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Russian playwright Anton Chekhov noted that, as a dramatic device, a gun introduced in the first act of a play must be fired in the second, otherwise it has no reason to be there. Lets hope thats not as true in life as it is in art, now that we have an armed racist right squaring off against leftist counter-protesters in public confrontations.

Weve already seen violence, even death, at these rallies. But the potential is for much worse if participants continue to carry guns into such provocative situations. The question is how to minimize the risk without trampling peoples constitutional rights.

The 1st Amendment to the Constitution establishes the right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The 2nd Amendment creates a right to own firearms. Neither is absolute. Nevertheless, firearms have become a significant presence in our culture, and only a dozen states prohibit people from carrying them openly in public. Whats more, over 40 states have NRA-backed preemption laws, which to varying degrees limit the ability of local governments to adopt stricter gun regulations than the state as a whole.

Virginia is a preemption state that also allows open carry, and the nation saw the results at Charlottesville, where paramilitary militias men heavily armed with military-style weapons and in some cases battle gear appeared as part of the Unite the Right rally. But far-left groups, including the so-called Redneck Revolt, a liberal pro-gun group, have also paraded around with their firearms at various demonstrations.

Now, another provocative rally aimed at promoting the true Confederate heritage is planned for Sept. 23 in Austin, Texas. Billing it as a Dixie Freedom Rally, its organizers, the Texas Confederate Militia, are telling prospective attendees that state law will allow them to bring openly carried and concealed handguns, as well as long rifles. Given the mix of firearms, passions and politics, its not hard to see the potential for violence.

This is a problem that the nation must resolve. A group of self-organized, trained and heavily armed men (and these groups are predominantly male) is a paramilitary organization, and giving it megaphones and parade banners doesnt magically transform it into something peaceful. Adding open carry to a contentious event can put public safety at risk, and the presence of visible firearms creates unique problems for the police.

Open carry can also be an act of intimidation. Heres one illustration: During the Unite the Right event, gun-toting and swastika-carrying Nazis chanting anti-Semitic slogans marched past a Charlottesville synagogue containing 40 worshippers, leaving them so frightened that they felt compelled to sneak out the back. And heres another: In April 2016, opposing protesters at a Dallas-area Nation of Islam mosque engaged in a tense face-off that, fortunately, ended without those Chekhovian firearms being used. This is not the America we want.

Another complicating factor: Two dozen states, including Texas, have adopted stand your ground laws similar to the one that became an issue in Florida after George Zimmerman shot of wrongdoing after shooting dead 17-year-old Trayvon Martin during a confrontation. The details differ among the states, but at their core the laws allow people to shoot to kill if they perceive they are under physical threat.

Incendiary political speech, demonstrators, open-carry and stand-your-ground laws what could possibly go wrong here?

This is madness. Police train to control unruly crowds, and develop strategies for separating rival groups of protesters, but are they equipped and able to keep the peace when the protesters have become paramilitary militias? If states such as Virginia and Texas insist on allowing citizens to brazenly strut around their streets with guns slung over their shoulders like Third World mercenaries, they must at least make an exception at rallies and demonstrations. A ban on weapons from firearms to pointed sticks, concealed or carried openly should be a condition for obtaining a permit.

Boston took the right approach this weekend at a controversial Free Speech rally that drew 40,000 protesters: Anything that could be used as a weapon, from guns to sharp sticks, was prohibited.

Fearing violence, some lawmakers and advocates have urged officials not to give permits, period, for these contentious rallies. But thats the wrong answer. Its not the right to speech and assembly that should be restricted; its the right to carry guns in certain potentially explosive situations. Gun advocates like to argue they have the right to bear arms as a bulwark against tyrannical government, but government has a responsibility here as well: to keep people safe.

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Don't restrict free speech. Restrict the right to carry guns at potentially explosive public events - Los Angeles Times

Pittenger asks: Why aren't liberals condemning Black Lives Matter and others? Sacramento Bee The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag gained prominence on social media after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, who was charged in the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, a black teen, in Florida. The first Black Lives Matter protests came after the shooting ... and more »

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Pittenger asks: Why aren't liberals condemning Black Lives Matter and others? - Sacramento Bee

Pittenger asks: Why aren't liberals condemning Black Lives Matter and others? News & Observer The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag gained prominence on social media after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, who was charged in the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, a black teen, in Florida. The first Black Lives Matter protests came after the shooting ... and more »

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Pittenger asks: Why aren't liberals condemning Black Lives Matter and others? - News & Observer

1. Look back and examine how your earliest racial attitudes were formed. If you are an oldster like me, you enjoyed Seor Wences & Speedy Gonzales. Since you were just a kid, you didn't know these caricatures shaped how you saw people of color. You also grew up loving What's Happening, Good Times, Sanford and Son, Sammy Davis, Jr., The Jackson Five, and Stevie Wonder. They were easy to love because they were happy and entertaining as opposed to those angry fist-raised Black Panthers. What were they so mad about? No one told you.

