As Adam Johnson, a contributing analyst for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told me, a November study he conducted
found that the "New York Times has dedicated 21 columns and articles to the subject of conservatives' free speech on campus, while only three covered the silencing of college liberals or leftists."
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The Anti-Defamation League
reported that incidents of white supremacist propaganda on U.S. campuses more than tripled in 2017. Groups doubling down on campus propagandizing include explicit neo-Nazis like the Florida-based Atomwaffen Division, as well as associations like Identity Evropa, known for couching its unabashed racist message in thinly veiled panegyrics to protecting Western culture and posters bearing Michelangelo's David.
"The 'alt-right' is a movement of mostly young white males," Carla Hill, senior researcher for the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, told me. "They realize that for any movement to truly grow, they must reach young minds, and this segment of the white supremacist movement has been focused on doing that."
The potential gravity of this surge was then underlined by a
report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, titled simply, "The Alt-Right Is Killing People." More than 100 people have been killed or injured since 2014 by perpetrators believed to be influenced by the racism and misogyny that defines the so-called alt-right, the center found. More than 60 people were killed or injured in "alt-right" violence last year alone.
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The Anti-Defamation League
reportedseparately in November that white supremacists and other far-right extremists were responsible for 59 percent of all extremist-related fatalities in the U.S. in 2017, up from 20 percent in 2016. While it's too soon for much dispositive social science on the link, it's difficult to consider all this data outside of the Trump era in American politics.
OVER A YEAR ago, there was no shortage of coverage predicting this sort of uptick in racist violence. The possibility of it occupied the liberal commentariat as Donald Trump's presidency loomed as an unlikely aberration. Opinion pages in late 2016 ran dozens of pieces wondering whether a Trump regime would be a truly
fascist one,
warning of emboldened white supremacy and neo-Nazism.
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Even as bigotry and racist violence have dug into their footholds over the course of the last year, many of the same liberal publications once seemingly obsessed with the threat of fascism have devoted more energy to decrying the students and staff organizing to expunge hate from their midst.
At New York Magazine, for example, centrist ideologue Jonathan Chait
decried the "repressive methods and slogans" of leftists chanting, "Shut it down!" New York Times neoconservative Bari Weiss
tweeted in horror that it was "amazing to watch leftists turn free speech into a right-wing issue." In a New York Times
op-ed, the president of the University of Oregon, Michael H. Schill, said the campus "crusade" against fascism was "misguided."
After the right-wing "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, descended into violence, including the killing of a protester by a far-right rally-goer, Trump came under heavy criticism for blaming "both sides." Yet the mainstream media has too frequently adopted an almost identical stance when it comes to the balance of coverage between left-wing and right-wing demonstrators. In the month following the rally, America's six top broadsheet newspapers
ran 28 opinion pieces condemning anti-fascist action, according to FAIR, but only 27 condemning neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Trump's failure to disavow them.
The Anti-Defamation League's November report evidences the flaws in this "two sides" position. The group found the far right was responsible for 71 percent of domestic extremist killings in 2017, but only 3 percent of killings were attributed to "left-wing extremism" — and even reaching this figure meant the Anti-Defamation League lumped together "anarchists and black nationalists."
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To be generous, the media focus on the free speech canard could reflect the reasonable assumption that readers already know emboldened white supremacy is bad. To be less generous — and more realistic — liberal and centrist media institutions don't care as much about white supremacy as they claim to. White supremacy has never stood at odds with the American status quo. Its rise on college campuses is a disgrace, but in itself is not a disruption.