Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and neo-Nazis are vile, fascist thugs. They have been routinely denounced for decades by both political parties, incessantly so after the Unite the Right rally of August 12 at Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally, ostensibly to protest the removal of Confederate statues, did not take place. Under lax police tactics, which have been criticized by both protestors and counter-protestors, 34 people were injured, only four people were arrested, and one woman was killed by a person, likely deranged, who supported the rightwing ralliers.
Antifa (short for Anti-Fascist) is a nationwide network of masked, left-wing agitators and anarchists who have taken it upon themselves to protect communities from right-wing fascists and racists. Their standard mode of operation is to descend upon suspicious events (e.g., rallies, marches, and speaking engagements) to shut down free, but hateful, speech, thereby preventing the violence that it will surely cause — doing so often with violence, which they openly embrace, and, preferably, without police assistance, which they openly reject. In an article in The Atlantic, “The Rise of the Violent Left,” Peter Beinart writes, “They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.”
Under lax police tactics, which have been criticized by both protestors and counter-protestors, 34 people were injured, only four people were arrested, and one woman was killed.
So far so good, you may be thinking. But before you run out to purchase your mask, black hoodie, and bat, before you head down to the local alt-Left recruitment office to enlist, consider that the universe of fascism extends far beyond the villainous skinhead demographic that you have always despised. That unsuspecting bigot whom you are itching to sneak up behind and cold-cock might be your neighbor, a fellow employee, a relative, perhaps. To the alt-Left, and to the sycophantic news media, academia, and Democrat party, America is awash with fascists and racists.
According to an author featured by CNN, everyone who voted for President Trump is “by default” a white supremacist. And, notes Beinart, roughly three-quarters of Democrats are convinced that he is a racist who is advancing fascist policies. During the racial and radical strife that consumed the presidential campaign of 1968, Gore Vidal famously won a political argument with William F. Buckley, by simply calling Buckley a crypto-Nazi, a Nazi sympathizer — thereby creating an intellectual foundation for modern liberal discourse. Consequently, the “progressive” argument today, that Mr. Trump and the 60 million Americans who elected him are white supremacists because liberals say they are, is thought to be unassailable. And no doubt following this logic, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination concluded that rampant bigotry now permeates America, and felt compelled to issue a formal "early warning and urgent action procedure," said to be “a rare move often used to signal the potential of a looming civil conflict.”
To avert this second Civil War, the news media and politicians have decided against denouncing the alt-Left. Politicians, that is, except for Trump, who blamed both the alt-Right and the alt-Left for the Charlottesville violence — and has been excoriated himself, by both political parties, ever since. Republicans such as Mitt Romney and Senators John McCain and Marco Rubio have accused him of equating the acts of racists and fascists with the acts of those fighting against racism and fascism. Said Gary Cohn, Trump’s National Economic Council Director, “Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK.” Mr. Cohn went on to urge his administration to “do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities.”
That unsuspecting bigot whom you are itching to sneak up behind and cold-cock might be your neighbor, a fellow employee, a relative, perhaps.
Good luck salving up those divisions; the alt-Left exists to create them, the deeper the better. Patrisse Cullors, one of Black Lives Matters’ three cofounders, claims that Mr. Trump is prosecuting a Hitler-like genocide on our communities. Says Ms. Cullors, “Trump is literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country, be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia and he has set out the most dangerous policies not just that impacts this country but that impacts the globe.” To Antifa’s Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, she has barely scratched the surface of America’s unjust, illegitimate landscape. In its recruitment video (which should turn neo-Nazi leaders and their videographers green with envy) we are told that the government “has openly declared war on our communities, threatening to ethnically cleanse Latinos, criminalize Muslims, destroy indigenous land, oppress the LGBTQ community, and continues to murder and oppress black people.”
Although little may seem more virtuous than shameless affirmations of the alt-Left’s moral superiority over the alt-Right, Messrs. Romney, McCain, et al. should give “Burn Down the American Plantation” a read. It might cause them to question, possibly challenge, the Alt-Left crusade. Incidentally, the violence produced by such divisive vitriol began long before Trump’s election, in cities such as Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland.
Democrats, and the media, on the other hand, not only refuse to condemn alt-Left violence; they condone, if not encourage, it; they revel in the division it creates. The alt-Left, they say, does not advocate violence, as does the deplorable alt-Right. Never mind that the alt-Left consciously seeks to stir up violence at every opportunity, and uses “self-defense” as an excuse for its own violence. As such, alt-Left thugs are referred to as counter-protestors and peace activists, sometimes as heroes. For example, former Hillary Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon, Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, and CNN anchorman Chris Cuomo all likened the alt-Left counter-protestors at the “Unite the Right” debacle to American soldiers on D-Day, who “confronted the Nazis without a permit.”
