Commenter Sarah kindly pointed us to this report about Jason Kessler, a leader of the #WhiteLivesMatter Charlottesville march.

Rumors abound on white nationalist forums that Kessler’s ideological pedigree before 2016…point[s] to involvement in the Occupy movement and past support for President Obama.

You do have to take it with a grain of salt, because it comes from the highly-dysfunctional Southern Poverty Law Center. Still, it’s plausible when you remember that in 2008, white supremacists tended to support then-Candidate Obama. (Original Esquire article here; in case that ever goes away, my comment here captures some bits.)

OK, so why would white supremacists (whether full-fledged, or just potential ones) align with left-wing causes, such as Occupy Wall Street and Barack Obama? The answer is in the linked Esquire article. In brief,

• White supremacists know a fellow racist when they see one. (They admired President Obama’s “racial consciousness”.) And,
• They admire fellow socialists.

That’s right. Racism and socialism go together, as the Nazis proved. The Nazis were socialists; if you don’t believe me, check out the list of evidence in this earlier post.

We also know it from American history. Democrats fought to preserve slavery (whereas the Republicans freed the slaves). Democrats formed and manned the KKK; instituted the Jim Crow laws; invented Planned Parenthood specifically to abort black babies (look into Margaret Sanger sometime); and defended racial segregation well into the 1970s. And the youngest, most “progressive” lefties are bringing back racial segregation, here in the 2010s.

At some point, Democrats did flip the racist script and turn into brown supremacists (rather than white supremacists), but the dynamic is the same: An obsession with racial categories and race preferences/stigmatizing. It stems from Tribalism, which goes hand-in-hand with Collectivism, which is the philosophical root of socialism.

That’s why racism is left-wing. As to the violence: The essence of the socialist or “progressive” project is the use of force – that is, violence – to punish one’s neighbor for being better-off AND/or for not submitting enough to leftist nonsense and virtue-signalling.

In other words: leftism is violent inherently. In its nature, left-wing politics is a wish to see violence being done to those of your neighbors who won’t be or do or say what you want. Whereas pro-liberty or genuine right-wing politics is a wish for people to be able to avoid each other when they want.

All of this makes it wrong to claim that violent racists are from the Right. And that is part of why I keep calling the Charlottesville march a #WhiteLivesMatter thing, rather than using the false and misleading “Unite the Right” name given by its organizers. What those guys stood for has nothing to do with the Right’s love of life, liberty and property.

But leftists will claim that violent racists are rightists anyway. Because every American knows instinctively that racism and political violence are both bad. To stay in business, the Left must, at all costs, deflect and project-away the blame for it.

Thus we get the accusational, virtue-signalling frenzies like the one against President Trump today, which I just noted.