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Dayanna Gonzalez

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http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=5235

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Ruby Rico

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If you aren't already, it's time to panic. Wildfires raging out of control, a deadly pandemic raging, and we have a raging maniac in charge. Downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus when he knew how deadly it was, Donald Trump

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If you aren't already, it's time to panic. Wildfires raging out of control, a deadly pandemic raging, and we have a raging maniac in charge. Downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus when he knew how deadly it was, Donald Trump

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http://becauseimaddicted.net/2017/01/american-dream-actually-mean.html

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http://freakonomics.com/podcast/american-dream-really-dead/

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Dulce M.

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Item title reads - Ideal Home Exhibition. Olympia, London. Various exterior shots of Georgian house at exhibition. People look around the house. M/S of woman in dining room. C/U silverware, plate and cutlery. M/S woman working in modern kitchen, she places a cup on the table and takes an oven cloth from rack above table.

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“Many Americans want to work more or are already holding down multiple jobs”

“This is probably why many Americans plan to continue working when they hit retirement age. Some 42% expect to either retire at age 70 or older or to never retire.”

Many americans struggle in America

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Angel Madrid

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http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/10/news/economy/americans-struggling-financially/index.html

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http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/immigrants-face-tougher-road-american-dream-daca-cut-article-1.3468751

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http://www.commonsenseevaluation.com/2013/02/20/cartoon-of-the-day-10-2-2012/#sthash.5zzV1xts.dpbs

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"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else." - Winston Churchill

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Angel Madrid

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https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21586581-economist-asks-provocative-questions-about-future-social-mobility-american

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" I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream" - Bruce Springsteen

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Javier A

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Te'Sioun Diggs

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Amanda B.

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Angel Madrid

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/upshot/the-transformation-of-the-american-dream.html?mcubz=3

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Jordi

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Jordi

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Te'Sioun Diggs

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Starlene McMillian

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What does it mean to be an American? | Scholastic.com

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I have spent my life judging the distance between american reality

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I have spent

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Britney Theisgen

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Javier A

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Mr. Carson has explicitly said that homeownership is a central part of the Dream. In a speech at the National Housing Conference on June 9, he said, "I worry that millennials may become a lost generation for homeownership, excluded from the American Dream."

But that wasn't what the American Dream entailed when the writer James Truslow Adams popularized it in 1931, in his book "The Epic of America."

Mr. Adams emphasized ideals rather than material goods, a "dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement." And he clarified, "It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and recognized by others for what they are. "

His achievement was an innovation in language that largely replaced the older terms "American character" and "American principles" with a forward-looking phrase that implied modesty about current success in giving respect and equal opportunity to all people. The American dream was a trajectory to a promising future, a model for the United States and for the whole world.

In the 1930s and '40s, the term appeared occasionally in advertisements for intellectual products: plays, books and church sermons, book reviews and high-minded articles. During these years, it rarely, if ever, referred to business success or homeownership.

By 1950, shortly after World War II and the triumph against fascism, it was still about freedom and equality. In a book published in 1954, Peter Marshall, former chaplain of the United States Senate, defined the American Dream with spiritually resounding words: "Religious liberty to worship God according to the dictates of one's own conscience and equal opportunity for all men," he said, "are the twin pillars of the American Dream."

The term began to be used extensively in the 1960s. It may have owed its growing power to Martin Luther King's " I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, in which he spoke of a vision that was "deeply rooted in the American Dream." He said he dreamed of the disappearance of prejudice and a rise in community spirit, and certainly made no mention of deregulation or mortgage subsidies.

But as the term became more commonplace, its connection with notions of equality and community weakened. In the 1970s and '80s, home builders used it extensively in advertisements, perhaps to make conspicuous consumption seem patriotic.

Thanks in part to the deluge of advertisements, many people came to associate the American Dream with homeownership, with some unfortunate results. Increasing home sales became public policy. In 2003, President George W. Bush signed the American Dream Downpayment Act, subsidizing home purchases during a period in which a housing bubble - the one that would lead to the 2008-9 financial crisis - was already growing at a 10 percent annual rate, according to the S.&P. Corelogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price index (which I helped to create).

This year, Forbes Magazine started what it calls the " American Dream Index." It is based on seven statistical measures of material prosperity: bankruptcies, building permits, entrepreneurship, goods-producing employment, labor participation rate, layoffs and unemployment claims. This kind of characterization is commonplace today, and very different from the original spirit of the American dream.