1 (a). You also went to all-girls religious school where there were only two Black girls in the whole school. You and your friends never spoke to these girls, because it was easier not to mix or even try. Now you wonder what school must have been like for those two invisible girls in a sea of white girls.

2.You learned about the Civil War and the Holocaust and learned slavery and anti-semitism were evil and wrong. But then a family friend casually says, "Blacks just aren't as smart as whites." You feel uncomfortable, but since your parents don't say anything, you ignore it. In the car on the way home, your parents tell you, like it's a secret, that the man was wrong, and that all people are equal. But no one wanted to be rude, so no one said anything.

3. You love I Love Lucy but can't imagine dating someone Hispanic because they are uneducated, lazy and drink a lot. You know this because of Speedy Gonzales and Slowpoke Rodriguez. Or you are told to lock the car doors because you are driving through a Black neighborhood. When white people impersonate Black people, you laugh, because you might be poor, weak and scared but least you aren't Black or have an accent. You have a single solitary black high school friend but dating outside your race doesnt even occur to you.

4. Then you move away, go to college and make new friends. Your world view expands as you meet people of other cultures, races, and gender preferences. Since you never tried to get to know people of other races, you fear saying something offensive or ignorant, so you don't interact as easily as you do with white people. With people who are just like you, white folks from the burbs, there is some kind of easy code, where if you make a cultural generalization, you all laugh because you know it's just a joke and you aren't really racist, because you are creative and liberal and evolved. (But if you have to look around before you make a joke, to make sure no one Black is listening, chances are the joke is a teensy bit racist. Harmless racism... you tell yourself)

5. Then someone (maybe your father) mocks your new gay friend. And it bothers you enough to defend your friend. This is the beginning of understanding the equality that your parents mentioned in secret in order to not offend a racist. You might use this newfound sense of injustice to defend gay people. You watch (and join) protests for gay rights. You realize that progress and equality and allowing people to be different scares a lot of people who think giving minorities equal rights somehow means less power for them. But when watching TV and a relative asks, 'Why do Blacks have to talk like that?', you feel angry inside but say nothing.

6. Then you get a job with Black and white people. At lunch, the white people sit together and all the Black people sit together. But not together. Everyone works hard to integrate. Everyone respects everyone else but silent segregation is deeply entrenched. You don't even realize that you invite the white people from work but not the Black people, because you never really were that close. The door was there and you failed to open it.

7. You are older. You finally meet your life partner, who is not the person you married in Step 6. But you can't make a baby. You take classes to become foster parents. The brilliant, hard working Black course instructor, teaches Black, white, Hispanic and mixed race people how to be foster parents.

Foster parent classes inadvertently teach you more about white privilege than they do about anything else. White people constantly raise hands to answer the questions. The people of color dont even try. You know everyone in this room is as smart as everyone else, but you begin to wonder if they feel inferior, less educated, or dont want to appear ignorant. You stop raising your hand in an attempt to level the playing field. But that also feels wrong.

8. Your child is Black. Her birth family's day to day reality exposes you to life without a safety net. You stay close to your child's birth mother and learn how hard it is for Black people to succeed when economic, medical, educational and legal institutions stack the decks against them. You watch this woman try to do the right thing for her family. Her struggle becomes personal. Then Trayvon Martin is shot and George Zimmerman is set free and you begin to learn how much you never knew.

9. You read Nurture Shock to learn about how to not fuck up your kid. Chapter 3 rocks your world. Chapter 3 is "Why White Parents Don't Talk About Race". White parents are uncomfortable discussing race with their kids, but families of color have to discuss racism when their children are as young as three, because they know their kids will be discriminated against, cursed at, bullied or worse.

If you have a daughter, you instill in her the belief that she can be anything, a doctor, lawyer, President of the United States. That's the same way to discuss skin color. Studies indicate that if white parents don't talk with their children about race, kids will learn it on their own, quite possibly not from credible or empathetic sources. The earlier we teach our kids that there are brown, white and blue eggs, but inside we all look the same, the easier. By third grade children have pretty much self-segregated based on looks.

