Who are the real extremists?

[Progressive Pessimist]

Yeah, keep telling yourselves that. The real question should be what this "extremism" looks like and whether that's equivalent. The easiest metric for this is body counts-people associated with the average far right domestic terrorist having killed insurmountably more people, even in just the last few years, than the most left wing would-be terrorist out there. Meanwhile, if you want to not count instances of actual terrorism and just look at fringe sentiments: counting a bunch of people on Twitter or Ilhan Omar as representative elements of this country's far- left "extremists," there is still no comparison to how empowered hate groups and online reactionary communities have become.

 Ideologies becoming more extreme is an unfortunate side effect of the polarization we are seeing, but it by means is equivalent even if the left has suddenly started moving to where the right already was, in terms of "extremism."