After a century in which Communism killed 100 million people, it should be obvious to all that left-wing extremism can produce as much misery as right-wing extremism, if not more. And yet, within the collective imagination of the West, in particular of its intellectual elites, the danger always comes from the right. Fascism, in all its varieties and manifestations, is the perennial threat. Not the Soviet Gulag, the killing fields of Cambodia, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, but the Nazi Holocaust is the great instantiation of evil in the morally impoverished Western mind. There are, it is true, other evils—slavery, Jim Crow, colonialism—but they all flow from the fascistic impulse of white racism.

Any manifestation of right-wing extremism thus receives an inordinate amount of attention. The Wikipedia entry for the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville—a march attended by a few hundred white supremacists—is almost as long as the entry for World War I. The Right’s fake hate crimes receive far more media coverage than the Left’s real hate crimes. Most people have heard of Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington high school student who smirked in silence while being aggressively confronted by a jerk banging a drum and chanting in his face, but no one knows Micah Xavier Johnson, who ambushed and murdered five Dallas police officers in cold blood.

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