10. When you do have the race chat, and you discuss how theres brown and white bread but its still bread. Or that there are white, brown, blue and spotted eggs, but inside its all the same it can really be that simple. So-and-so might have different color skin, come from a different culture, a different faith, a different language with different food, but we are all people with feelings who deserve love and respect.

Challenge yourself to go one step further. Ask your kid questions. Make race and equality an on-going dialogue, because as your children grow, so does their comprehension of what is happening around them. See Charlottesville and racism and Neo-Nazis and the Presidency as your opportunity to grow a compassionate, informed, integrated citizen of the world.

11. At the park or playground or through preschool, you make Black friends, and you learn to shut up and listen. You learn to not say things like "You're so articulate!" to a Black woman because she hears the silent "For a Black person" at the end of your alleged compliment. You learn to not tell Black people how much better it is nowadays then when you were young. That doesn't help Black lives right now. Your Jewish friends hopefully learn to not say, "We know about suffering and prejudice." Believe me, it's different when you are judged just by turning a street corner.

PS: And you brace yourself for the day you have to explain racism to your tiny, shining, bright, life-hungry three year old Black daughter.

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How To Not A Raise A Racist - HuffPost

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, the Associated Press (AP) has updated its style guide to change the standard usage of the term alt-right. The guide, widely followed across the US media, first added the term in November of last year, after Donald Trump won the presidential election, revealing the alt-right to be more than an electoral flash in the pan.

The update added anti-Semitism to the original definition. It now reads:

A political grouping or tendency mixing racism, white nationalism, anti-Semitism and populism; a name currently embraced by some white supremacists and white nationalists to refer to themselves and their ideology, which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States.

Both the original and updated AP definitions resemble early attempts to explain fascism in the decades following the second world war. Like the style guide versions, early writers focused attention on regime or movement attributes. This approach, often employing lists of various sizes, proved either too inclusive, or not inclusive enough.

Subsequent attempts to define fascism can be divided into two rough camps. One, now associated with Robert O. Paxton, explained fascism in terms of its ascent to social and, eventually, political power. The other, generally attributed to Roger Griffin, explained fascism as having a minimal ideological essence.

Both approaches can be useful now, to look beyond haphazard attempts to keep up with the various hatreds and styles of the alt-right (ideological sexism and transphobia could be added to the above definition, for example) to distill the ideological commitment around which the alt-right centers: namely, eugenics.

By now, the genesis of the term alt-right is well known: it originated around 2008, when either Paul Gottfried or Richard Spencer employed the term to describe the wide array of right-wingers who saw themselves as outside of, and marginalised by, the conservative mainstream. That same year, Spencer, Colin Liddell, and Andy Nowicki received $5,000 from hate site VDARE to start a blog.

When alternative-right.blogspot.com launched in 2010, the groundwork had already been laid to constitute the alt-right into a cohesive, if not coherent, movement. In the early 2000s, the paleoconservatives with whom Spencer cut his teeth had ushered libertarians towards their platform against free trade and immigration. At the same time, white nationalists whom Spencer eventually joined in their call for a white ethnostate were signing the New Orleans Protocol, a pact between previously bickering factions to never punch right and to maintain a polite and non-violent decorum.

By 2010, a vast infrastructure of blogs, think-tanks, and civic organizations had been built up. This network facilitated a coordinated far-right response to the building of an Islamic Center six blocks from the former World Trade Center site, which included sustained anti-mosque protests and Quran burnings across the United States.

The viciously sexist manosphere began establishing its own web presence, through The Spearhead, A Voice for Men, and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) among others. Meanwhile, the Tea Party was vociferously protesting taxes and defending the for-profit healthcare system, while sharing artistic Hitlerisations of Obama and shouting racial slurs at congresspeople.

In 2012, a year after Spencer was appointed head of the National Policy Institute, a 17-year old boy named Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a known racist and self-appointed armed Neighborhood Watch patrolman. Right-wing and tabloid media sought out photos of Martin in macho poses, described his demeanor as thuggish, and implied that the hoodie he was wearing on the night of his murder made him look suspicious, demonising the teen with racist dog-whistles. When Zimmerman was acquitted a year later, protests reignited around the country.

