Georgetown University’s Michael Eric Dyson says President Trump is wrong to criticize self-described antifascist activists around the country because they are attempting to “preserve the fabric of America.”
The president’s recent condemnation of bat-wielding protesters known as “Antifa” was likened to a man resisting chemotherapy during a CNN panel on Wednesday. Mr. Dyson was invited onto the network to discuss violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week between white supremacists and counter-protesters when he made the comment.
“The people that we claim, Black Lives Matter, the Antifa movement, and so on, are interested in preserving the fabric of America,” Mr. Dyson said, The Washington Free Beacon reported. “[Former Trump aide Jason] Miller says again that there was violence there, but the problem is, to equate that violence in reaction to the bigotry with the bigotry itself is to misunderstand the fact that when you go to cancer treatment, the radiation is tough treatment, but it is meant to remove the cancer.”
Mr. Trump came under sharp criticism over the last 48 hours for telling reporters that “alt-left” agitators armed with weapons share culpability for the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last weekend. Heyer was allegedly run over by James Alex Fields Jr., 20, who was arrested after accelerating his vehicle into a crowd.
“So what he fails to understand and what the president especially fails to understand is that you are complicit with the worst currents of bigotry in this country when you try to draw a false equivalence between secessionists, racists, and confederate defenders and bigots and neo Nazis, and African American and white people and others who have defended the rights of this nation to really seek a path of healing beyond the consternation we see now,” the sociology professor added.
“That’s the problem with this president: he ain’t got the right moral vision; he doesn’t have the right words to express that moral vision and he lacks an understanding of American history.”
SEE ALSO: Kiara Robles, pepper-sprayed Trump supporter from Berkeley riots, files $23M lawsuit
Mr. Trump’s history with Antifa includes Inauguration Day protests in which businesses in Washington, D.C., along with a limousine, were smashed and lit on fire.
Antifa members also tallied more than $100,000 in damage at the University of California, Berkeley, in February prior to an event planned for provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. A Trump supporter on campus, Kiara Robles, filed a $23 million lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after she was randomly pepper-sprayed during an interview.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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