I am sure several of you conservatives reading this are still short-circuiting about Antifa snowflakes deserving a beating in the name of free speech or whatever. Turn down the Ben Shapiro podcast and stay with me! Let’s look at some of Chapman’s words. Here is a tweet by Chapman from July 24, mere weeks before Charlottesville.

That’s going to be a “yikes” for me, buddy ol’ pal.

The group Chapman is heaping praise on (“the kind of heart it’s going to take to save Western Civilization!”) is the Rise Above Movement. These are a bunch of sad mad shitheads who, like Chapman, are really only interested in pretending they’re in Fight Club, attacking protesters and trusting the White House and the media to spin the situation to Antifa-vs. Free Speech. Unlike Chapman, McInnes, and the other “Western chauvinists” though, these Tyler Durrrrdens do not claim to be anything but fascists and neo-Nazis.

The skeletal jaws are to emphasize their love of free speech!

An NYT article identifies Rise Above Movement among the groups who showed up at Charlottesville:

…this weekend, Mr. Duke arrived in Charlottesville, along with an array of old-school and new-school white supremacists. They included organizations like Vanguard America, whose Nazi-era motto “Blood and Soil” was chanted by the marchers on Friday night, and the Rise Above Movement, a loose collective of California neo-Nazis, formerly known as the DIY Division, who train to fight at political events. Members of the League of the South showed up, as did their more recently radicalized colleagues from Identity Evropa, a white separatist group that endorses racial segregation.

I cannot believe Matt Labash, the Weekly Standard author, is ignorant of what it means to be a “Western chauvinist,” or that Kyle Chapman’s ideology goes beyond even this facade straight into boosting Nazi gangs. Labash actively downplays the extremism of the right-wing politics at play here in order to valorize violence against anti-fascists. But does this matter to his audience of mainstream conservatives and neocons? Does my conservative friend who shared the piece, who is Jewish, understand the implications for the Weekly Standard doing image rehabiliation for a man backing a group who waved a huge banner reading “Da Goyim Know” at Berkeley? He dismissed Chapman as “a loon” when I confronted him with evidence of Chapman’s support of Nazi gangs, but he was not ultimately willing to critically reassess the ideology of the Weekly Standard piece — which at its core celebrates violence against Antifa “ninjas” — beyond that.

Turns out you can look like an Insta #liveauthentic parody and STILL BE A NAZI.

And to be clear, the Weekly Standard article is replete with other examples of heinous bullshit. It compares Antifa first to ISIS and later to al-Qeada because they…wear black? Great. Also, just wow at the assertion in the screenshot above that Chapman’s Asian wife somehow throws his white supremacy into question. Like, my dude, have you BEEN on /b/ or the Daily Stormer? But muh waifu…

Really though, the disconnect between what my friend wanted to share with me (points against Team Antifa) and what he really shared with me (fascist apologia) gets at the crux of our present derangement. Joshua Clover at the Los Angeles Review of Books has recently done an excellent job putting words to this collective crisis wherein we fail to cognitively process fascist activity as a continuous, dynamic process. This phenomenon renders columnists and their audiences so dislocated from history and context that they are willing to advance the idea that a man who became famous for assaulting protesters in public, who half a year ago founded the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, and who promoted Nazi gangs two weeks before Charlottesville now means it when he condemns “racist alt-right fuckin’ Nazis.” It’s ok, because he’s against anti-fascists! Violent snowflakes who hate free speech! That narrative can stick.

Bullshit to that, and bullshit to those who want to split the difference and say “both sides are insane.” Only one side has shot people, only one side has a body count, and only one side is considered a greater threat than radicalized Muslims by police departments across the country. That is the side that believes in silencing, deporting, and killing people based on their identity — the far right. Yet only the anti-fascists, who seek to prevent this monstrous ideal from being realized, have the smear of “identity politics” lobbed at them.

Violent fascists are being openly defended in your papers of record, conservatives. Your state legislators were pushing for laws that protected drivers who ran over protesters up to the moment Heather Heyer died. How many of you will defend these tendencies in the name of triggering a liberal cuckflake? How many of you will be fellow travelers before you even understand what road you’re on? How many of you will leave when you find out where that road really goes?

Stop minimizing fascism in order to promote screeds attacking anti-fascists. Do not tolerate people or press outlets who go out of their way to praise violent fascists. No nuance, no two sides about it. Show the spine that the Weekly Standard has proven it lacks. It takes an assertive and sustained rejection of fascism to land on the right side of history. There is a difference between holding anti-fascists to account and calling them on their excesses in service to a moral goal (opposing fascism, like the name says), and demonizing them as a bogeyman that justifies literal fascism. I should not have to explain this. Our president should not be calling fascists “perfectly decent people.”

Yet here we are. And I just had an interesting thought…