To the Editor:
I am responding to Maggie Wilson’s letter published on August 15th. Extremists of any sort can be a danger. But to call the Charlottesville protestors of hate speech “anti-First Amendment” and to put leftist violence on the same plane as the organized espousal of institutional racism serves only to obscure the real issue: The particular menace of hate groups is that their messages promote violence (and worse) against minorities.
Secondly, Wilson has missed the message in Trump’s choice of words. By failing to condemn the hate groups up front (not their right to hate-speech), Trump implicitly condones them. If you have any doubt about that, read what the alt-right is saying about his words.
I would also like to point out that the “dead cops” clip Wilson attributed to BLM was actually of a small contingent of protestors taken after the end of the 2014 Millions March, whose actions were later disavowed by the event’s organizers.
G. Armsden
Lake Forest Park
I am bemused by Armsden's comments here as in one thing, they are profoundly wrong. Within the last week, Antifa extremists sang out that cops are aligned with the Klan, never mind officers who are Jewish, Muslim, Black and Brown. Leftist extremists were singing for the deaths of officers just a few months ago in marches in other areas (plenty of video footage out there to see).
ReplyDeleteAll supremacist groups, whether they be White, Black or Brown, or religious supremacist groups, whether they be Christian, Muslim or Hindu, or political supremacist groups, whether they be Democrat, Republican or Communist, have no place in our Great American society. To that end, the president was right as hate has come from all sides and those of us in the center grow weary of it. We in the center see the seething that the alt-left and alt-right are bringing to our country and we must stand united to say, "Not here! No more!"
I doubt a centrist would use Trump's made-up label "alt-left".
ReplyDelete