laughner, Breivik, or (ahem) abortionist.

The evidence for Right Wing Extremism is not merely weak, it is often self-contradictory to the concept. Now, this is hardly a pass for all unpleasant Right Wing behavior—the Czar is not merely doing the opposite and attributing all bad behavior to the Left, but let us be blunt: the Left pretty much owns this responsibility. And while the Czar is not biased enough to assume all liberals are violent people, he is willing to conclude that conservatives tend (by an inarguable majority) to be non-violent folks.

Conservatives tend to use the head, not the heart, when making decisions, or so liberals tell us. There is truth in this, and also in the reverse: liberals are more likely to act on impulse, rage, or a visceral feeling of frustration that needs to be handled by action: whether that is marching, shouting, screaming, vandalizing, or hurting others is up to their particular sensation of what they can best get away with. But let us end this fantasy-based narrative that right wing extremists are to blame for mass violence: as the Tea Party shows, the worst you should expect is a penchant for dressing up in 18th Century clothing and cleaning up a park. And there is, as it happens, a lot of evidence for that.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.