So, at the Women’s March in LA, I stumbled upon Jesse Lee Peterson, who most recently defended Rep. Steve King on the popular extreme right TV show Infowars, which has been banned from Youtube. Mr. Peterson defended the Iowan Congressman after House Republicans stripped him of his committee seats for his continued support of Neo-Nazi affiliated Austrian politicians following the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh.
Ironically, when I saw Peterson, he was interviewing three young women. Peterson asked them why they attended the Women’s March, equating the protest with March organizer Tamika Mallory, who attended a Nation of Islam event in February 2018, which Peterson described as hating Jews and whites. As I approached Peterson began to ask the youth if their attendance of the event meant that they too were anti-white and anti-semitic.
One could argue that the February 2018 speech which has generated so much controversy, including the cancellation of the Chicago Women’s march, took minister Louis Farrakhan out of context. Just before his supposed anti-semitic comments, Farrakhan described the persecution of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X by the FBI in the 1960’s, adn defended the Nation of Islam which had been designated a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League, saying that no member off the congregation ever hurt a Jewish person. Just before railing against powerful Jews and Israeli Apartheid, Farrakhan attacked Israel for its discriminatory treatment Ethiopian and Sephardic Jews, as opposed to their Ashkenazi brethren of European descent (around three hours and thirteen minutes into his speech.)
It’s kind of ironic that supporters of Infowars and Nazi supporting congressman Steve King would be the ones to trumpet this up so much at the march. It makes one wonder who was behind this smear on the Women’s movement, which has so effectively propelled the #resistance to Trumpism forward in the past.
Despite the concerted effort by the extreme right and a few supposed liberal media outlets to scare folks away from the 2019 Women’s March, when I got there towards the end, the scene was festive, loving, diverse, and friendly.
On my way out, I interviewed Hunter Avallone, a right wing youtube star with over 600,000 subscribers, whose bi-weekly videos have recently attacked and made fun of gays, transexual persons, fat women, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He held a big sign saying “You Don’t Need Feminism.” But I don’t think he really understood what feminism is, defined by Oxford’s English Dictionary as “the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.” Check it Out.
