Heather Heyer’s mother says she wasn’t surprised Trump refused to condemn white supremacy
And then she returned back to work.
“I thought, well, OK, not surprised,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Wednesday night. “This is not exactly new news.”
But according to Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, that’s not exactly the case.
Extremist groups remain a threat
In the past 25 years, hundreds in the US have lost their lives in domestic terrorist attacks, Belew told CNN. And the number of victims from those attacks, she added, “far outstrips the threat posed by the radical left.”
“Those groups have waged violence on Americans countless times,” she said. “The record, the casualty count is overwhelming.”
But Bro says unlike her daughter, victims of white supremacy who are people of color are often lost in the conversation.
“Unfortunately, that’s why people are refusing to step up and act,” she added. “Everybody get up and get busy.”
A moment not just about the Proud Boys
“I think it would be a mistake to think about this as a problem that is only about the Proud Boys,” she said. “Certainly the Proud Boys are galvanizing this moment for their own purposes … but this is about a broader situation.”
That broader situation, she says, is the larger social movement of extremist groups including “people who are involved in paramilitary underground activity,” she said, who also heard the same comments.
“All of those people have been called to stand by,” she said. “That’s not the same thing as stand down and the results, I think, could be catastrophic.”
