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Stephen K. Bannon thought hed only serve a year as the presidents chief political strategist. Rumors of his imminent sacking arose every few weeks. In April, the rumor that hed be plucked off the National Security Council actually proved true.

But even with the news Friday that the key Trump adviser was out of the White House , the leaders of the alt-right, which Bannon elevated and then denounced, predicted that their movement would continue.

Im sad to see Bannon go, but I was never sure who Bannon was ideologically and politically, said Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who popularized the term alt-right to rebrand the white nationalist movement. Hes a fighter, to be sure, and a populist in a basic sense, but what he actually believed was never clear.

Bannons detractors thought they knew what he believed. They pored over books he praised, especially the 1973 anti-refugee book The Camp of the Saints. They shuddered at how he called the news site he will return to lead, Breitbart, a platform for the alt-right, with verticals on black crime and paranoia about unchecked immigration.

Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart editor whom Bannon helped turn into a transgressive campus celebrity, said time will tell whether the Trump administration will drift into turpitude without Steve around.

[Steve Bannon says rivals wetting themselves, calls supremacists clowns, contradicts Trump on N. Korea]

Steve is far more dangerous and powerful outside of the White House now. And I think he will be happier, too. I cant wait to see Bannon the Barbarian viciously crush his enemies from whatever perch he believes he will be most effective from, Yiannopoulos said.

For Democrats, the removal of Bannon isnt enough. In statements Friday, Democratic lawmakers were sure to bring up the presidents comments on the violence in Charlottesville, and mention that the Trump administration still included Attorney General Jeff Sessions and immigration policy adviser Stephen Miller.

Steve Bannons firing is welcome news, but it doesnt disguise where President Trump himself stands on white supremacists and the bigoted beliefs they advance, said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Its good news that hes not in the White House, said Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.), who has sought Bannons firing since November. But I dont think anyone should have any illusions that now that Steve Bannon is gone, the president is going to take very different positions. These are the presidents positions. These are the presidents policies. They remain.

A Nazi sympathizer, Klan defender, and supremacist protector should not be President of the greatest country in the world, said Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.) in a statement, who was first to introduce articles of impeachment against Trump.

No member of Trumps administration worried liberals as much as Bannon. They shared photos of the strategist looking particularly unkempt. The Onion portrayed Bannon as a ghoulish fairy tale villain, with a headline announcing that he had burst into millions of spores upon his departure.

Anthony Atamanuik, a Trump impersonator who hosts the weekly Comedy Central satire The President Show, cast the actor John Gemberling to play Bannon as a shambling, wide-eyed slob.

I conceived him as your friend who breaks out the Ouija board at the seance, Atamanuik said. He was the guy who came up with theories about aliens building the pyramids, because he could not entertain the possibility that they were built by black or brown people. I think we did something accurate without knowing it we had Trump being scared of him.

Progressive activists were genuinely scared of him. The first #FireBannon signs appeared at rallies the day after Trumps presidential victory. At some rallies, the chant No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA was altered to squeeze in a mention of Bannon. The chants never went away, and this week, many of the post-Charlottesville protests and vigils featured calls for Trump to fireBannon.

The progressive group Daily Action organized at least 44,000 calls to the White House demanding Bannon be removed; Color of Change, which has organized advertiser boycotts of Breitbart and other news sites, got close to 100,000 people to sign anti-Bannon petitions.

His record made him such a clear figure of what Trumps policies would mean for people, explained Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change. We wanted to say to members of Congress, who were seeking to treat this administration as normal, that theyd be held accountable for doing business with people like this.

The success of those left-wing protests left a bitter taste for Bannons alt-right defenders. As the Bannon news circulated on Reddit and 4chan forums, Trump fans veered between rationalization (He will return to Breitbart in a civilian capacity in order to fight in the culture war) and depression (Why would you contact a leftist columnist and give an unsolicited interview in which you kill your reputation and give the media an angle on you?).

Vox Day, an alt-right activist and science fiction author, argued that Bannons enemies had missed the real reason he was terminated. Bannons nationalism, for all the hate it drew, put him on the opposing side of neoconservatives the war hawks that the left used to hate.

Hes not a bureaucrat, and the kind of strategic advice he offers Trump can just as easily be provided from outside, Day said. My one concern is that this could mean that the military interventionists are going to get their way in Syria, Venezuela and North Korea. I suppose well find out soon enough.

Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.

Read more at PowerPost

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Steve Bannon may be out, but the 'alt-right' says their movement will continue - Washington Post

You probably have a good idea of who the so-called alt-right are: a group of white supremacists and nationalists, bound up by a fiery loathing of political correctness, cultural Marxism, and those pesky social-justice warriors. You might have also seen the articles that tell us to stop using that term and call them out for the fascist, neo-Nazis they are. In the wake of the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville last weekend, these calls have only become more urgent. The phrase has become a catch-all for people like Richard Spencer, the head of the white supremacist National Policy Institute, and Milo Yiannopoulos, the online troll and provocateur who recently fell from mainstream conservative grace. But theres a lot more people it catches in its (inter)net.

The alt-right isnt one group. They dont have one coherent identity. Rather, theyre a loose collection of people from disparate backgrounds who would never normally interact: bored teenagers, gamers, mens rights activists, conspiracy theorists and, yes, white nationalists and neo-Nazis. But thanks to the internet, theyre beginning to form a cohesive group identity. And I have the data to prove it.

The_Donald is a Reddit community with over 450,000 subscribers. Its the breeding ground for the alt-right, and the fermenting vat in which this identity is being formed. According to data analysis by FiveThirtyEight, its US president Donald Trumps most rabid online following, and Reddit itself now claims it is the fourth most visited site in the US, behind only Facebook, Google, and YouTube.

As part of the Alt-Right Open Intelligence Initiative at the University of Amsterdam, Ive been working to understand the language of the alt-right and what it can tell us about its members. Working with the UK Home Offices Extremism Analysis Unit, I used Googles BigQuery tool, which lets you trawl through massive datasets in seconds, to interrogate a collection of every Reddit comment ever madeall 3 billion of them.

Focusing on The_Donald, I used a script that lets you see which words are most likely to occur in the same comment. Combining this with a tool that allows you to look at the overlap in commenters between different parts of Reddit, I found that the alt-right isnt just one voice: Its made up by distinct constituencies that share different opinions and ways to express them, identifiable by the language they use and the other communities they post in.

In other words, theres a taxonomy of trolls. So who are they, and what language do they use?

The 4chan shitposters. These men and boys (and they are almost exclusively male) come from 4chan, an image board in the deepest bowels of the internet. Youre most likely to see them deliberately provoking offense and outrage, often using the most extreme racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic slurs, but without necessarily fully buying into racist ideology. Theyre the people you cant argue with, because any attempt to engage them in a serious conversation will provoke an only joking! plea. Other users of The_Donald affectionately refer to them as weaponized autists, named for the orchestration of numerous hacks and leaks through the hacker collective Anonymous. Youll see them talking about memes such as Pepe the Frog, Kekistan, and the normies they despise. Elsewhere on Reddit, youre most likely to find them on /r/ImGoingToHellForThis, /r/CringeAnarchy, or any other deliberately offensive subreddit.

Anti-progressive gamers. Closely related to the above, these trolls were radicalized over the course of the #GamerGate hate movement. They really like video games, and they really hate social-justice warriors, gay people, and feminists, all of whom theyre pretty sure major movie and game studios are pandering to with things like all-female screenings of Wonder Woman. Youre likely to see them talking about the trans community a lot (and repeating the words there are only two genders constantly). Elsewhere on Reddit, youll find them in gaming subreddits, or /r/KotakuinAction, which was the home of GamerGate.

Mens rights activists. This group consists of those who explicitly campaign for mens rights (custody battles and workplace deaths are their favorite talking points) and also includes anti-feminists and misogynists of all stripes. Youll find them at /r/Incels (short for involuntary celibates, who want to have sex or find a partner but cantand blame women for this), /r/MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way, who believe that they can only find true liberation in a female-dominated world by refusing to interact with women completely), the infamous /r/TheRedPill, and a few less popular Manosphere subreddits as well as misogynistic sites like Return of Kings. Youll find them referring to women as females, and men they perceive as weak as cucks (more on that later).

