[Rolling Stone] If you picked your jaw up off the floor just long enough to scratch your head and puzzle at what President Trump meant by the "alt-left" during his now infamous "Remarks on Infrastructure" meltdown on Tuesday, you're not alone."OK, what about the alt-left," he proffered, "what about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?"
So, what about the alt-left? Does it exist, or is it another bullet-dipped-in-pigs-blood fairy tale of Trump's imagination?
The word no doubt entered the president's consciousness the same way all his wildest policy ideas, hopes, dreams and paranoid delusions do ‐ from tuning in to Fox.
Though it began as an insult within the left ‐ a way to further deride the far left and so-called "Bernie Bros" during and after November's election ‐ the right has adopted the phrase, as well. Sean Hannity and other, fringier monsters of the far-right media ecosystem have been, for at least a year now, pushing the idea of the "alt-left" as some sort of answer to the charge that the "alt-right," a very real political entity, has hijacked and poisoned the Republican party. The Washington Post best described it in 2016 as "The GOP's response: I know what you are but what am I."
But there is an actual active and growing group that Trump refers to. However, it's incorrect to name-check it as the alt-left and it's downright wrong to morally equivocate it with the neo-Nazi and white supremacist scum that stormed Charlottesville. But it does exist. Only it's called "Antifa,"
...the armed wing of the Democratic Party...
short for anti-fascist, and it far predates Donald Trump.
First, a bit of history.
Anti-fascism originated in the years leading up to the second World War as a means to fight the spread of fascism across Europe, but in America the progenitors of what Trump would have you call the alt-left can be traced back to 1980s Minnesota. It was during this time that the group "Anti-Racist Action" sprung up around the Twin Cities to combat the rise of local Nazi skinheads. A.R.A., as the group became known, opened chapters across the U.S. and won some major victories against neo-Nazis in the pre-Internet Eighties and Nineties.
Underground, local punk scenes often served as the stage for these groups to do battle, but the scale and frequency with which they clashed was enough to seep into the popular culture throughout the decade. It ultimately culminated with 1998's American History X, for which Edward Norton was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as a reformed neo-Nazi skinhead.
It culminated in a movie?
And sadly on it goes.