Report: Conspiracies fuel recent extremist killings
Qanon, anti-vaccine theories spur violence
Newer strains of far-right movements fueled by conspiracy theories, misogyny and anti-vaccine proponents contributed to a modest rise in killings by domestic extremists in the United States last year, according to a report released Tuesday by a Jewish civil rights group.
Killings by domestic extremists increased from 23 in 2020 to at least 29 last year, with right-wing extremists killing 26 of those people in 2021, the Anti-defamation League said in a report first provided to The Associated Press.
The ADL’S report says white supremacists, anti-government sovereign citizens and other adherents of long-standing movements were responsible for most of the 19 deadly attacks it counted in 2021. The New York City-based organization’s list also included killings linked to newer rightwing movements that spread online during the coronavirus pandemic and former President Donald Trump’s presidency.
The ADL concluded that roughly half of the 2021 killings didn’t have a clear ideological motive, fitting a pattern that stretches back at least a decade.
The group’s tally included a shooting rampage in Denver by Lyndon James Mcleod, who killed five people in December before a police officer fatally shot him. Mcleod was involved in the “manosphere,” a toxic masculinity subculture, and harbored revenge fantasies
against most of his victims, the ADL report notes.
Right-wing conspiracy theorists killed five people last year in two incidents, both involving “troubled perpetrators,” the ADL report says.
In August, California surfing school owner Matthew Taylor Coleman was charged with killing his two young children with a spear gun in Mexico. Coleman told an FBI agent that he was “enlightened” by conspiracy theories, including Qanon, and believed his wife had passed “serpent DNA” on to his children, according to a court affidavit.
A Maryland man, Jeffrey Allen Burnham, was charged with killing his brother, his sister-in-law and a friend in September. Charging documents said Burnham confronted his brother, a pharmacist, believing he was poisoning people with COVID-19 vaccines.
“The politicization of the coronavirus and other factors have created many new anti-vaccine conspiracy adherents and given the anti-vaccine movement a distinctly right-wing tone it did not previously have,” the ADL report says.
The Qanon conspiracy theory has been linked to other acts of real-world violence, including last year’s riot at the U.S. Capitol. In June, a federal intelligence report warned that Qanon adherents could target Democrats and other political opponents for more violence.
Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the ADL’S Center on Extremism and author of Tuesday’s report, said the Qanon movement is still evolving and overlapping with other extremist movements, including vaccine opponents.
Right-wing extremists have killed at least 333 people in the U.S. over the past decade.