One thing is clear: Bringing back the fevered housing dream of a decade ago would not be in the public interest. In " House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes," published in 2008, Daniel McGinn marveled at the craving for housing in that era: "In many neighborhoods, if you'd judged the nation's interests by its backyard-barbecue conversation - settings where subjects like war, death, and politics are risky conversational gambits - a lot of people find homes to be more compelling than any geopolitical struggle."

This is not to say that homes have no appropriate place in our dreams or our consciousness. To the contrary, in a 2015 book " Home: How Habitat Made Us Human," the neuroanthropologist John S. Allen wrote, "We humans are a species of homebodies." Ever since humans began making stone tools and pottery, they have needed a place to store them, he says, and the potential for intense feelings about our homes has evolved.

But the last decade has shown that with a little encouragement, many can easily become excessively lustful about homeownership and wealth, to the detriment of our economy and society.

That's the wrong way to go. Instead, we need to bring back the American Dream of a just society, where everyone has an opportunity to reach "the fullest stature of which they are innately capable. "

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The Transformation of the 'American Dream'

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Mr. Carson has explicitly said that homeownership is a central part of the Dream. In a speech at the National Housing Conference on June 9, he said, "I worry that millennials may become a lost generation for homeownership, excluded from the American Dream."

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Noah

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Amanda B.

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Jasmine C.

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Hundreds of protesters descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday for a "Unite the Right" rally: a belated coming-out party for an emboldened white nationalist movement in the United States.

The rally was dispersed by police minutes after its scheduled start at noon, after clashes between rallygoers and counter-protesters, and after a torchlit pre-rally march Friday night descended into violence.

But later that day, as rallygoers began a march and counterprotests continued, a reported Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 19.

Self-described "pro-white" activist Jason Kessler organized the rally to protest the planned removal of a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville. Kessler is affiliated with the alt-right movement that uses internet trolling tactics to argue against diversity and "identity politics" - part of a broader cultural backlash that helped elect Donald Trump.

But the rally quickly attracted other more traditional groups of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan.

The involvement of hate groups and the threat of violence led the city of Charlottesville to attempt to marginalize the rally for "hate speech," but the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defended the demonstrators' rights. The combination of rallygoers spoiling for a fight, and counter-protestors determined to convey that the rallygoers' ideology was not welcome in America, allowed the violence to overshadow the speech - and eventually prevent the rally from going forward as planned.

Plans to remove a Confederate statue have made Charlottesville a hot spot for right-wing activism

Charlottesville, like many cities in the South, still has public spaces and monuments celebrating heroes of the Confederacy - many of which weren't erected until the 20th century, as the civil rights movement began to pick up steam and Jim Crow laws started to come under attack.

In the wake of the 2015 massacre of several worshipers at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston by a white supremacist, there's been a renewed push to remove some of these Confederate monuments and rename streets and squares honoring the Confederacy. But where those campaigns have succeeded, there's often been a backlash from conservatives concerned about attempts to erase history, Southerners who consider the Confederacy part of their "heritage," and outright white nationalists.

In Charlottesville, advocates targeted a statue of Robert E. Lee in a park called Lee Square - city council members pointed out that Lee had no connection to Charlottesville, implying that commemorating him was just an indirect way to celebrate the Confederacy, while a high-school student collected 600 signatures on a Change.org petition to rename the statue. (A counter-petition collected 2,000 signatures.)

In February, the city council voted to sell the statue and rename the park Emancipation Park. (The statue is still in place.)

The decision made the city a target for right-wing activism and shows of strength - and for activists keen to stand up to them and demonstrate that such ideas weren't welcome. The Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Charlottesville in July, which was dwarfed by a massive counter-protest.

Meanwhile, Charlottesville resident Jason Kessler - a pro-white activist and a member of the Proud Boys, a loose collective of pro-Trump alt-rightists - put together the Unite the Right rally for Saturday, to be held at what event posters still call Lee Park. Speakers include some of the alt-right personalities who have flirted most openly with white nationalism, including Baked Alaska, an internet provocateur who was once the tour manager for fellow internet provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as self-identified white nationalists like Richard Spencer.

Political researcher Spencer Sunshine of the firm Political Research Associates told the Guardian's Jason Wilson that while the rally was originally intended to attract a broad coalition of right-wing groups, it had become "increasingly Nazified" - with some primarily anti-government "patriot" groups refusing to sign on, and explicitly fascist groups like the National Socialist Movement getting on board instead.

