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Showing Original Post only (View all)Extremist Experts Are Beginning To Worry About A Rise Of Violence On The Left [View all]
WASHINGTON In the spring of 2016, Brian Levin found himself in an uncomfortable position: trying to save the life of a Ku Klux Klan member.
Levin, a former New York City cop who studies domestic extremism as the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, was documenting a Klan rally in Anaheim, California, when a counterprotest suddenly took a violent swing forcing Levin to physically place himself between a Klansman and a furious, anti-fascist mob that seemed ready to kill.
It made Levin wonder if in his focus on the obvious subject the white supremacists hed overlooked a growing source of extremism: the far left. At that point, I said we have something coalescing on the hard left, Levin told VICE News.
Wednesday mornings shooting of Republican lawmakers at a baseball practice in Virginia seemed to raise the question again. The shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, was a Bernie Sanders-supporting man from Illinois with a record of anti-Trump rantings on social media. His politics have quickly become a talking point among some conservative pundits seeking a quick political score: proof of a looming leftist campaign against the government.
Experts in homegrown extremism say its not so simple Hodgkinson had no known association to any left-wing extremist group. But they also say that the past few months have seen enough of a rise in politically motivated violence from the far left that monitors of right-wing extremism have begun shifting their focus, and sounding the alarm. They see indications that the uptick in extremist rhetoric and anti-government activism that characterized the early years of the Obama presidency are beginning to manifest on the far left in the early days of Trumps, and that the two sides are increasingly headed for confrontation.
https://news.vice.com/story/extremism-experts-are-starting-to-worry-about-the-left
Levin, a former New York City cop who studies domestic extremism as the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, was documenting a Klan rally in Anaheim, California, when a counterprotest suddenly took a violent swing forcing Levin to physically place himself between a Klansman and a furious, anti-fascist mob that seemed ready to kill.
It made Levin wonder if in his focus on the obvious subject the white supremacists hed overlooked a growing source of extremism: the far left. At that point, I said we have something coalescing on the hard left, Levin told VICE News.
Wednesday mornings shooting of Republican lawmakers at a baseball practice in Virginia seemed to raise the question again. The shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, was a Bernie Sanders-supporting man from Illinois with a record of anti-Trump rantings on social media. His politics have quickly become a talking point among some conservative pundits seeking a quick political score: proof of a looming leftist campaign against the government.
Experts in homegrown extremism say its not so simple Hodgkinson had no known association to any left-wing extremist group. But they also say that the past few months have seen enough of a rise in politically motivated violence from the far left that monitors of right-wing extremism have begun shifting their focus, and sounding the alarm. They see indications that the uptick in extremist rhetoric and anti-government activism that characterized the early years of the Obama presidency are beginning to manifest on the far left in the early days of Trumps, and that the two sides are increasingly headed for confrontation.
https://news.vice.com/story/extremism-experts-are-starting-to-worry-about-the-left
So I guess the Proud Boys and III%ers are out of the question then?
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Extremist Experts Are Beginning To Worry About A Rise Of Violence On The Left [View all]
Initech
Jun 2017
OP
To start with, what the fuck is a "left wing extremist group"?? Does such a group even exist today?
madinmaryland
Jun 2017
#4
Freak Righty out: Generally, Conservatives win coups/attrition, Liberals win at swift overthrows.
TheBlackAdder
Jun 2017
#12