Once again, the Left can be all too quick to paint everyone with the same brush.
That’s how it appears in the aftermath of the tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where one counter-demonstrator and two policemen are dead after clashes between white supremacists and leftist “Antifa” protesters. One of those white supremacists, 20-year-old James Fields, drove a car through a crowd of the protesters, injuring 19 of them in addition to killing a woman, 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
But as Professor Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University tells Fox’s Judge Jeanine Pirro, one can’t put the members of the “Alt-Right” community in the same bucket as the brutal racists who were responsible for much of the violence last Saturday. Swain, whose 2002 book “The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration” predicted the rise of the Alt-Right, makes the case that this group is quite unlike the hate groups targeted by the hardcore Left.
First, as Swain argues, Alt-Righters condemn violence and steer clear of the racial epithets used by the hate groups. Second, their arguments are largely academic and reasoned, making use of facts and statistics plucked from public sources. Primarily, their cause is intellectual, rather than militant or anarchic. According to Pirro (who is black), many white grievances are legitimate because, like those of other ethnic groups, their causes are not necessarily favored over what’s “politically correct” to express in a public sphere. The fact of the matter is that most of the people belonging to the Alt-Right strongly condemn both sides in the Charlottesville rioting and abhor violence in general.
It’s very important for those on the Left to make these distinctions because there have always been hate groups in America. These groups existed long before Donald Trump became president, and sadly, it’s likely that many will continue to exist afterward. Watch as Swain explains her thinking on these issues to Judge Pirro.
