Quote Originally Posted by drillerpie View Post
There is a grain of truth to the fact that Antifa (or groups inspired by that ideology, for those people who think Antifa doesn't exist) get something of a free pass from large parts of the media.

Obviously I'm not equating them to right wing militias, who I think I'm right in saying even before this kidnap plot were considered as dangerous as Islamic terror cells by the FBI, but they do regularly engage in unpleasant behaviour which is either not reported or explained away. Trump takes this grain of truth and exaggerates it, distorts it, and makes false equivalences from it. Trump is in my opinion a bad man acting in bad faith, but I think the current media climate enables him to do that to a certain degree.

These right-wing types have always had a fascination with Fred Perry shirts, which is strange considering he was apparently very much against that sort of thing. I remember travelling around Europe when I was younger while wearing my Fred Perry polo shirt and sporting very short hair, and a bunch of skinheads coming over to me to shake my hand. I was young and naive at the time so it took me a while to figure it out!
Trump is clever enough to give his supporters something to latch on to that does include a grain of truth. That said, someone was talking about how dangerous the far left were on here a while ago. I remember looking the figures up and posting them and I think the far right had killed 150+ people in the US in recent years against 0 from the far left. Apologies in advance if the figures aren't quite correct but they were someing like that.

It's clear where the most danger lies, but agree that extremism on either side is unacceptable, but unpleasant is less bad than murderous of course. Still, that doesn't fit the orange one's agenda,so throwing out the odd crumb of truth in amongst spreading fear, division and hatred worked well for Trump last time. Who knows what'll happen this time.