The killing of an activist in Georgia highlights the disparity of state violence inflicted on progressives, and not toward far-right and racist demonstrators.
Michael Gould-Wartofsky (@mgouldwartofsky) is an award-winning writer, scholar, educator, and ethnographer whose work focuses on state-society relations and contemporary social movements, right and left, in the United States and internationally. Gould-Wartofsky is the author of The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement (Oxford University Press, 2015) and American Inquisitions: A Social History of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in America (forthcoming, 2025). In addition to The Daily Beast, he has written for Gizmodo, Guernica, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Washington Post, and his research has been featured on PBS and NPR. He holds a PhD in Sociology from NYU and a BA in Government from Harvard University.
Five years since the murder of Heather Heyer, the government and law enforcement still coddle right-wing extremists and criminalize peaceful left-wing protesters.