And many supporters and attendees of the rally certainly had no problem using Nazi tropes to promote it, as this "fan art" poster shows:

According to the Charlottesville police affidavit put out before the rally, planned attendees included the Klan; the militia movement (a right-wing movement that gained traction in the 1990s, whose members include the activists who took over a federal nature reserve in early 2016); the "3%", a right-wing anti-government movement; the Alt-Knights, an alt-right "fight club"; and others.

Police affidavit on tomorrow's "Unite the Right" attendees:
* 150+ Alt Knights
* 250-500 Klu Klux Klan
* 500 "3% Risen"
* 200-300 Militia pic.twitter.com/Xfg44vmQlT
- Jack Smith IV (@JackSmithIV) August 12, 2017

The Nazification of the alt-right

The arc of the Unite the Right rally - from an ostensible attempt to bring a broad coalition of conservative groups together to protest the controversial removal of a statue, to a "Nazified" rally for "the pro-white movement in America" - mirrors what's been happening to the alt-right as a whole. The movement's leaders have become increasingly willing to dabble in white-nationalist rhetoric and tropes, while attempting to avoid direct accusations of being themselves white nationalists.

The rise of the alt-right is one face of a broader backlash against "identity politics" and "political correctness," which have left some white Americans feeling that they're losing ground to nonwhites - or that America is losing its identity - and that political, economic, and media elites are either uninterested in defending their heritage or actively trying to eradicate it.

Among some younger, more internet-savvy people, hatred of "political correctness" has paired neatly with online troll culture, in which pushing boundaries and offending people is seen as harmless at worst and a show of cleverness at best.

In 2015 and 2016, the alt-right was an inescapable online presence, with some of its members crediting the movement's "meme magic" with the unexpected popularity of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary and, later, the general election. With Trump's election, some of its leaders have become more seriously engaged in politics, via pro-Trump organizations like the Proud Boys and the Alt-Knights.

Like Trump himself, alt-right leaders didn't start out by explicitly aligning themselves with the sort of right-wing groups and movements that almost everyone in 2017 America is willing to agree are racist - like the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. But racist rhetoric has become a hallmark of the movement, from the use of "cuck" to deride anti-alt-right conservatives to Twitter harassment of Jewish journalists by Photoshopping them into images of Nazi gas chambers.

That crosses the line into ideologies that most Americans agree are taboo. People may believe that Donald Trump supporters aren't necessarily racists, but they are willing to agree that members of the Klan and Nazis are racists. Indeed, it's a contrast with those groups that allows some people to draw the line between "real racism" and liberals "crying wolf" about racism. (This is true outside the alt-right as well - just look at pro-Trump commentator Jeffrey Lord, fired by CNN this week after tweeting "Sieg heil!" in what he claims was a joke.)

Many public figures and politicians on the left, center, and center-right have argued that the alt-right is defined by these actions - among many on the left, the term "alt-right" itself is an unacceptable euphemism that legitimizes an ideology that would be considered unacceptable if it were simply called white nationalism. Progressive writer Lindy West wrote in 2016 that the term "alt-right" was "an attempt to rebrand warmed-over Reconstruction-era white supremacy as a cool, new (and harmless!) internet fad."

Instead of responding by deliberately distancing themselves from white nationalism, though, leaders of the alt-right have deliberately blurred the distinction. They've adopted memes and hand gestures (like the "okay" symbol) as an inside joke, because people outside the movement have mistaken them for white nationalist symbols. The attitude tends to be that if "the left" is going to see them as Nazis, they might as well encourage that conception.

But there are plenty of people whose Naziism isn't ironic at all. And at an event like the Unite the Right rally, it's impossible to tell the difference between someone who's wearing a swastika pin or giving a Nazi salute "ironically" and someone who's doing it in earnest. The people who claim they're doing it "ironically" don't appear to have any problem with that confusion.

The line between "protected speech" and violent street fighting is getting very blurry

As the movement behind the Unite the Right rally has become so closely intertwined with groups universally condemned as racist, the response to the rally has started to treat it as inherently illegitimate - as an attack on the rights of people of color, LGBTQ Americans, non-Christians, and immigrants to live and worship safely in the United States.

Airbnb shut down accounts of users who were seeking accommodations in Charlottesville for the rally, citing its "Community Commitment": "those who are members of the Airbnb community accept people regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age."