The violence produced by such divisive vitriol began long before Trump’s election, in cities such as Ferguson and Baltimore.
They are not heroes. Heroes (92% of them) don’t live with their parents, hide behind disguises, throw public tantrums, sucker-punch unsuspecting victims (even if the victims are authentic fascists), or hurl balloons filled with urine and feces at police. (By the way, I can’t imagine anything that I could hate enough to make me even touch a shit balloon, let alone fill one. And how is it done, with safety to the hurler? I bet that a terrorist, concerned about a weapon going off prematurely, would be more fearful of a shit balloon then an IED.)
And the alt-Left does not exist to fight fascism. Its violence has plagued the nation for years, and its attacks have been focused, not on avowed or even plausible fascists, but on conservatives or libertarians such as Charles Murray, Anne Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Heather Mac Donald, who were invited to speak at liberal colleges and universities; on police, on attenders of Trump rallies, and on ordinary Americans whose only sin was the ownership of homes, vehicles, and businesses in the vicinity of unchecked alt-Left destruction, burning, and looting. Its principal targets have been capitalism, liberty, tolerance, law and order, property rights, peaceful assembly, American history, and, most importantly, free speech. These so-called antifascists did not confront actual fascists until the Charlottesville tragedy — where their “peace activist” behavior was indistinguishable from that of the vicious fascist thugs that they engaged.
For the most part, alt-Right fascism exists only in the paranoid minds of the alt-Left, and in the hysterical talking points of the journalists, social science professors, and politicians who tell us, incessantly, that it is on the rise. If so, where? The Unite the Right rally was the largest white supremacist gathering in over a decade, drawing an estimated 250 to 500 racists from all over the country. One would expect a racist nation to send tens of thousands of hate-filled bigots to such an event.
The alt-Left's principal targets have been capitalism, liberty, tolerance, law and order, property rights, peaceful assembly, American history, and, most importantly, free speech.
“Alt-Right” groups such as the neo-Nazis and the KKK have been despised for decades by the American public; they hold no positions in government, academia, the news media, entertainment, or corporate America; they have no money; they wield no power. According to Anti-Defamation League estimates, there are only “3,000 Klan members and unaffiliated individuals who identify with Klan ideology” in the entire country — probably only half that number, if the ones in old age homes and prisons are deducted.
As Kevin Williamson observed in his article “Gangs of Berkeley,” “the so-called antifa and the white-nationalist clowns are two sides of the same very sad little coin.” The news media, academia, and politicians — crypto-antifascistswho tacitly endorse the alt-Left — would do well to heed the admonition of Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz: “Do not glorify the violent people who are now tearing down the statues. Many of these people, not all of them, many of these people are trying to tear down America. Antifa is a radical, anti-America, anti-free market, communist, socialist, hard left censorial organization that tries to stop speakers on campuses from speaking.”
One week after the Unite the Right rally, a Free Speech rally was held in Boston (aka the Cradle of American Liberty), Massachusetts. The organizers, the Boston Free Speech Coalition, “publicly distanced themselves from the neo-Nazis, white supremacists and others who fomented violence in Charlottesville,” emphatically stating, "We are strictly about free speech . . . [W]e will not be offering our platform to racism or bigotry. We denounce the politics of supremacy and violence." The Boston Police Department, which assigned 500 police officers to the event, requested that counter-protestors not throw urine at them.
The rally drew fewer than 100 free speech advocates. No Nazis and no Klansmen attended. But 40,000 counter-protesters showed up — witless fools, in effect, protesting against free speech, in the cradle of liberty.
Neo-Nazis and the KKK hold no positions in government, academia, the news media, entertainment, or corporate America; they have no money; they wield no power.
Included among the protesters were an estimated 2,000 members from the alt-Left. They attacked the few free speech advocates that they could find, screamed infantile chants; e.g., "Hate speech is not free speech," "Cops and Klan go hand in hand", "Oink oink, bang bang," and “George Soros, where is our Money!” And, of course, they threw urine at the police.
The news media and Boston politicians celebrated. Evidently, the police too were jubilant. Of the 40,000 protesters, Boston Police Commissioner William Evans gushed that they came to Boston "standing tall against hatred and bigotry in our city, and that's a good feeling."
Not so for national unity, peaceful assembly (33 arrests were made), or the First Amendment.
The alt-Right is vile, but powerless. The alt-Left is vile, but, through the tacit endorsement of the cowardly news media, servile academia, and spineless politicians, it has become a significantly destructive force in American culture. As such, it is immensely more worrisome than the alt-Right. I worry about the contaminating effects of the alt-Left’s hatred for America, in general, and free speech, in particular.
