It's ironic that the most remembered image from the recent inauguration of our newest President was not the confusing, conspiracy-theory inducing crowd shots, nor the Michelle Obama memes, nor the videos of the civil unrest in D.C. The moment possibly best remembered from the day’s affairs involved not President Trump, but one of his most vocal and controversial supporters; specifically, one who got his lights knocked out.
Yes, I am talking about the instantly infamous video of right-wing extremist Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. The video immediately caught fire, creating reactions as intense and visceral as the video itself. Many immediately lashed out in a righteous anger, praising the unknown hitter for attacking Spencer. Many laughed, because sometimes a video of someone getting punched out of nowhere can be funny, especially when, in the following days, it is set to music. Others, including myself, felt confused, because I had honestly never heard of the guy.
As it turns out, he is the progenitor of the much maligned alt-right, as he invented the term, and champions himself as the “Karl Marx of the Alt-Right” to indicate his ideological creation of the movement. In the midst of the insanity, there were new, fully-formed opinion pieces coming out, waxing on the idea of punching people whom you disagree with, and whether violence is the answer. Just as many on the left decried it and praised it, there was a confusing response filled with lots of heavy-handed arguments.
Personally, I do not condone or agree with violence towards those you do not agree with. However, it's impossible to feel bad for a man such as Spencer.
Spencer has been labelled a Nazi, which he refutes. However, his refutation is hard to take seriously given the Nazi salute and the “Hail Trump!” given at his post-election conference. It is hard to sympathize with a man who has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing”. It is hard to sympathize with a man who allowed for his website to publish an article calling for the extermination of black people, described by the author as inhabiting “a world of savagery, disease, and death, replenished by a wild, thoughtless fertility”. It is hard to defend a man who praised the lack of mention of Jewish people in the White House’s Holocaust Remembrance Day press release for its “de-Judification” of the Holocaust and considers one of history’s most absolute travesties as simply a rhetorical device for “liberal hyper-morality”. It is impossible to defend a man who sees immigration as “‘a kind a proxy war -- and maybe a last stand -- for White Americans’”.
All in all, a sucker punch will never be worse than uninhibited racism feeling comfortable enough to espouse these sorts of ideas.
In this context, it becomes understandable why those who disagree would lash out. Many see taking the fight to these people as simply a survival tactic- if I don’t get to them, they will get to me. Ideologies such as these are bound to create fear and paranoia in those who see their lives and worlds targeted by people such as Richard Spencer, which includes more or less anyone that is not white.
In their criticism of the punch and the positive reaction it elicited from many, conservative magazine National Review stated that while violence can be returned with violence, that violence should never be seen as an acceptable response to “passive ideology”. What the Review was incorrect on is the view that the views of Richard Spencer and the many who think like him is that it is not passive.
These are the ideals held by Dylann Roof, the murderer of nine black members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, who desired to see the start of a race war, and who took it upon himself to carry on the racial separation and extermination tactics of apartheid South Africa.
They are the ideals held by Alexandre Bissonnette, the French-Canadian man who has been arrested for the recent murder of six and injury of 19 more in a Quebec City mosque. He was known for posting extremist screeds against refugees, feminism, and in support of white-nationalist ideas on pro-refugee Facebook pages. Even then his ideals were seen as “‘more intolerant than hateful’”, showing the way people with violent agendas can be hidden in what may be dismissed as an annoying internet troll. (It should be noted here that this incident occurred just after the executive order that placed a temporary halt on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, and it was initially reported that the attacker was a Muslim man of Moroccan descent, an untrue assertion reported by Fox News and not retracted until the pressuring of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau).
It is hard to see these ideals as passive when given that on the same day as Richard Spencer being punched, a Seattle man protesting a speech given by another hero of the alt-right, Milo Yiannopoulos, was shot in the stomach by someone who supported the speaker.
Milo is another perplexing figure in this ideology, and possibly the most polarizing among them. He is a British man who has taken it upon himself to insert his ideas into the American political field, a champion of fighting "political correctness” and other tenets of the American left. He has been criticized for his actions in his speeches and on the internet, such as his public mockery of a transgender student of a school he was speaking at. He is possibly best known for his Twitter campaign against actress Leslie Jones, which included harsh criticisms of not only her acting, but also of her appearance, and joined in by thousands of other Twitter users making explicit racial and sexist jabs at her. After Milo’s indefinite ban from Twitter, he decried the blow to free speech signaled in the decision.
What was confusing about Milo’s idea of speech suppression was the way he seemed to mistake freedom to act for freedom from consequences. Nowhere was it implied that he was somehow not allowed to say these things. However, it was also never implied that his words deserved to be upheld by the owners of a platform, or that he was exempt from criticism.
The violence that recently sprung up in Berkeley at the site of Milo’s most recent speech is indefensible on all fronts. The actions of anarchists interested in causing a scene were nowhere close to justified. Regardless of ideological leaning, destruction of public spaces is irresponsible.
Speech, however can also be irresponsible and indefensible. What has been shown by the reactions of Spencer, Milo, and people on their side has been the desire they have to incite this sort of violence, implicit as it may be. The nature of violence, whether contained in thought or action, is one that is complicated and hard to make sense of. There is no easy solution to resisting violence, whether it be from anarchists who are falsely accused of representing everyone who is a liberal, or from alt-right extremists who are falsely accused of representing everyone who is a conservative. Understanding empathy for those who think differently from you must be balanced by a refusal to accept the demands or notions of those who seek to violate the principles of right and wrong that our country is based in.