And local governments have taken the initiative to shut down right-wing demonstrations before they happen - forcing them into the tricky position of deciding the line between protected free speech activity and physical violence waiting to happen.

In Portland in June, the city government attempted to revoke a permit for a pro-Trump "free speech" rally, but didn't succeed - then dispersed the rally and a counter-protest when they descended into violence.

In Charlottesville, the city government attempted to move the Unite the Right rally out of downtown; the ACLU helped defend the rally, and a judge's injunction Friday night allowed the original plan to remain in place. (Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, meanwhile, urged both would-be rallygoers and would-be counter-protesters to stay away from downtown Charlottesville Saturday.)

The problem is that while the law sees a clear distinction between speech and action when it comes to violence - a peaceful Nazi rally is protected by the First Amendment - many of the people attending do not.

The recent right-wing resurgence has fed a rise in an American "antifa" (short for "anti-fascist") movement, dedicated to violent resistance of ideologies that it sees as inherently violent (or, in simpler terms, dedicated to punching Nazis). While the counter-protesters to Saturday's Unite the Right rally planned peaceful resistance, some were prepared for self-defense; local activist Emily Gorecenski told the Guardian that she was carrying a gun because "The second amendment is one of the few civil rights I have left as a trans woman."

And many rally participants, for their part, were more than willing to beat up counter-protesters - as was demonstrated during a related march Friday night on the campus of the University of Virginia, which devolved into a brawl when marchers assaulted counter-protesters around a statue of Thomas Jefferson.

After stepping in somewhat belatedly on Friday, police officers took an aggressive stand Saturday to prevent the rally from going forward as planned. Both the city of Charlottesville and the state of Virginia declared states of emergency Saturday, minutes before the scheduled start time of the rally (but after clashes had already begun). Shortly before noon, police assembled at the rally site and declared the assembly "unlawful" before the rally actually began, then moved immediately to disperse the crowd.

But it's too late to keep the Unite the Right rally from becoming violent; to some, its concept was inherently violent, and few appear invested in stopping physical violence from erupting in its wake.

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Unite the Right, the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, explained

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Hundreds of protesters descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday for a "Unite the Right" rally: a belated coming-out party for an emboldened white nationalist movement in the United States. The rally was dispersed by police minutes after its scheduled start at noon, after clashes between rallygoers and counter-protesters, and after a torchlit pre-rally march Friday night descended into violence.

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Starlene McMillian

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Ah, yes. The American Dream. Imagine a happy, smiling mother and father with their 2.5 kids and a dog, sitting inside their nice house sheltered by a nice, clean, white picket fence.

By definition, the American Dream means:

"Life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement regardless of social class or circumstances of birth."

The American Dream's foundation lies in the Declaration of Independence, which says that:

"All men are created equal with the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

But as we all know, this document was written by Thomas Jefferson, the same dude that personally owned over 200 slaves, and is publicly known to have raped and bred his female slaves.

The American Dream is just that -- a dream. It's a set of goals and expectations set before each American even though they are not nearly as obtainable as they are made out to be.

Why, you ask?

The issues begin with the very definition of the American Dream. "Regardless of social class or circumstances of birth." Excuse me? Let us not forget that as of 2014, the overall poverty rate is about 15 percent. About 20 percent of that includes those of Latin descent, about 30 percent are African American, about 30 include Native Americans, about 15 percent identify as transgender, and about 30 percent include those with disabilities. Also see the 80-cent gender wage gap

Seeing as America was founded on the wealth that is attached to owning property, those of us who do not and cannot afford to do so are left out. J ust in case y'all forgot: Black people fell under the category of property in the Constitution until 1865.

America only cares about poor people once you're done being poor. The United States spends less on social programs than other first-world countries, but has a relative poverty rate almost twice as high as those nations, including a child poverty rate of more than twice as high. Most articles you read about individuals regarding poverty, however, are only done once they have beat the odds and made themselves successful, adding data to the played-out idea of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."

As most of us know, an unreasonable amount of pressure has been put on higher education. Years ago, a degree could guarantee you a job. Currently, the unemployment rate is about 5.5 percent, which is comparatively low. However, about 44 percent of recent college grads are still stuck in their low wage jobs, happily clutching their degrees and trying to ignore the ever looming debt.

