Some of the folks on the right are having a hard time distinguishing between the antifa protesters on the left and the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville. Let me help you out. The ones with assault weapons, body armor and small arms are white supremacists and anti-government militias. The ones with masks and pepper spray and rocks are the antifa groups trying to give peaceful protests a bad name.
The ones calling for rallies all over the country to demand an “ethno-white state” are the white supremacists. The ones trying to shut down those rallies are the antifa. In other words, the ones spoiling for a race war are the white supremacists. The ones who take the bait are the antifa.
The ones who can trace their roots back to the Civil War and Jim Crow are the white supremacists. It’s a movement that’s been here for generations. The ones who have only popped up in the last few years are the antifa.
Finally, the ones that have the ear of the President of the United States and who have become members of one of the two major parties, influencing primaries like the one in Alabama last night, are the white supremacists. The ones who have no influence on either political party are the antifa folks.
The antifa groups are mostly anarchists who yield little influence over anybody and who hijack otherwise peaceful protests to cause property damage and attack people who disagree with them. They aren’t organized enough to orchestrate rallies of their own and, if they did, nobody would come. Progressives need to call them out. Democratic elected officials need to condemn their actions. But they are not the same as the white supremacists who are making a resurgence.
The white supremacists have been with us the entire history of our country and, for most of it, actually wielded power. While they’ve been beaten back and chased to the shadows over the past fifty years, the rise of Trump has empowered and energized them. They’ve infiltrated the Republican Party and are recognized by the president.
For Republicans like state Rep. Dan Bishop of Charlotte, who want to equate Black Lives Matter with the white supremacists, they’re just wrong. BLM is a group borne out of the disturbing frequency of unarmed African-American men and boys killed at the hands of police. Their goal is to shine a light on injustice that is widely recognized and to push for solutions to reduce the deaths of black men and to address other societal problems like prison reform. Comparing them to white supremacists groups who want a white nation would be laughable if it weren’t so offensive.
Comparing violent white supremacist groups with protesters on the left is false equivalence. The left certainly needs to disavow people in their ranks who suppress free speech but the alt-right feels empowered by the Republicans controlling the federal government and the policies they’re pushing. The GOP has offered a wink-and-a-nod to racists in their midst for decades. If Klan and Nazis now feel like they’re becoming more mainstream, the GOP under Donald Trump bears some responsibility. The perpetrators of violence on the left have no such hold over the Democratic Party.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
I saw no signs of antifa doing any damage. I had heard from clergy who were at the protest that it was the antifa who saved them. One man addressed a weekly protest of our senator and said that he had preconceived notions of what the antifa are, but when he met them and interacted with them all of his notions were found false and he said that he probably would not be alive today if it were not for them. They are just people fighting Fascism with truth. They were not armed.
Just as a comment on your statement that the antifa only popped up a few years ago – while this might be somewhat true in the sense that they’ve been much more noticeable in our current environment only recently, the antifa movement has been around much longer. Not near as long as the other side, but just as an FYI. “The exact origins of the group are unknown, but Antifa can be traced to Nazi Germany and Anti-Fascist Action, a militant group founded in the 1980s in the United Kingdom.” quoted from this CNN article: http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/14/us/what-is-antifa-trnd/index.html