UC Berkeley hosted a three-day conference on “Right-Wing Studies” appearing to conflate politically right of center views with white supremacy and other forms of extremism.
“This interdisciplinary conference will feature dozens of new and established scholars from around the world whose work deals with the Right as a social, political, and/or intellectual phenomenon from the 19th century to the present day,” states the description for UC Berkeley’s “Inaugural Conference on Right-Wing Studies.”
The description goes on to include the details for a Friday screening of a PBS documentary entitled, “Documenting Hate: Charlottesville” — a strange conflation, given that the 2017 Charlottesville riots have no connection with conservative values.
The description adds that the documentary will then be followed by “a panel discussion regarding the resurgence of white supremacist groups in the US and abroad.”
The conference, which kicked off on Thursday, is co-sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a disgraced far-left organization known for labeling mainstream conservatives with extremists — which was also dropped by the FBI as a hate crimes resource, and even more recently was dropped by Twitter as a “safety partner.”
On Friday, the “Right-Wing Studies” conference featured several different sessions along with the white supremacist PBS documentary. The sessions, much like the Charlottesville film, appear to be similar in nature, as they include bizarre titles, such as:
- ‘Be Rough, Be Violent, Don’t Drop Her On the Floor’: The Christian Right’s Enactment of Female Purity through Evangelical Ballet Technique
- ‘Make “America” White Again’: White Resentment under the Obama & Trump Presidencies
- The Triumph of ‘Americanism’: How Ideas of the 1950s-60s Ultra-Conservative Anti-Communist Conspiracists Have Been Embraced and Developed In the Trump Era
- My Girlfriend Became Neo-Nazi: The Right’s Presence and Activity in the Internet
- Social Psychological Perspectives in Studying the Right: Analyzing Everyday Conversations about the ‘National Socialist Underground’
- Forging Fascism: Authoritarian Populism, Apocalyptic Aggression, and Scripted Violence
The workshops continued on into Saturday, dedicating the entire midday to focusing on alleged “male supremacy,” with a panel called “Male Supremacist Ideology and Mobilization in the Contemporary United States,” including sessions which titles such as:
- ‘No Seat at the Party’: Mobilizing White Masculinity in the Men’s Rights Movement
- Valorizing Trump’s Masculine Self: Constructing Political Allegiance during the 2016 Presidential Election
- Becoming Men: Political Violence as an Apolitical Rite of Passage
Sessions and panels will also seek to examine political leaders outside of the United States, such as Brazil’s newly-elected president, Jair Bolsonaro, and Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s political Party “Lega” [The League], as well as politics in Poland, including a panel entitled, “Right-Wing Demonstrations in Poland — Who Joins and Why?”
UC Berkeley’s three-day extravaganza being co-sponsored by an unabashed far-left group is fitting, as the event appears to be predominately, if not solely, an apparatus used to fill youthful minds with the false narrative that “right wing” or mainstream conservative leaders in the U.S. and abroad are in league with white supremacy, Neo-Nazis, and other types of extremists.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo and on Instagram.
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