Chris Cuomo delivered a passionate monologue on Monday evening, defending Antifa after several incidents of violence from its members over the weekend while counter-protesting against white supremacists in Washington D.C. and Charlottesville, Virginia.
The CNN anchor said there could be no “moral equivalency” between violence from the two camps and that outbursts from those protesting hate was more excusable than those promoting hate.
“It’s not about being right in the eyes of the law, but you also have to know what’s right and wrong in a moral and a good and evil sense,” said Cuomo “That’s why people who show up to fight against bigots are not to be judged the same as the bigots, even if they do resort to the same kinds of petty violence. The law will take care of that.”
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Cuomo also said that the issue was comparable to fighting an immoral enemy in a war or the civil rights movement.
“Fighting against hate matters,” he said. “In a clash between hate and those who oppose it, those who oppose it are on the side of right.”
On Sunday, less than two dozen supremacists were met in Washington D.C and Charlottesville by hundreds of counter-protesters. Many were members of Antifa, the self-described anti-fascist group, and multiple instances were reported of journalists being heckled, shoved or otherwise impeded from doing their work. Cuomo’s colleagues, Brian Stelter and Jake Tapper both condemned the violence
Unacceptable behavior by a protester in C'Ville last night — violently swatting away a journalist's camera — I asked @CalNBC for more info, and he deferred to his tweets, which described the protest as "almost exclusively Antifa at that point." https://t.co/BJ2t5HGceZ
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 12, 2018
Totally unacceptable and not at all out of the norm for antifa https://t.co/LvqyZByugX
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) August 12, 2018
The rallies were organized by white supremacists groups looking to mark the one year anniversary of the deadly “Unite The Right” rallies in Charlottesville. That clash drew hundreds of torch-bearing white nationalists and resulted in the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer.
President Trump infamously declined to explicitly condemn the white nationalists saying that there were “very fine people” on “both sides”
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