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Nov 28, 17

Does Public Condemnation Since Charlottesville Have the Alt-Right on the Run?

At Charlottesville, numbers of white nationalist and counter-protesters were estimated to be of the same general order of magnitude, but recent street actions by white nationalist/supremacist/racist groups have been universally overwhelmed, shut down, and shouted down. Public denunciations by politicians from Jeb Bush to John McCain to Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan condemned either the right’s Charlottesville action or Trump’s response; even Steve Bannon called white supremacists a “collection of clowns” in an interview shortly after Cville.

If you care about state politics (which, to some extent we all must, because the backdrop of conventional politics speeds, slows, coalesces, or dissolves the tide of social movement beneath), it appears that enablers of white nationalist/supremacist/racists on the far-Right even lost in politics; Donald Trump’s popularity is at an all-time low for a modern president; most Republican contenders lost in the November 7th elections; and in Virginia, a transgender candidate even knocked out a veteran state congressman (and bigot) to become the first transgender state legislator in the country.

“Are we home free? Has the #RESIST sentiment touted by liberals, who, up until the 2016 election were more concerned about paper-vs-plastic at the supermarket, actually amounted to something?”

At least on the public front, it might seem at first that hate groups are on the run.The optics debacle that Charlottesville was for the far right woke up a hitherto ignorant and complacent American public, who had up to then had dismissed them as a fringe movement, and as a result, liberal/educated/city/university communities were ready the next time. Despite the fact that it only took a two weeks after Cville for liberals (and even certain anarchists) to shift their focus to “Antifa” for potentially someday bringing down the wrath of the state—and despite liberals continuing to argue that Nazis have the same right to free speech that everyone else does, and that to repress them “makes us as bad as the Nazis,” an 800-to-1 ratio of counter-protesters to fash in Boston certainly seems to suggest little national tolerance for hate speech.

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If we, as white working class people, want to see a reality of political, social, and economic freedom, REAL freedom, then we must directly contribute to a struggle against all oppression, especially white supremacy.

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