Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/19/alt-left-delusions.html
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So the work of the white supremacists were successful.
They have created a false equivalence between the top terror threat to the nation for many decades running (which happens to have the ear of many mainstream political figures) and a “beer league” level minor group with no official support or history of much beyond some property damage and scuffles in public.
Just to put things in perspective since 9/11, white supremacists have killed 70 people, Antifa has killed zero.
Until someone can cough up an Antifa Timothy McVeigh or Dylann Roof, I say to all the ultra-conservative apologists who bring up Antifa to divert attention away from white supremacist mayhem, to go fuck themselves and the horses they rode in on. [Yes that was a big run-on sentence!]
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Calling broadcast media “mainstream press” is as (dis)honest as calling America’s Top 40 “popular music” - as it is made by and for the interests of a minute population of people. If you give their narrative primacy, then you are making yourself part of the problem.
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A shinning ray of hope in an otherwise shitty horizon.
“Anti-antifa” is a double negative. The antis cancel. You can just call such folks facists (or pro-facists).
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They’ve succeeded in the media. Succeeding in the minds of the non-fascist public is something else, fortunately.
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Sadly broadcast media is the primary source of information for a HUGE cross-section of Americans. And many others get their news from Facebook, which is largely just linked video from broadcast media.
In terms of audience there is no form of “journalism” that is more mainstream.
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While I’ve no doubt that the right wing of the Dems are doing that, antifa are not the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The politics in the street have gone way left of that.
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But that doesn’t preclude the right wing of the D party from trying to use antifa to weaken support of moves to the left. They can point at black bloc stereotypes all day and say “more socialism and less corporate power? Look, that way lies madness!”
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No surprise that the Fourth Estate is experiencing the same jingoistic decline as the rest of American politics.
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Like Planned Parenthood, 97% of Antifa’s work is humdrum, non-controversial delivery of medicine.
Exposing fascists in communities so that they can be ostracized is job number one, Antifa also run self-defense classes for LGBTQIA folx, operate safe houses, train street medics, hold social justice seminars- heck, Rose City Antifa puts on a childrens’ summer camp here in Portland.
I’d also suggest reading Mark Bray’s book if you want to learn about the history of Antifa. Personally, I was involved with ARA (Anti Racist Action,) from my teens to early 20’s, which is the network that spawned Antifa in the US. Of course we protested KKK marches, US government imperialist actions, etc. etc. but mostly we spent our time making life difficult for the fascists that lived in our community, providing free food for houseless people, distributing educational literature, and other things of that nature. Did I smash some stuff (including Nazi faces?) Yes. But that doesn’t scratch the surface. For decades, while mainstream US society adopted the pretense that fascism had disappeared from our shores, ARA/Antifa knew exactly where they were hiding.
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I’d have to say the (MS) media has been quite the accomplice in eroding pro-democratic American values and bringing us to where we are today. Everything from not reporting truthfully on the benefits of O’care to parroting GOP talking points and basic lies to not challenging public officials with their soft-ball interviews (Palin) to marching us into a BS war in Iraq to pretty much propping up a lying ‘presidential’ candidate in Trump to normalizing this administration to… well you get it. It’s almost like there is, dare I say, an agenda!
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A vast right-wing conspiracy?
There is an agenda, but not the way you imply. The agenda is money. Controversy == eyeballs and eyeballs == profits. And a lot of it is enabled by the uncritical application of “balanced reporting” where there is an implicit assumption that everybody involved with a dispute is reasonable, acting in good faith and just have legitimately different takes on mutually agreed upon facts.
That kind of implicit trust is ripe for exploitation by people who are not acting in good faith, and that’s what we’ve seen happen more and more often over the last couple of decades. Its part of the reason why the media relentlessly focused on Clinton’s run-of-the-mill missteps, giving them equal coverage to the mango shitbag’s avalanche of moral failures.
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As much as I would like to agree with you, I can’t. As much as we would like to believe it, these outlets are what a large chunk of America trusts. That large chunk is the segment that holds power in one fashion or another even if they do not make the rules. Worse still is the people controlling this narrative that somehow opposing nazis makes us horrible people (which I will admit I’ve been the one here going ‘hey guys the way I hear us talking would sound pretty fucking terrifying if you swapped names around’.)
So as horrifying as it is, they’re winning by waging a hearts and minds war. The question we have to find an answer to is ‘how do we fight on a war where the other side has had experiance and a head start belittling us to the rest of the nation?’
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I’d say it’s more of a “capitalist” agenda as JamesBean expands upon. I just couldn’t quite get the words in. Didn’t meant to imply it is all just right-wing.
And that, I agree, is the other side of the coin - giving equal weight to unequal points of view. When you have to fill 24 hours of programing 7 days a week, there’s a whole lot of padding going on.
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Actually, the article is about 6 high profile newspapers, not tv or radio. Newspapers have typically done much better reporting than tv news (and the talk-right that dominates radio doesn’t even qualify as press).
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Not yet they aren’t:
Same as before: 1/3 Trumpist. They’re still outnumbered.
It isn’t about hearts and minds, except in the sense of unifying the left. The Trumpist third are locked in.
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Respectfully, I will have to disagree.
The fact they are in power is my evidence we have work to do.
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No argument with that.
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