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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThere's no equivalence between Antifa and white supremacists.
What Trump Gets Wrong About Antifa
If the president is concerned about violence on the left, he can start by fighting the white supremacist movements whose growth has fueled its rise.
In his Tuesday press conference, Donald Trump talked at length about what he called the alt left. White supremacists, he claimed, werent the only people in Charlottesville last weekend that deserved condemnation. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent, he declared. Nobody wants to say that.
I can say with great confidence that Trumps final sentence is untrue. I can do so because the September issue of The Atlantic contains an essay of mine entitled The Rise of the Violent Left, which discusses the very phenomenon that Trump claims nobody wants to discuss. Trump is right that, in Charlottesville and beyond, the violence of some leftist activists constitutes a real problem. Where hes wrong is in suggesting that its a problem in any way comparable to white supremacism.
What Trump calls the alt left (Ill explain why thats a bad term later) is actually antifa, which is short for anti-fascist. The movement traces its roots to the militant leftists who in the 1920s and 1930s brawled with fascists on the streets of Germany, Italy, and Spain. It revived in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, when anti-racist punks in Britain and Germany mobilized to defeat neo-Nazi skinheads who were infiltrating the music scene. Via punk, groups calling themselves anti-racist actionand later, anti-fascist action or antifasprung up in the United States. They have seen explosive growth in the Trump era for an obvious reason: Theres more open white supremacism to mobilize against.
More: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/what-trump-gets-wrong-about-antifa/537048/?fbclid=IwAR0AOwcbK9othWAjx1M5-PbN4iQuPUXyhbOCFITFdrUb-FtNQMjccZvVVFU
Turbineguy
(37,313 posts)to vilify to make white supremacists look better.
albacore
(2,398 posts)NCLefty
(3,678 posts)I say that a lot about him, of course. :p