Justin Ward
1 min readAug 27, 2018

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Saying Kaepernick is biracial is a strange counter to the argument that the antipathy of conservatives is motivated in part or completely by racism. Have you heard of the One-Drop Rule? If someone presents as black in the US, they’re black. Barack Obama is biracial but he was subjected to all sorts of racist caricatures.

Race had a lot to do with it. Race is why BLM gets labelled “terrorists,” and neo-Nazis get called “very fine people.”

And I agree that left and right are inadequate. Politics has many dimensions and fascists have historically co-opted left wing ideas to their own ends, ex. National Bolshevism, Third Position, etc. Even Identity Evropa today says they want something like “white socialism.”

I prefer the 8 values system, which has four axises, vs. the Political Compass, which has two, but I would say if you had to put politics on a left-right axis, the proper one would be progressive vs. traditional, which puts fascists and Republicans both on the right.

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Justin Ward
Justin Ward

Written by Justin Ward

Journalist and activist. Founder and co-chair of DivestSPD. Bylines at SPLC, The Baffler, GEN, USA Today. Follow on Twitter: @justwardoctrine, @DivestSPD

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