WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that both the left and the right contributed to the violence in Charlottesville in Virginia state over the weekend.
Trump said the alt-left group were also "charging at the alt-right with clubs." "Do they have any problems? I think they do," he said.
Alt-Right, Alt-left, Antifa come from a glossary of extremist language in the deeply divided United States. The following is a brief introduction to the meaning of those expressions.
Alt-Right
The "alt-right," or alternative right, is a loosely defined group of people with far-right ideologies of white nationalism and anti-Semitism, while rejecting mainstream conservatism. The media usually uses terms like "white nationalism" and "far right" instead of "alt-right."
White supremacist Richard Spencer coined the term in 2010 in reference to a movement centered on white nationalism.
The movement's self-professed goal is the creation of a white state and the destruction of "leftism."
Alt-right beliefs have been described as isolationist, protectionist, anti-Semitic and white supremacist, frequently overlapping with Neo-Nazism.
Alt-Left
Researchers who study extremist groups in the United States say there is no such thing as the "alt-left." Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, said the word had been made up to create a false equivalence between the far right and "anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn't like."
"It did not arise organically, and it refers to no actual group or movement or network," Pitcavage told The Washington Post. "It's just a made-up epithet, similar to certain people calling any news they don't like 'fake news'."
Victor Davis Hanson, an American military historian, columnist and former classics professor, has written on the American Greatness website that the "Alternative Left is no longer an 'alternate' wing of the Democratic Party or traditional liberalism. It now drives the Democratic Party trajectory."
Antifa
"Antifa" is a contraction of the word "anti-fascist." The anti-fascist movement began in a few European countries in the 1920s, and eventually spread to other countries around the world.
A similar movement emerged in the 1980s in the United States and has grown as the "alt-right" has risen to prominence.
For some so-called antifa members, the goal is to physically confront white supremacists. "If they can get at them, to assault them and engage in street fighting," Pitcavage said.
Members of the "alt-right" broadly portray protesters who opposes them as "antifa," or the "alt-left."
