Excusing its own violence while taking aim at Trump.
White nationalists gathered last weekend to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a Charlottesville, Virginia park. Violence ensued in clashes with counter-protesters. One white nationalist, consumed by his neo-Nazi hatred, rammed his vehicle intentionally into a group of counter-protesters, killing a 32-year-old woman and seriously injuring others in his path. Two state troopers also died when the helicopter they were using to monitor the white nationalist rally crashed. The Trump administration took immediate steps to go after the perpetrators with the full force of federal law enforcement. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Justice Department was treating the vehicle attack as an act of domestic terrorism.
Despite his administration’s rapid commencement of a civil rights investigation, President Trump came under heavy criticism for his initial comments Saturday on the Charlottesville violence for not specifically calling out the white nationalists as the primary cause of the tragedy that unfolded in Charlottesville. Instead, he condemned in more generic terms “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” On Monday, in a statement issued from the White House, the president was more explicit. “Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, Neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to what we hold dear as Americans,” President Trump said.
Leftists have exploited the tragedy to serve their own twisted political agenda. They used the two day interval between President Trump’s initial comments and his more explicit White House statement denouncing white supremacists to opportunistically paint the president as a racist and white nationalist sympathizer. While always ready to pounce on anything they think will prove President Trump’s white nationalist sympathies and delegitimize his presidency, the left – including the hate-Trump media – is in denial about the violence committed by the so-called “anti-fascists,” who practice their own form of fascism, and by black nationalists, who practice their own form of racism.
In an Atlantic article titled “The Rise of the Violent Left,” Peter Beinart described how leftists have threatened violence to get their way and have followed through when they deemed necessary. Beinart mentioned incidents in which leftists linked to the “antifa” movement (short for anti-fascist) violently disrupted events in fascist fashion at which conservatives were invited to speak on college campuses. At UC Berkeley, for example, a riot broke out to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart.com editor, from speaking. The embrace of such tactics is no longer confined to the radical left fringes. “Trump’s rise has also bred a new sympathy for antifa among some on the mainstream left,” Beinart wrote.
House Democrat Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California is a good example of the left’s double standard toward condemning violence, depending on its source. She wasted no time declaring that “President Trump’s failure to immediately denounce white supremacy is well in line with the unmistakable conduct of his Administration toward immigrants, Muslims, and communities of color.” She did not distinguish between peaceful protesters and the violent thugs. Yet when violence broke out earlier this year at UC Berkeley by leftists who prevented Yiannopoulos from speaking, Pelosi defended the protesters’ “right to free speech.” She did not strongly condemn the violence or the forcible denial of First Amendment rights to Yiannopoulos and the audience members who wanted to hear him speak. Instead, she tepidly noted, “If there is an infiltration of the crowd by those that are less than peaceful, that should be addressed.” If there is an “infiltration of the crowd”? It was more like a takeover by the violent left to prevent a conservative speaker from being heard.
Antifa anarchists use violence to stifle the right of free speech and assembly by their political opponents. They spew hate and are willing to use force to enforce their own extrajudicial code of morality. Yet the mainstream left is increasingly willing to embrace or at least tolerate antifa’s tactics, while condemning what they call “hate speech” and “domestic terrorism” on the right.
The left has also romanticized black nationalists, rather than see some of them as the racists they really are. One such black nationalist killed 5 police officers at an anti-police rally in Dallas Texas. Former President Barack Obama condemned violence committed both against police officers and by police officers at the funerals for the slain officers, avoiding the racist motive for the Dallas shootings by a murderer who said he wanted to kill as many white people as possible.
Joy-Ann Reid, host of AM Joy on MSNBC, could not bring herself to admit that there are violent elements on both the left and right ends of the political spectrum. She said during a panel discussion on last Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press” that “I think that both-sidesism doesn’t serve anyone well.” She refused to acknowledge the violence perpetrated by the left’s so-called “anti-fascists.” She accused the White House of harboring white nationalists.
Jonathan Capehart, an opinion writer for the Washington Post, accused the president of conducting “a candidacy that allowed right-wing hate to feel safe quarter and a presidency that lets it grow by pretending it’s not there. Trump, the man who is oh so quick to thunder against radical Islamic terrorism, always gets cramps in his Twitter thumbs, loses his voice or suffers amnesia when white nationalists are involved.” Capehart ignores that fact that Obama allowed radical Islamist hate “to feel safe quarter” and to let it “grow by pretending it’s not there” when he embraced the Muslim Brotherhood and refused to condemn Islamic terrorism by name.
