Coming up, President Trump hosts the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates and the israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu to sign a deal that would normalize relations between the two countries. Live coverage on cspan3. Coming up, President Trump hosts the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates and israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu to sign a deal that will normalize relations between the two countries. Live coverage on cspan3. Michael kenny of the university of pittsburgh. Well talk about antifa and left wing extremism in this segment. Thank you. Good morning. First of all, ill ask you the exact same question as we talked about earlier in our segment about right wing extremism. First of all, i want you to define extremism for us and tell us the difference between left wing and right wing extremism if there is one. Okay. Extremism is what we might call an essentially contested concept and in laymans terms it means Different Things to different people. Certainly if you were to ask 100 terrorism experts to define extremism you would get a wide number of answers if not a hundred. Speaking for myself, i would define extremism as not just believing certainly theres belief and then theres action. Sometimes scholars will distinguish between the two, but believing in things that are fundamentally radical, that would imply radical change for society. So in other words, if the extremist political views were actualized in society, it would be changed in fundamental ways than what it is now. Theres distinctions that are made between extremism and violent extremism. An extremist believes violence is necessary to bring about the changes. With respect to extremism on the far right or left, there are differences in terms of their beliefs. You know, a far left anarchist believes in a much different set of beliefs than a far right bug aloo boy. And anarchist believes all forms of government and man or a woman can be free until were placed with local institutions based on mutual aid and direct democracy. Violent folks would believe in the use of violence to achieve those goals. Antifa includes people that subscribe to anarchist beliefs, but some antifa supporters are not anarchists. So theres a difference between the two. Well, President Trump recently sought to define antifa. So i want to show you a little bit of what he said at a press briefing and i want you to respond to it. Heres President Trump. Fully enforce the law and have no tolerance for anarchy and no tolerance zero for violence. And anyone who breaks the law should be arrested, prosecuted and finished, this includes the Law Enforcement efforts to focus on antifa, the left wing Domestic Terrorist Organization and the mission is to spread terror with the goal of getting americans to give up to their agenda. This is how terrorist organizations have always operated. Biden wont even say the name antifa. I dont believe hes said it today. He made a speech, he didnt mention that. He mentioned others but not antifa. He mentioned Law Enforcement and the police but he didnt mention antifa. I wonder why. So, michael, i want you to define for us what antifa what they are and do you agree with the president s characterization . I would not agree with the president s characterization. I believe that the president is engaged in labelling. Kind of a classic political rhetoric tactic in which you define your opponents as the enemy and you mischaracterize who they are and what theyre about. Frankly, this is a lot of what were seeing right now in the popular discourse and in the media about narrative in the media reports is this this narrative thats coming out. So i would define antifa as its not a single organization. Let alone a terrorist organization. Its actually a very loose collection of groups and individuals. Someone characterized it as a movement. Others would characterize it as a network. There is no Central Command and control at the national level. What you have is essentially is a number dozens of local groups located in different cities of the United States and in areas you might not think of and composed of a small number of activists who organize for one common purpose. And that is to confront what they see as fascism and racism. In this case, in the United States. So they are committed to stopping either by force or not by force any attempt by farright extremists to organize and to publicize their views. Because from the antifa perspective, these views, the far right right supremacist views represent an existential threat to americas pluralistic multiracial societies. So thats what they target. Now, within that broad movement, people have different views. You have got your an arco communists. You have your socialists. And you even have what i would call liberal antifascists. These are people who have no qualms about going out on the street and engaging in fisticuffs with White Supremacists at a protest, but are not anarchists. They dont want to overthrow government institutions. In fact, theyre quite liberal in that respect. You know, they may even vote. Now, anarchists, antifa supporters, do not vote, right . They tend to view our political system as legitimate. They scorn liberals, such as myself and many other people. So theres a lot of variety within that larger movement. The Common Thread there is that antifa which is of course short for antifascist, they believe that we have to confront any forms of white supremism, neonazis and far right extremists because if we dont confront them now, it will just continue to grow and grow and then were going to be looking at a much bigger problem down the road. Thats kind of how they see it. Let me remind our viewers they can take part in this conversation. If youre in the eastern and central time zone, 2027488000. Mount town pacific, text to 2027488003. Were always reading on social media. Now, can you give us a brief history of antifa in both the United States and around the world . Can you tell us how this began. Absolutely. So this brief history, the roots of antifa go back to western europe in the 1920s and 30s. You had different groups of local activists in germany, italy, britain, and spain. Those were kind of the main areas as well as other areas in which they were organizing to confront the nazis, mussolinis black shirts, oswaldo mosleys British Nationalist Party in britain and the fascists in spain. Francos fascists in spain and in each one of the countries what you had was rising fascist movements and antifascist groups formed in response] n t those rising fascist groups. So ever since the beginning of antifascism it has always existed in symbiosis. When you see a rise in far right fascist activity you often see an increase in antifascist activity. Its the same way in the United States. In the United States back in the 1908s, we saw a rise in the skin head movement. Okay . Local groups of political activists decided to organize and stop them. They actually came out of the punk rock scene and that was a carryover from europe. That was the same thing going on in britain and elsewhere. Ladies and gentlemen, the first lady of the United States, mrs. Melania trump accompanied by mrs. Sarah netanyahu