Thread by @SethAMandel

Ppl are right to say you shouldn’t put blame for a shooting on an ideology there’s no hard evidence inspired the act.

But as others have pointed out, this utterly obliterates the credibility of the ADL’s methodology for its own reporting and categorization.

An important fact.

What this tells us is that we should assess how we interpret political motivations, and be transparent about that system of assessment.

This is important: if we say (as ADL does) that personal beliefs, and not demonstrated motivations, govern the threat, we are pre-crime profiling lots of mixed up young adults and souls adrift, breeding suspicion and feeding the siege mentalities that can exacerbate the problem.

It’s a recipe for a panic. And it would mean further empowering institutions of the state—law enforcement, schools—to go looking inside ppl’s heads for possible threats. And one thing we know: when they go looking for threats, even if they don’t find them, they find them.

Plenty of ppl probably are willing to make that tradeoff. But let’s not pretend that that’s not precisely the devil’s bargain we’d be making.

Now, here’s why I think red flag laws are a good idea. Much greater protections for due process and therefore much less confusion about motive. Additionally, and this is crucial, restraining order requests would be brought by those close to them. Cops are last, not first, line.

This does not mean such beliefs cannot portend trouble! But it means we address the threat through a culture of presumed rights instead of a culture of paranoia. The risk of the latter is high: this is a key point in Adam Zamoyski’s book Phantom Terror: goodreads.com/book/show/2285…

You don’t *first* send the barely accountable men w/ guns to look for Bad Thoughts. To avoid that, you need to nurture a high-trust society. What ADL’s methodology does, just like those saying the Dayton shooter is on antifa’s head, is incentivize a low trust society.

The low trust option ADL and others push for means empowering the Trump administration to treat any and all antifa and antifa supporters, however tenuous, as an armed insurrection. Raise your hand if you think that sounds like a good idea.

I will assume no hands went up.

As I’ve said before, we should approach white nationalist terror as a kind of ISIS ‘jihad in place’ threat. Confronting the Infinity Chan type recruiting and radicalization pipelines does not necessitate, and in fact is not aided by, inflating the numbers and blurring lines.

We have a white nationalist violence problem. We won’t solve it by diluting signals with noise. As a free people, we’re still entitled to make the choice. So, let’s.