The New York Times editorial board declared that it was “fiction” to suppose that the president “wasn’t placating white supremacists by responding so weakly to the neo-Nazi violence that killed” the counter-protester. “Mr. Trump’s fear of naming the source of Saturday’s violence sharply contrasts with his eagerness to call out Islamist terror,” the editors continued in their editorial entitled “The Hate He Dares Not Speak Of.”
After President Trump did indeed speak out on Monday against the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists from the White House, the New York Times ran a story claiming that he had “bowed on Monday to overwhelming pressure… after two days of equivocal statements.” It couldn’t even give President Trump some credit for clarifying his stance.
Notice how President Trump’s critics have turned his criticism of former President Barack Obama’s reluctance to specifically call out Islamist terrorists on its head. Their attempt to show inconsistency in President Trump’s handling of white supremacist violence and his criticism of Obama’s handling of Islamist terrorism is intellectually dishonest. The difference is that Obama never called out the source of Islamist terrorism during the eight years of his presidency. He used a variety of euphemisms to avoid confronting the evil of Islamist supremacism and jihad directly. It took Donald Trump only two days to call out the white nationalists’ racist violence in Charlottesville for what it was and to label it as “evil.”
President Trump interrupted his working vacation at his Bedminster New Jersey golf course retreat to return to Washington where he made his statement and conferred with Attorney General Sessions and FBI Director Chris Wray. By contrast, Obama resumed his golf game during his Martha Vineyard vacation immediately after his brief statement condemning ISIS’s beheading of the American journalist James Foley in 2014. He said that ISIS “speaks for no religion” and compared it to a “cancer.” Obama’s deputy press secretary at the time defended Obama’s quick return to the golf course after his statement as “a good way for release.”
In Obama’s world, violent jihadists animated by their interpretation of Islamic ideology are simply “violent extremists.” The acts they commit are “workplace violence” or “man-made disasters.” The terrorists are molded, Obama said, in “a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” We are supposed to understand them, and even empathize with their plight, rather than confront their evil in specific terms.
The New York Times editorial board excoriated President Trump for not at first uttering the words white nationalism in connection with the Charlottesville violence. Yet the editors simply could not abide by the Trump administration’s use of the phrase “radical Islam” in describing the hate ideology motivating the global jihad terrorists or President Trump’s criticism of Obama for not doing so. They supported Obama’s obfuscation while holding President Trump to a different standard. So too has much of the hypocritical left.
Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam.
>> It’s also important to note that the Antifa and Black Lives Matter
>> movements are socialist and communist
Troublesome as the socialist and communist movements are, we must never forget that in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, those were the ones who stood up to the Nazis. At quite a terrible cost to them.
When the US and European capitalists not only collaborated, but financed and supported the Nazi regime, the socialists and the communists fought them. When the political Right in Europe volunteered to fight the communists wearing German uniform (and thereby strengthening Nazi Germany), the political left fought them and went to concentration camps for it.
The Soviet Union was not a nice place for Jews, but there is no doubt that the Red Army, with significant assistance from the US (weaponry and resources sent by convoy to Russia) shortened the war considerably. Had it not been for the communists and the socialists (and the US military industrial complex) the Holocaust would have lasted at least two years longer than it did. That might have cost another 3-4 million Jews their lives.
Yes, socialism is retarded, evil and dangerous, but it is also the only group of people that consistently have fought the Nazis.
I have no sympathy for the extreme left, socialism is a scourge on this planet, and their ideas are reprehensible. I am surprised at the antipathy they are facing though. Seriously.
1/ Any decent human being should strongly protest Nazi and Fascist marches.
Why were you not there? Why was I not there? Why where the ONLY people showing any kind of decency in this case, the extreme left? Maybe because the extreme left have always been the ones to protest Fascism and Nazism. In the ’30s and ’40s the extreme left, at the cost of thousands of lives, fought Nazis in Europe. What did the people on the right do? Collaborated. Even Jewish business people on the right collaborated extensively with Nazi Germany. Even GERMAN Jews on the right collaborated long into the 1940s with the Nazi regime.
Your description of the events with the car are no in accordance with the videos.
>> On the other hand, the leftist violence was obviously planned advance
Yes, and you should thank them for it. Someone needs to stand up to the Nazis, why didn’t you? Why did you let the leftists do it for you?
>> That is why he defended the British officers
Yeah, but the British officers didn’t have an ideology that said they should exterminate population groups. That’s why you should not, under any circumstance, defend the Nazis. Yes, they deserve the right to voice their opinions, but we have a DUTY to make that hard for them.
