I'm pretty sure they're talking about people engaging in direct action like fighting with / firing on the police in opposition of an oil pipeline, or destroying GMO crops. The wording of the article is bad; I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider donating to an animal hospital or picking up trash in the park to be extremism.

Emberleaf

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But there actually ARE left-wing 'extremists'. I guarantee you've met at least one. They're the ones who always seem to bring everything back around to some sort of armed conflict. They support all of the regular things that leftists support (at least verbally), but have a tendency to fetishize violence and are alllllll about the guns, man. They often express things like 'acceptable losses' and 'wiping the slate clean'. These people DO exist, and they ARE dangerous to the general health and wellbeing of the public. These are the extremists that I think the APA is talking about.

Obviously, this does not mean that EVERY leftist is an extremist or dangerous to people, and I think the APA's statement is very poorly worded.

lunatichacker

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wiping the slate clean is anti-marxist🙃

Jeffrey

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Can confirm. I have seen leftists proudly display the communo-anarchist Gadsden flag which implies aggression and violence. These are almost always the same leftists who own guns and advocate for violent revolution & punching fascists.

The report says "two thirds [of violent extremists were] from the far right, about a quarter from the far left, and the remainder were driven by religious or 'ethnonationalist' causes". Violent leftists are absolutely real, and no one should pretend they do not exist. Change requires uncertainty, fear, and discomfort, but violence is optional. The ends never justify the means, the ends are the means.

ree

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Nobody read the article and now everyone is angry and scared at the big evil psychologist.

It focuses on what's hapenning in the US and capitol events.

"As the United States grapples with a surge of domestic extremism—including the Capitol breach on January 6—psychologists are identifying factors that are at the root of such violence, along with ways to stop it."

And here is the full quote about anti capitalism

Studies of domestic terrorism have largely focused on three categories: far right, far left, and Islamist. START’s Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS), a database of 2,226 people who engaged in extremist crimes, points to some demographic differences between those groups [...] Left-wing extremists include groups and individuals who oppose capitalism, support environmental or animal rights causes, or embrace communism, socialism, or anarchism (The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2020). Some members of the anti-fascist political protest movement Antifa have enacted violent extremist crimes, but research by psychologist Gina Scott Ligon, PhD, director of the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) at the University of Nebraska Omaha, shows that while Antifa-inspired individuals engaged in increasing levels of violence over the summer of 2020, it is still a decentralized movement with low levels of coordination and does not meet the criteria for an organization (Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2021).

So if ou want a take home message it's that violence define radicalization.

Radicalization of opinion can be an important precursor to meaningful social change,” said Lemieux. “The problem is when people begin to feel that using violence in service of those views is not only justified but also recognized and celebrated.”

Source : https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/07/cover-domestic-extremists

jazzfes

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I think the problem people see is more with creating an equivalence of political opinion and mental health.

The full quote about anti-capitalism doesn't say anything about what makes someone an extremist. It doesn't say anything about rational criticisms and irrational ones it just relates political attitudes. It doesn't say anything about how we would separate rational criticism from extremism. That is a problem, no?

The take home message doesn't help at all when a dissident deals with an oppressive system. E.g. how would that message be applied in Germany in 1933? Or 1939? Or 1942? I don't think it can at all. How would it be applied to say US intervention, or colonisation? Again, I don't think the message would hold up.

Do you think that the scientific method is applied here in an appropriate way?

ree

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Thanks for answering.

First i wanted to adress that the title of this post is bullshit. The article is merely about psychologist telling other psychologist how they are relevant to understand radicalization.

You're right about the quote it's just explaining what left extremism is about there is a paragraph for the 3 identified category : religious, left and right.

The take home message was about the article and this ill-informed post.

Now for my opinion: I don't think you should expect anything about a discipline which classify deviance in a big red book with statistical procedure (see DSM).