Anti-globalists. These people like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Sean Hannity, and conspiracy theoriesand they talk about them an awful lot. They are far less enamored (yet still mildly obsessed) with George Soros, who funds everyone they hate, as well as Emmanuel Macron, John McCain, and Paul Ryan. Elsewhere, they can be seen on /r/uncensorednews (primarily news about bad things perpetrated by members of minority groups and left-wing people), and /r/conspiracy. Their hyperbolic conspiratorial language might sound absurd, but its become an increasingly coherent and important part of The_Donald since the subreddit began.

White supremacists. It might seem surprising, but the language of white supremacy is actually quite uncommon in The_Donald. Thats because explicit racism is banned. Implicit or coded racism is very common, for example displaying Islamophobic sentiment and passing it off as criticizing Islamism, or claiming Islam is not compatible with Western culture. They also populate other subreddits like the now-banned /r/CoonTown and /r/GreatApes, as well as sites like Stormfront and the now defunct The Daily Stormer.

For a long time, these people would have very limited reason to interact with one another. There wasnt much in common between meme aficionados, gamers, sexists, conspiracy theorists, and racists. Because the very nature of Reddit is to subdivide and find your own specific corner of the internet, these communities didnt tend to run into each other all that much. But thats now changed.

Over the last year and a half, these types of trolls have formed a central identity around Trumpism and have started to coalesce. Bored teenagers and gamers are becoming indoctrinated into hard-line anti-globalism, conspiracy theories, and Islamophobia, and its happening right before our eyes, on a publicly accessible forum.

The_Donald contains all of these different groups, marked out by their overlapping community memberships and the words that they (and only they) use. Theyve created an in-group language consisting of words like MAGA (Make America Great Again) and based, a word appropriated from rap culture. The latter is taken to mean being yourself and originated in the crack era. Then there is centipede (usually shortened to pede), a self-referential term originating from the viral video series Cant Stump the Trump, which was popularized when the linked video was tweeted by Trump himself.

But the keystone of this vernacular is cuck. A shortening of cuckold, an old word used to refer to men who allow their partners to sleep with other men (and often find sexual gratification in the humiliation of it), its use has become the sine qua non of alt-right group membership.

The word cuck is everywhere, and its story can tell us a lot about the different groups described above.Youll find cuck used in multiple senses. First, theres cuckservative, used against conservatives who are seen as being too soft and allowing their countries (primarily European) to be invaded by Islam and Muslims. The racial connotations of the word were attached during a period when the word was incredibly popular in the now-banned /r/CoonTown, an explicitly racist subreddit.

Then, theres the use of cuck in a more patriarchal sense. The GamerGate movement popularized the word on Reddit when they were banned from 4chan and migrated over to /r/KotakuInAction. They used it first to describe the jilted ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, a games developer they ran a hate campaign against, before turning it against Christopher moot Poole, the administrator of 4chan, when he kicked them off his site.

Thirdly, you have what might now be the most standard usage of the word, which is to refer to those seen as liberal. You can see this in the popularization of words like libcuck, cuckbook, starcucks, and cuck Schumer in The_Donald. In the wider digital world, you might see it in below-the-line comments of articles on Facebook.

This leads us to the final type of usage, which is when anyone who isnt the alt-right uses it to mock those who do use it, flipping its meaning entirely. As a result, its everywhere, and its story can tell us a lot about the different groups described above.

The_Donald and other alt-right spaces are acting as meeting places for disaffected white men from all walks of life to share a communal hatred. They start out in different corners of the internet with different interests and different lexicons. They remain separate when theyre outside of The_Donald, but the more time they spend in there, the more pernicious views of the world they are likely to pick up by osmosis. They are forming a coherent group identity, represented in the language they have begun to speak, which coalesces around their common hatred of liberalism and their love of Donald Trump.

Were witnessing the radicalization of young white men through the medium of frog memes. In order to see it, all you need to do is look at the words coming out of their mouths. The alt-right isnt yet united, but it soon will be.

Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Linguistic data analysis of 3 billion Reddit comments shows the alt-right is getting stronger - Quartz

Demonstrators in New York march against the Charlottesville nationalist protests. Photograph: ddp USA/REX/Shutterstock

The left-right spectrum of political speech is getting increasingly crowded. The rise of Donald Trump has popularised the term alt-right, which sounds more indie and cool than far right. Meanwhile, those on the alt-right have recently begun to describe their opponents as the alt-left a coinage that, asymmetrically, seems to be an attempt to rhetorically downgrade them to a fringe group of eccentrics, rather than a broad coalition of people who dont like racism much. What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Trump asked, Solomonically, after the clashes in Charlottesville. Do they have any semblance of guilt?