@ Michael S: Michael, the following videos of Faith Goldy of Rebel Media reporting the Charleville leftist riot from the scene are also very helpful. Faith was able to film a lot of what was going on. https://www.pscp.tv/FaithGoldy/1yNGamRYYAgGj
I think the following article from Quartz Media provides the keys to numerous articles which tell the other side of the story:
The complete story of what happened in Charlottesville, according to the alt-right
Gwynn Guilford August 15, 2017
Members of white nationalists clash against a group of counter-protesters in Charlottesville Virginia
(AP/Steve Helber)
The mainstream media account of the Unite the Right rally and the alt-narrative ultimately diverge regarding the weekend’s violence: Who started it, what kind occurred, who let it happen. Both tell roughly similar stories, with the perpetrator roles inverted. According to alt-right commentators, the white nationalist protesters were thrust defenseless into crowds of armed thugs, beaten, and forced to defend themselves to the extent that one of their ranks killed in self-defense.
This isn’t surprising. The theme of Unite the Right and the surrounding commentary wasn’t the superiority of whites as much as it was their victimhood. While some Unite the Right attendees certainly came armed to the teeth, many others stood just as vigilantly clutching their smartphones and selfie sticks, as if poised to capture leftist evils rained upon them.
This matters because the alt-right audience isn’t exactly tiny—Breitbart News, the most popular site of its stripe, clocked 11 million unique visitors in May, after peaking at around 45 million in 2016. Nor is it disempowered: after all, the man the alt-right sees at its most prominent ally occupies the Oval Office. But perhaps because the alt-right (a term that encompasses those with anti-establishment views to racist extremists) readership is still small compared to more mainstream outlets—CNN’s monthly traffic exceeds 100 million—writers have fostered a David-versus-Goliath solidarity with readers around a shared conviction that politicians and the mainstream media aim to take power and rights away from whites.
And many Trump supporters passively consume the alt-right narratives, despite not subscribing to the alt-right’s hyper-racialized ideology, through their social networks and other right-wing media where they tend to percolate.
With that in mind, what follows is an exploration of the events and the two broad themes that make up these alt-narratives. In the interest of clarity, we present alt-right views and descriptions in their own words and unchallenged. You can cross-reference these accounts with CNN’s timeline of events, or Buzzfeed’s detailed snapshot.
1. Government officials—and not white nationalists—are responsible for the deadly violence
ap steve helber in the park
White nationalist demonstrators hold their ground as they clash with counter demonstrators in Lee Park. (AP/Steve Helber)
Local and state officials and the police let violent counter-protesters—including Black Lives Matter and Antifa (extreme left-wingers who sometimes employ militant tactics to protest racism; not to be confused with the similarly militant Black Bloc, who dress in all black) take over Charlottesville.
“If they [counter-protesters] had not been there, there would have been no violence, and the rally would have taken place as planned,” writes Jared Taylor for The Unz Review.
Commenters on numerous alt-right sites believe the counter-protesters were “hired professional anarchists” funded and “bused in” by George Soros.
“[Police] were allowing Antifa, who were armed with bricks—they were recorded throwing bricks at people—and pepper spray, and Molotov cocktails, and tear gas—they were allowing these people essentially to march throughout the city, they gave them full control of the city,” Jazzhands McFeels said on his podcast Fash the Nation, part of the neo-Nazi blog The Right Stuff.
An anonymous Unite the Right attendee echoed this story, telling Breitbart, “We initiated, from what I saw, literally none of the violence. I would say, of the violence initiated 98 percent Antifa, two percent ours, and that’s just out of margin of error.”
As Marcus Halberstram, McFeels’ co-host, explains, “When Richard [Spencer, a rally speaker and prominent white supremacist], when our guys decided we were going to break camp and haul ass after the state of emergency, once it dawned on everybody what exactly was going on—our people were out. And all I saw was a bunch of violent, smelly communists and their brown pets owning the fucking town, which is what led to…whatever happened.”
steve helber in the park
White nationalist demonstrators hold their ground against Virginia State Police as police fire tear gas rounds in Lee Park. (AP/Steve Helber)
The police’s fault
Jason Kessler, one of the organizers, told Return of Kings that due to lack of police protection, several Unite the Right speakers were maced in the face.
“You can see police laughing as our crew were pepper-sprayed by the anti-white, anti-America so-called Antifa George Soros scumforce,” says Alex Jones, the conspiracy theory-mongering head of InfoWars.
