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A new intolerant strain of the Left is on the rise and elitist institutions approve.
The third assassination attempt on the president’s life, this time by left-wing extremist Cole Allen, has once again exposed the blind spot among academics and journalists when it comes to left-wing violence.
I’ve experienced this in academia. When Portuguese professor Pedro Zuquete was trying to publish his Handbook of Left-Wing Extremism, to which I am a contributor, he repeatedly hit brick walls. One reviewer for a publisher grudgingly admitted that the volume filled a gap and that there were no handbooks on left-wing extremism in existence, but focused mainly on ideology: “Chapter 15 … equates BLM and Antifa as a ‘destructive’ force of extremism, but shows no indication that a balanced investigation of the context and causes of these movements will be provided.”
Needless to say, there is no such equivocation or calls for “context” and understanding when it comes to interrogating right-wing extremism. Jeffrey Bale and Tamir Bar-On convincingly argue that a moral panic around fascism has been consistently manufactured since 1945 by Western intellectuals. Lazy and nebulous definitions of terms such as “fascism,” “racism,” and “far-right” go unchallenged by their peers, reinforcing a continuous “fascist scare.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Daily Wire
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Eric Kaufmann is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London.