Some of the people who actually protest against alt-right protesters in the US are from a group called Antifa, short for anti-fascist. Their opponents happily adopt the term, aiming to paint any and all anti-racist liberals as a small militant conspiracy, but their acquiescence in such language seems a bit peculiar when you think about it. American shock-babbler Ann Coulter, for example, tweeted that she hoped Trump would denounce the violent left-wing Antifa that shut down my Berkeley speech! IfCoulter agrees to call her opponents Antifa, does it logically follow that she is happy to identify as a fascist?

Fascist, of course, has long been a term of abuse on the left that has not, historically, been restricted to actual fascists, but applied liberally to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George W Bush and many others before Trump. As Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell, wrote in 2004: Fascism unlike communism, socialism, capitalism, or conservatism is a smear word more often used to brand ones foes than it is a descriptor used to shed light on them. We may suspect that the same is increasingly true of almost all political descriptors applied to other groups these days.

If Coulter agrees to call her opponents Antifa, does it logically follow that she is happy to identify as a fascist?

The angry white men who congregated in Charlottesville were widely described as Nazis, a usage for which there are arguments both for and against. On the one hand, these people love swastikas, chant things like blood and soil, and hate Jews and black people, which definitely seems pretty Nazi. On the other hand, tocall them Nazis is a convenient othering that refuses to acknowledge their identity as Americans, standing in the USs own proud tradition of violent racism. The first of the three groups calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan formed in the mid-19th century, after all, and US eugenics and investigations into the science of racial cleansing in the early 20th century were themselves taken as inspiration for the Nazis murderous programme.

To resist calling them Nazis is not somehow to make excuses for savage paranoiacs who claim that liberal policies amount to genocide of their group. A similar point can be made about the term neo-Nazi, which was already in use in the 1940s when actual Nazis were still around, and probably ought to be limited to groups that explicitly want to reconstitute something very like the National Socialist German Workers Party. The unfortunate truth is that nazism does not exhaust the scope of possible human evil.

What, then, about white nationalists or white supremacists? Such terms certainly seem more coolly analytical than fascists or Nazis, though it might be seen as a problem that they both contain the word white, and so implicitly acquiesce in the underlying idea that skin colour is really important. And white supremacist itself (from 1896) was formed from the earlier phrase white supremacy (1824), and thus carries within it the exact noxious ideology that opponents wish to denounce. It might seem that the simple term racists would suffice, were it not for the unfortunate fact that there are so many racists in the world that its just not specific enough to pick out this particular rump of morons.

If you are not a Nazi or a fascist or on the alt-right, but not a paid up member of Antifa or really feeling the Bern either, what are you? You may be a member of the roundly despised group of centrists. That is now a term of outright contempt among fans of Jeremy Corbyn, for example, but the very first citation of the word in the OED is hardly complimentary either: in 1872, the Daily News reported on a group of French parliamentarians: That weak-kneed congregation who sit in the middle of the House, and call themselves Centrists. To employ the term centrist as abuse, of course, is to imply a Manichean worldview in which everything is pure good or pure evil, and politics boils down to a simple binary choice. Its a fantasy world in which complicated decisions are easy, and you can be sure the Nazis would agree.

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'Alt-right', 'alt-left' the rhetoric of hate after Charlottesville - The Guardian

Last Friday night, the white nationalists who marched on Charlottesvilles Emancipation Park all looked strikingly similar. They were almost exclusively white, of course. But they were also relatively young. And with a handful of exceptions, they were men.

The Unite the Right rally brought together white nationalists of all stripes, including traditional white supremacists like Neo-Nazis and the KKK, and other racist groups that have united under the banner of the new, internet-oriented alt-right. The rally was violent and bloodyone of the white supremacist attendees is being charged with deliberately ramming his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring more than a dozen others.

Bannon's Exit Leaves Trump Untethered

Its hard to determine just how many women identify with the alt-right, because many of the movements members keep a low profile. George Hawley, author of Making Sense of the Alt-Right, estimates that 20 percent of alt-right supporters are women. But in Charlottesville, a far smaller portion of the crowd was female. All 10 speakers at the rally were men.