By 2013, the relentless murders of Black people by police carried momentum from Trayvon Martin rallies into the Black Lives Matter movement. As the protests escalated to highway blockades and property damage, opponents called for and committed vigilante violence.

As the Council of Conservative Citizens and American Renaissance churned out stories and statistics of Black criminality, many on the right, including Dylann Roof and Chris Cantwell, were radicalised into white nationalism.

Meanwhile, though receiving less media attention, the manufactured Gamergate controversy prompted men to harass women through rape threats, doxxing, and swatting campaigns.

Having built up a white nationalist and paleoconservative milieu around the sleeker contraction alt-right, Spencer and others sought to harness the masculine internet rage of Gamergate. A Silicon Valley-based movement called Neoreaction, which extended the logic of libertarianism to argue that a single corporation ought to run a racial slave state, bridged the ideological gap between Gamergate and the alt-right. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and former Business Insider chief technology officer Pax Dickinson are just two high-profile figures associated with Neoreaction.

In 2015, after the intentionally offensive Draw Mohammed contest in Texas was disrupted by armed men claiming allegiance to the Islamic State, various independent militia members organised another wave of anti-mosque protests this time with rifles and white nationalists.

Then, one day after Donald Trump announced his intention to run for president, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine Black parishioners. While most recoiled in horror in response to Roofs crimes, a far-right conservative movement was galvanised against subsequent calls to remove the Confederate flag from public spaces. The combined messages of free speech, heritage, and racial bigotry created just the platform for the increasingly broad alt-right to catapult themselves into the centre of conservative discourse.

By Halloween 2015, the National Policy Institute had a record attendance at its increasingly frequent conference, selling out of discounted tickets for attendees under 30.

After Hillary Clinton delivered a speech denouncing the alt-right as a basket of deplorables in August 2016, Google search trends for alt-right increased exponentially. They peaked again when Spencer delivered a speech in Washington DC, shouting Hitlers invocation hail victory in response to Trumps election win, as his audience gave Nazi salutes.

As this potted history reveals, the alt-right, fractious as it may be, was the result of numerous fragile alliances and unlikely coalitions. While white nationalists ultimately united the alt-right, that work did not necessarily translate into support for white nationalism, as internal denunciations of its origins reveal. The alt-right is, however, united in its commitment to eugenics.

Eugenics, the infamous Nazi-supported pseudo-science, is a belief that data proves biological or cultural explanations for differential social outcomes. The term is only explicitly embraced by the alt-rights racist core, which publishes academic books through a variety of financially-connected publishing houses (including the National Policy Institutes own Washington Summit Publishers). The historical eugenics, however, also extended to theories of gender and economic status, which have been embraced by the other segments of the alt-right. Eugenics theory posits that race, gender, and class determine intelligence and that any attempt to balance social outcomes for example, through affirmative action upends the meritocracy of natural selection.

These three axes, race, gender and class, can be seen in the alt-rights three major segments: the white nationalist-fascist nexus, the manosphere-tribalism nexus, and the libertarian-neoreactionary nexus. Although these movements are ideologically distinct, they converge when taken to their conclusion: domination through triumph.

Until the massacre in Charlottesville, the alt-right had managed to put aside its glaring differences in the conception of political praxis because of this shared faith in eugenics. In theory, fascists, tribalists, and libertarians should not get along. Fascists detest the chaos of the market and love futuristic technology. Tribalists detest social contracts of any sort and reliance on anyone, much less the government. Libertarians detest any sort of government planning and acquisitive violence.

Yet despite different theories of ideal governance circulating within the alt-right, each of the overlapping factions believes that its preferred social configuration can ensure a eugenic society: fascists through state intervention, tribalists through physical struggle, and libertarians through market forces. That the alt-right was ever able to manage to get these disparate factions to support each other (and further blend together) is an incredible feat.

The constant flux among these groups within the alt-right is something definitions like the APs style guide fail to capture or anticipate. The ever-changing list of bigotries espoused by the alt-right are not its defining characteristic. Each emerges from the core commitment to eugenics, which operates as the basis of its recruiting strategy.

The framework of eugenics allows a shifting of focus from particulars about governance or bigotry to innate ability and natural hierarchy in the abstract. The danger in merely listing what the alt-right has been is losing sight of where its going next.

Mike Isaacson is a lecturer at John Jay College and an anti-fascist researcher. Download his latest zine, You Cant Punch Every Nazi.

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The 'alt-right' is an unstable coalition with one thing holding it together - Red Pepper