After allowing demonstrators to gather in a central location surrounded by violent counter-protesters, officials declared a state of emergency and canceled the rally. In so doing, “the police—or, more likely, the people who were pulling their strings” forced “a large crowd of easily identifiable pro-white activists to disperse straight into the maws of the BLM [Black Lives Matter] and Antifa fanatics who consider it their highest moral calling to bloody and kill any white person who publicly declares it’s OK to be white,” writes Jim Goad in Taki’s Mag. “The rally-goers were thus forbidden from holding smaller events in nearby parks. So as they dispersed, they were sent into the hands of bat-wielding local blacks, who persistently taunted them as they quietly tried walking to their cars.”
Scheduled event speaker Daniel Friberg, via Return of Kings blog, wrote that the police started “pushing the entire audience” at the counter-protesters with the goal of igniting fighting.
APTOPIX Confederate Monuments Protest
A counter-demonstrator throws a newspaper box at white nationalists at the entrance to Lee Park. (AP/Steve Helber)
This was a deliberate effort by government officials to foment violence
Counter-protesters also think the police could have done a better job. But the Fash the Nation hosts think their neglect was “intentional.”
“This was a trap first and foremost in my mind, but the police failed in every conceivable way,” says Halberstram. “It was just like the crashing of the helicopter was just for good measure after a long great day of solid police work.” McFeels adds that the goal all along “was to set [Unite the Right demonstrators] up and put them directly in harm’s way.”
Governor Terry McAuliffe’s ultimate goal was to then blame the violence on Trump, according to commenters on Gateway Pundit. InfoWars’ Jones argues the state of emergency was declared to bring about the banning of right-wing gatherings in the future.
Reuters Joshua militia
Self-appointed armed guard for the white nationalist demonstrators. (Reuters/Joshua Roberts)
White nationalists are therefore not responsible for the death of Heather Heyer or those injured during the protests
“None of the violence,” says McFeels, “would have happened if it wasn’t for the actions of the Virginia governor and the Charlottesville police.”
Taki’s Mag put it in more sweeping terms, blaming the police for failing to adequately protect the demonstrators and neglecting to forcibly disperse the counter-protesters. Goad also asks whether this would have happened “if the current cultural diktat wasn’t that the worst person on earth, probably even worse than a murderer or a child molester, is a white person who says there’s nothing wrong with being white?”
The alleged attacker was himself assaulted by counter-protesters
Noting that the “car-plowing incident” will be “milked of every last drop for political purposes,” Taki’s Mag observes, “Plenty of evidence has emerged—and it will be suppressed—that before plowing into the crowd, murder suspect James Alex Fields Jr.’s car had been repeatedly attacked by bat-wielding rioters.”
The argument that Fields was acting in self-defense is common, though the actual nature of the attack is a matter of debate. “When the facts come out. The guy was chased to his car by leftest [sic] he ask cops for help but received none, he was in fear for his life and did what he had to do to save his life,” said one Gateway Pundit commenter. Another, however, said Fields only accelerated after his Dodge was hit by a brick.
2. A societal double-standard
Reuters joshua roberts white nationalists with shields
(Reuters/Joshua Roberts)
Fields “could be a madman like the Bernie Sanders supporter who tried to kill Steven Scalise and other Republicans,” the Independent Sentinel argues. “The media and the left are attempting to put the blame at the President’s feet.”
The media is ignoring the violence perpetrated by Antifa
The media’s liberal slant means it applies a double-standard to the violence, reporting on actions perpetrated by “white supremacists” and ignoring the “counter-protesters,” refusing to identify them as communists, argues the Independent Sentinel. In this sense, the media creates controversy where it doesn’t exist.
“The story of the neo-Nazi is the only story being told as people turn to social media or cable news,” S. Noble writes in another Independent Sentinel piece. “The media works in concert with the perpetrators of violence and divides the country further instead of simply reporting the news. The violence was on both sides.”
steve helber water bottle2
A counter-protester hurls a water bottle at the white nationalists and is pepper-sprayed. (AP/Steve Helber)
Not Trump, though
Breitbart was outraged that McAuliffe refused to condemn Antifa, while heaping the blame on the rally-goers. Unlike other politicians, Trump refused to buckle to media pressure when he drew an equivalency between the demonstrators and protesters for the bigotry “on many sides,” urging Americans to “cherish their history.” For that, various alt-right sites celebrated him.
Says McFeels: “[The media is] doing the same thing that they’ve always done to the president and to anyone else who isn’t going to cuck [alt-right slang for anyone who buckles to liberal/media pressure], anyone they can make cuck they’re gonna try to make cuck so of course they want Trump to name ‘white supremists’ [sic] and neo-Nazis and the like as the perpetrators of everything that happened yesterday and he actually refused to—he said ‘all sides.’”