There has been a lot of theorizing on why the white nationalism of the alt-right is more popular among men than women. The prevailing theory is that women are turned off by its stark anti-women rhetoric. But their lack of presence at the rally shouldnt be read as an absence of women in the white nationalist movement overall.

There are a lot of white women who buy into this movement, theyre just doing it in private, said Kelly Baker, an author who specializes in gender and white extremist groups. Theyre not vocal, but they are supporters of the men in their lives who are.

I talked to a few alt-right supporters after the Charlottesville rally. All of them gave the same explanation for the protests missing women: biology. There is no official alt-right platformmembers are generally anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and see themselves as defenders of the white race. Most also maintain that there are certain characteristics inherent to each gender. Men are risk-takers, multiple alt-right supporters told me. Women are nurturers. Risk-takers belong at nationally televised protests. Nurturers dont.

By and large, alt-right men dont seem to be forcing these traditional gender roles on the women of their movementthe alt-right women are doing it themselves. The women share a profound disdain for the feminist movement, and are eager to claim the supportive, behind-the-scenes roles.

As for female empowerment, theres nothing that has made me feel more empowered in my life than supporting and being supported by a strong man, Claudia Davenport, an alt-right activist, said in an interview with The Economist. I think that men and women are better off when we stop fighting nature and allow our distinct identities to shine through.

In our conversations, multiple alt-right supporters referred to the movements men as protectors.

Its not the role of women to protect the borders, the nation, or the family. So we do not expect this of women, nor do we find it strange that they are less represented in something that we view as an innately male occupation: guarding territory, said Tara McCarthy, a female alt-right blogger.

White supremacy movements have used the language of protection since the height of the KKK in the 1920s. The KKK rallied to defend white supremacy from the forces it perceived as threateningnamely immigrants and recently enfranchised African Americans.

The KKK made it its mission to defend the spaces it saw as its own: white women, the home, the schools, the nation. They thought, This is our job as knights, protection is what we do, said Baker.

Unlike the alt-right, however, Klanswomen were on the front lines of the movement. There were fewer of themat the Klans peak, half a million, compared to four million menbut they didnt confine themselves to supporting roles. The vast majority wore robes, marched in parades, and participated in highly visible picnics. They were involved in the fight for female suffrage, arguing that only white women should get the vote.

So why are todays white nationalist women less visible than the 1920s Klanswomen? Today, visibility entails significantly more risk. When the KKK marched in the early 20th century, it was powerful and influential in the South. When the white nationalists marched through Charlottesville, they knew they would face social media backlash and counter-protests across the country.

In this way, white-nationalist protestand protectionhas become a more traditionally masculine act in the view of its proponents. Its more dangerous, and requires more risk, than it did 100 years ago.

The alt-right is divided on how visibleand vocalthey want women to be. On one hand, there are organizations like Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), a gender separatist group that cautions men against relationships with women, that bar women from membership. On the other, there is a growing contingent of alt-right men who encourage the women in their community to speak out and become leaders themselves.

Many alt-right men like it when they have women who are contributing content, recording podcasts, making YouTube channels. Thats because women in this movement have an easier time amassing followers, said Hawley.

According to Hawley, outspoken women on the alt-right are particularly effective mechanisms for recruitment. Because there arent many of them, a female alt-right blogger, YouTube star, or Twitter enthusiast attracts more attention than a young white man who fits the alt-right stereotype. Women make the movement seem more normal, Hawley said.

There are only a few alt-right women interested in claiming leadership roles within the movement. As the alt-right develops, these women will likely continue to be a source of tension. During a live-streamed video chat in 2015, Colin Robertson, a popular Scottish alt-right blogger, discussed U.S. politics, among other things, with two of the most prominent female personalities on the alt-right, Lana Lokteff and Ayla Stewart. As soon as Robertson opened the conversation up to the audience , misogynistic comments started rolling in. One viewer wrote, These women are the same old tainted, fucked-up strong womyn, using a spelling of women some feminists use to mock Lokteff and Stewart as feminists in disguise.

To fit into the movement, alt-right women must be visible in the right way. They have to prove they arent threatening traditional gender roles: both through what they say, and how they look. The majority of well-known, female alt-right personalities are young, attractive women.

