Screengrab from https://twitter.com/ChrisCuomo/status/1029186775556608000

This is really not a great surprise. For decades, the American press has gone all fanboi on domestic terrorists. During the 60s and 70s, most of the reporters covering the terrorist attacks by the Weathermen…who among them numbered two mentors of a future president…the sympathy for their goals was palpable. They agitated for the release of the communist murderers in the 1981 Brink’s robbery. Andrew Cuomo commuted one sentence. Another was paroled and is now an adjunct professor at Columbia. They cheered when Barack Obama released a vicious and unrepentant Puerto Rican terrorist. Throughout the 80s, the press was aligned with communist guerrillas in Central America. They lionized the Baader-Meinhoff gang. They, and a handful of lefty professors at elite universities, seem to have been the only people who didn’t think Ted Kaczynski’s rambling manifesto was utter gibberish. So when terrorists showed up in Charlottesville this past weekend and beat at least one police officer and roughed up several reporters, guys like Chris Cuomo feel an overwhelming urge to protect their precious creation, the antifa thugs.

Two wrongs and what's right #CuomoPrimeTime #LetsGetAfterIt #CPT pic.twitter.com/zqtOeJcWnY

— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) August 14, 2018

Transcript by way of NewsBusters

Here’s the closing argument. Two wrongs and what is right. It’s been one year since Heather Heyer was killed for standing up to hate, and our thoughts still go to her family.

We know what happened with racial tensions nationwide after that. And this weekend was built as round two, “unite the right”, the sequel. Organizers planned to rally in Washington, D.C. this time.

But the turn out of white supremacists was thankfully pathetic, which is why I didn’t have to go there and cover it. Only a couple dozen showed up. Proof they lost membership after being exposed again last year as a bunch of hateful losers? No. They’re still in force online, but they didn’t have the guts to show up, and that’s good.

Counterprotesters did. There were good numbers of them. The vast majority were peaceful.

…You attack cops, you slap the media, you are in the wrong, period. But I argue to you tonight, all punches are not equal morally. In the eyes of the law, yes. But in the eyes of good and evil, here’s the argument: if you’re a punk that comes to start trouble in a mask and hurt people, you’re not about any virtuous cause. You’re just somebody who’s going to be held to the standard of doing something wrong.

But when someone comes to call out bigots and it gets hot, even physical, are they equally wrong as the bigot they are fighting? I argue, no. Fighting against hate matters.

Now, how you fight matters too. There’s no question about that. But drawing a moral equivalency between those espousing hate and those fighting it because they both resort to violence emboldens hate, legitimizes hateful belief and elevates what should be stamped out. That’s what Trump did wrong last year.

…Two wrongs and what is right? The bigots are wrong to hit. Antifa,or whomever, anarchists or malcontent or misguided, they are also wrong to hit. But fighting hate is right. And in a clash between hate and those who oppose it, those who oppose it are on the side of right. Think about: civil rights activist, were they the same morally as the bigots, as the racist with whom they exchanged blows. Are people who go to war against an evil regime on the same moral ground as those they seek to stop from oppressing the weak? When you punch me in the nose for being Italian and you say I’m somehow less than, am I in the same moral place when I punch you back for saying that? It’s not about being right in the eyes of the law, but you also have to know what’s right and wrong and immoral, in a good and evil sense.That’s why people who show up to fight against bigots are not to be judged the same as the bigots, even if they do resort to the same petty violence. The law will take care of that. How you disagree matters…

This isn’t the first time that Cuomo has run interference for these vicious, if wildly comical, thugs:

Let's not forget pic.twitter.com/q5wjVmZylR

— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) August 16, 2017

Here’s the real closing argument. Homeland Security and the FBI consider the “antifa” to be a domestic terrorist group since early 2016:

Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.

In Cuomo’s diatribe, the false equivalence drawn is in who has historically initiated the violence in these encounters. In Charlottesville, and in DC, this year as well as last, the source of the violence was the people Cuomo is trying to mainstream and legitimize. His “punch-an-Italian-in-the-nose” analogy is wildly off base. The real analogy is a person expressing the opinion that they don’t like Italians and a random person hitting them and then claiming they are justified because hurt feelings or something. Cuomo isn’t against bigotry, per se. He’s merely against an unfashionable bigotry. If you are truly against bigotry then New York Times editorial board member Sarah Jeong’s tweets are exactly the same, and perhaps even more violent in implication, than anything voiced by neo-Nazis. In fact, Candice Owens was suspended from Twitter for sending out Jeong’s tweets but substituting “black” for “white.” But Cuomo, apparently, is fine with that bigotry just like he’s entirely fine with violence being used to suppress speech he doesn’t like.

So, in a backhanded way, Cuomo is right. There is no moral equivalence between the neo-Nazis and the antifa. The neo-Nazis aren’t attacking police and reporters. They aren’t trying to start riots. They aren’t the ones shouting down other people. They aren’t even the ones publicizing their own existence.

Let’s be very clear on where this is going to end. We are seeing a slow-motion replay of the street fights between the Freikorps and Spartacists in Weimar Germany. The media is cheering this on because they think it is hurting Trump, but it isn’t. What it is doing is radicalizing a lot of people who ordinarily wouldn’t pay any attention to the antics of the neo-Nazis or the soy-boys with pencil necks and black bandannas. If you watch any of the news coverage over the weekend, the people who came off as rational and peaceful were the neo-Nazis. We’ve seen this play out before in America:

While Cuomo accuses Trump of dog-whistling to neo-Nazis, Cuomo is using a trumpet to encourage leftwing terrorism. The only saving grace here is that so few people watch his program that it will mostly pass unnoticed.