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One last thing: I am not downplaying the threat of right-wing politics and racism in America. Donald Trump is the president, after all. But I tend to think that the biggest threats from the right come from the Republican Party, not the Klan and the Dominionists and the neo-Nazis and whatever Richard Spencer’s thing is called. (Even Spencer’s hometown hates him.) And when we fixate on the outright fascists, the people who have “organized street forces,” we are missing the more significant threat, which comes from the halls of state capitol buildings. You can (and should) care about both threats, of course, but it’s important to keep them in proportion, to weight each in accordance with its power and consequences. And it’s not that Berlet and Wilson are necessarily wrong that the white supremacists are rising, it’s that they are not trustworthy guides, because they don’t respond to the tough questions or show an instinct for self-criticism. And that’s why I think it’s perfectly fair for us to say that the state of the far right is unknowable. It’s unknowable because those who study it don’t seem committed to evaluating it cautiously.
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