CNN host Don Lemon caught heat this week for remarks he uttered on Monday, when he said white men are America’s biggest terrorist threat.
He doubled down two days later, providing data to back up his assertions.
And there’s plenty more where that came from.
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Lemon was talking with fellow host Chris Cuomo about a shooting that killed two people at a Kroger supermarket in Jeffersonstown, Ky., on the outskirts of Louisville on Oct. 24.
An eyewitness recounted a shooter saying “whites don’t kill whites” during the incident.
“We keep thinking that the biggest terror threat is something else,” Lemon said, noting people’s concerns abut migrant caravans currently approaching the U.S. border.
READ MORE: 2 dead after shooting at Kroger supermarket in Kentucky
Then he said, “we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them.
“There is no travel ban on them, they have the Muslim ban, there is no white guy ban, so what do we do about that?”
The remarks drew fire from numerous quarters, including Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted the following.
Far from retreating, however, Lemon reaffirmed his remarks on Wednesday.
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“Let’s put emotion aside and look at the cold, hard facts,” he said.
The remarks are at the 4:30 mark in the video below:
“The evidence is overwhelming,” Lemon said.
He cited a July 2017 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) showing that there were 225 fatalities in U.S. incidents perpetrated by domestic violent extremists from the day after 9/11 to Dec. 31, 2016.
Those numbers include 106 people killed by far right extremists in 62 incidents, and 119 people who became victims of Islamic extremists in 23 incidents.
The Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) revealed no fatalities from far-left violent extremist groups in the same time frame.
The GAO report went on to note that the number of fatalities in incidents caused by domestic violent extremists during that time ranged anywhere between one and 49 in a given year.
Attacks by far right wing violent extremists, however, outnumbered those by Islamist extremists in 10 out of those 15 years.
While the number of people killed by both groups is similar, over 40 per cent of deaths attributed to Islamist extremists happened in the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016.
Lemon also cited a study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) showing that homegrown extremists killed at least 372 people between 2007 and 2016.
That same study found that right-wing extremists were responsible in 74 per cent of cases, while Islamic extremists were culpable in 24 per cent of them.
Left-wing extremists? Two per cent.
READ MORE: Unstable employment, criminality, radical peers: Why does extreme political violence happen?
Lemon could have also cited a report by Reveal and the Center for Investigate reporting, which showed that right wingers were responsible in several more domestic terror incidents than Islamists and left wingers.
Finally, Lemon mentioned a study by New America, a non-partisan think tank, showing that between 9/11 and Charlottesville, of the attacks that weren’t carried out by Islamic extremists, 68 had been attributed to far right extremists and eight by left wing or black separatist groups.
“So let me break that down for you even further,” Lemon said.
“Their analysis shows that for every eight deadly attacks by right-wing extremists, there were one by left-wing extremists.
“Those are the facts.”
Lemon went on to say that people who are angered by what he said are “missing the entire point.”
“We don’t need to worry about people who are thousands of miles away, the biggest threats are homegrown.”
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