When women do appear in alt-right journals or online discussions, its as objects of attraction, said Baker. They need to appear as victims or passive objects of male desire.

Above all, women on the alt-right must accept the movements dogma on biology: the idea that men are meant for certain roles, and women are meant for others.

See the article here:
The Women Behind the 'Alt-Right' - The Atlantic

Fighting Nazis is a good thing, but fighting Nazis doesnt necessarily make you or your cause good. By my lights this is simply an obvious fact.

The greatest Nazi-killer of the 20th century was Josef Stalin. He also killed millions of his own people and terrorized, oppressed, enslaved, or brutalized tens of millions more. The fact that he killed Nazis during the Second World War (out of self-preservation, not principle) doesnt dilute his evil one bit.

This should settle the issue as far as Im concerned. Nazism was evil. Soviet Communism was evil. Its fine to believe that Nazism was more evil than Communism. That doesnt make Communism good.

Alas, it doesnt settle the issue. Confusion on this point poisoned politics in America and abroad for generations.

Part of the problem is psychological. Theres a natural tendency to think that when people, or movements, hate each other, it must be because theyre opposites. This assumption overlooks the fact that many indeed, most of the great conflicts and hatreds in human history are derived from what Sigmund Freud called the narcissism of minor differences.

Most tribal hatreds are between very similar groups. The European wars of religion were between peoples who often shared the same language and culture but differed on the correct way to practice the Christian faith. The SunniShia split in the Muslim world is the source of great animosity between very similar peoples.

The young Communists and fascists fighting for power in the streets of 1920s Germany had far more in common with each other than they had with decent liberals or conservatives, as we understand those terms today. Thats always true of violent radicals and would-be totalitarians.

The second part of the problem wasnt innocent confusion, but sinister propaganda. As Hitler solidified power and effectively outlawed the Communist Party of Germany, The Communist International (Comintern) abandoned its position that socialist and progressive groups that were disloyal to Moscow were fascist and instead encouraged Communists everywhere to build popular fronts against the common enemy of Nazism.

These alliances of convenience with social democrats and other progressives were a great propaganda victory for Communists around the world because they bolstered the myth that Communists were just members of the Left coalition in the fight against Hitler, bigotry, fascism, etc.

This obscured the fact that whenever the Communists had a chance to seize power, they did so. And often, the first people they killed, jailed, or exiled were their former allies. Thats what happened in Eastern Europe, Cuba and other places where Communists succeeded in taking over the government.

If you havent figured it out yet, this seemingly ancient history is relevant today because of the depressingly idiotic argument about whether its okay to equate antifa anti-fascist left-wing radicals with the neo-Nazi and white-supremacist rabble that recently descended on Charlottesville, Va. The president wants to claim that there were very fine people on both sides of the protest and that the anti-fascist radicals are equally blameworthy. He borrowed from Fox News Channels Sean Hannity the bogus term alt-left to describe the antifa radicals.

The term is bogus for the simple reason that, unlike the alt-right, nobody calls themselves the alt-left. And thats too bad. One of the only nice things about the alt-right is that its leaders are honest about the fact that they want nothing to do with traditional American conservatism. Like the original Nazis, they seek to replace the traditional Right with their racial hogwash.

The antifa crowd has a very similar agenda with regard to traditional American liberalism. These goons and thugs oppose free speech, celebrate violence, despise dissent, and have little use for anything else in the American political tradition. But many liberals, particularly in the media, are victims of the same kind of confusion that vexed so much of American liberalism in the 20th century. Because antifa suddenly has the (alt-)right enemies, they must be the good guys. Theyre not.

And thats why this debate is so toxically stupid. Fine, antifa isnt as bad as the KKK. Who cares? Since when is being less bad than the Klan a major moral accomplishment?

In these tribal times, the impulse to support anyone who shares your enemies is powerful. But it is a morally stunted reflex. This is America. Youre free to denounce totalitarians wherever you find them even if they might hate the right people.

READ MORE: The Fascists Were Using Antifa against Conservatives What Identity Politics Hath Wrought Rebuilding the Public Square after Charlottesville

Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. You can write to him in care of this newspaper or by e-mail at [emailprotected], or via Twitter @JonahNRO.

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Alt-Right & Antifa -- Both Bad Groups & Ideology | National Review - National Review