Trump has since changed his tune, saying “racism is evil” and calling out “KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups” as “repugnant.” While some supporters saw this as forced upon him—as the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer put it, “at the point of a Jewish weapon”—commenters on Breitbart, for example, mostly poured scorn on Trump for his cowardice and his refusal to call out Antifa and BLM.
The Democrats—especially Obama—are really to blame
Obama—not Trump—is “one of the catalysts for the division in this country in terms of splitting people apart on racial boundaries, argues Fash the Nation. The Independent Sentinel adds, “The KKK are evil racists and so are the counter protesters. They were dredged up by the past president who hopes to start a race-class-gender war.”
The Gateway Pundit sees even longer historical continuity in the violence. “The KKK has lost its popularity among Democrats the past few years but not its tactics. Democrats still dress in masks and beat and abuse conservatives and Republicans. Today they’re called Antifa.”
“It’s also important to note that the Antifa and Black Lives Matter movements are socialist and communist. Those two ideologies should never become mainstream and yet they are embraced by Democrats,” argues Noble in the Independent Sentinel.
In fact, despite the rally’s name, Nazis by definition can’t be right-wing. “Republicans do not embrace the right-wing crazies. Many of these so-called right-wing extremists are socialists,” writes Noble. “You can’t be a Republican, conservative or libertarian and be a socialist [Nazi is the National Socialist Party].”
joshua roberts tear gas
A smoke bomb is thrown at a group of counter-protesters during a clash against members of white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville. (Reuters/Joshua Roberts)
But still, the real issue is white rights
Many alt-right commentators see the need to protect “white rights” as the result of decades of marginalization of hardworking white Christians.
“They are not naturally ‘racists’ or even ‘white supremacists,’ but rather they seek to guarantee their own survival, and the survival of their families, their communities, and their culture,” says Boyd D. Cathey in The Unz Review. “They have seen the standards, beliefs, traditions, morality and customs that they inherited and have cherished—they have seen them attacked, ridiculed, and, in many cases, banned, even criminalized.”
More extreme alt-right members openly embrace white tribalism, mocking white counter-protesters for denying this natural allegiance.
“I can see why the Black Lives Matter dudes, however knuckleheaded they are, would have problems with a pro-white rally. That’s simply how phenotypical racial tribalism works,” writes Goad in Taki’s Mag. “What’s curious is the keening, unhinged hatred that the ‘anti-racist’ whites have for their genetic cohorts who refuse to join them in their creepy, ethnomasochistic psychological self-cleansing rituals.”
Reuters torches alejandro alvarez
White nationalists chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil” surround students rallying on the UVA campus. (Reuters/Alejandro Alvarez)
Read next: Who were the armed, camouflaged men in Charlottesville who have nothing to do with the military?
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Thank your for your research, Adam. This is the first I have heard, that the suspect in custody had been physically attacked by the leftist demonstrators before his apparently spur-of-the-moment decision to drive the car into the crowd. The lad has a troubled past, a history of mental health problems and had been under medication for years. If he were a Leftist, there would be a hewan cry in his defense. As it stands, he apparently had been charged only with manslaughter, which seems appropriate.
I also read, that the Right-wing demonstration never actually happened. They secured a permit for it, of course; but before they could begin it, the Lefties had caused such mayhem, the police revoked the permit and the event was called off. The violence continued through the city, including the car incident. I just tried to look up the article I had read, for a reference; but it’s been buried under left-wing hate news.
The author never mentions the fact that not only was there violence on both sides, but that most of the violence, both before and after the car assault, came from the antics and black nationalists. This has been documented with video coverage. The car attack was the work of an individual who had been goaded by the anarchist-letted vigilantes, who through bricks at his car and hit it with sticks, So far, there is not the slightest evidence that it was the work of an organized group or planned before the demonstrations. On the other hand, the leftist violence was obviously planned advance by organized groups. They came loaded for bear and set right to work. The connivance of the police and city officials in the violence was barely disguised. I hate being put in the position of having to defend Nazis and Klu Kluxers from unfair criticism. Their ideology is indeed hateful and evil. But as John Adams pointed out, when he acted as attorney for the defense of British officers unfairly criticized for defending themselves from an assault by American revolutionaries, “facts are stubborn things.” Even our deepest ideological convictions won’t make them go away. That is why he defended the British officers even though he was a leader of the American revolutionary movement himself.