In short, the American Dream is a sham. Some argue that society has groomed us to argue against Jefferson's manifesto, which has led us to be lazy. Some argue that you can get by with being straight, cisgender, white and male. While those traits undoubtedly help, we live in a society that has been founded on both oppression and capitalism. If you start at the bottom, you have to fight to crawl up the rungs even the slightest.

Obviously we can, and should, make the absolute best out of our situation. Take a hold of your life and control what you can, but don't let anyone make you feel any less than them for being in a different spot on an uneven playing field.

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Ah, yes. The American Dream. Imagine a happy, smiling mother and father with their 2.5 kids and a dog, sitting inside their nice house sheltered by a nice, clean, white picket fence. By definition, the American Dream means: "Life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement regardless of social class or circumstances of birth."

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Luis M

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Jasmine C.

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Hundreds of protesters descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday for a "Unite the Right" rally: a belated coming-out party for an emboldened white nationalist movement in the United States.

The rally was dispersed by police minutes after its scheduled start at noon, after clashes between rallygoers and counter-protesters, and after a torchlit pre-rally march Friday night descended into violence.

But later that day, as rallygoers began a march and counterprotests continued, a reported Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 19.

Self-described "pro-white" activist Jason Kessler organized the rally to protest the planned removal of a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville. Kessler is affiliated with the alt-right movement that uses internet trolling tactics to argue against diversity and "identity politics" - part of a broader cultural backlash that helped elect Donald Trump.

But the rally quickly attracted other more traditional groups of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan.

The involvement of hate groups and the threat of violence led the city of Charlottesville to attempt to marginalize the rally for "hate speech," but the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defended the demonstrators' rights. The combination of rallygoers spoiling for a fight, and counter-protestors determined to convey that the rallygoers' ideology was not welcome in America, allowed the violence to overshadow the speech - and eventually prevent the rally from going forward as planned.

Plans to remove a Confederate statue have made Charlottesville a hot spot for right-wing activism

Charlottesville, like many cities in the South, still has public spaces and monuments celebrating heroes of the Confederacy - many of which weren't erected until the 20th century, as the civil rights movement began to pick up steam and Jim Crow laws started to come under attack.

In the wake of the 2015 massacre of several worshipers at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston by a white supremacist, there's been a renewed push to remove some of these Confederate monuments and rename streets and squares honoring the Confederacy. But where those campaigns have succeeded, there's often been a backlash from conservatives concerned about attempts to erase history, Southerners who consider the Confederacy part of their "heritage," and outright white nationalists.

In Charlottesville, advocates targeted a statue of Robert E. Lee in a park called Lee Square - city council members pointed out that Lee had no connection to Charlottesville, implying that commemorating him was just an indirect way to celebrate the Confederacy, while a high-school student collected 600 signatures on a Change.org petition to rename the statue. (A counter-petition collected 2,000 signatures.)

In February, the city council voted to sell the statue and rename the park Emancipation Park. (The statue is still in place.)

The decision made the city a target for right-wing activism and shows of strength - and for activists keen to stand up to them and demonstrate that such ideas weren't welcome. The Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Charlottesville in July, which was dwarfed by a massive counter-protest.

Meanwhile, Charlottesville resident Jason Kessler - a pro-white activist and a member of the Proud Boys, a loose collective of pro-Trump alt-rightists - put together the Unite the Right rally for Saturday, to be held at what event posters still call Lee Park. Speakers include some of the alt-right personalities who have flirted most openly with white nationalism, including Baked Alaska, an internet provocateur who was once the tour manager for fellow internet provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as self-identified white nationalists like Richard Spencer.

Political researcher Spencer Sunshine of the firm Political Research Associates told the Guardian's Jason Wilson that while the rally was originally intended to attract a broad coalition of right-wing groups, it had become "increasingly Nazified" - with some primarily anti-government "patriot" groups refusing to sign on, and explicitly fascist groups like the National Socialist Movement getting on board instead.

And many supporters and attendees of the rally certainly had no problem using Nazi tropes to promote it, as this "fan art" poster shows:

According to the Charlottesville police affidavit put out before the rally, planned attendees included the Klan; the militia movement (a right-wing movement that gained traction in the 1990s, whose members include the activists who took over a federal nature reserve in early 2016); the "3%", a right-wing anti-government movement; the Alt-Knights, an alt-right "fight club"; and others.

Police affidavit on tomorrow's "Unite the Right" attendees:
* 150+ Alt Knights
* 250-500 Klu Klux Klan
* 500 "3% Risen"
* 200-300 Militia pic.twitter.com/Xfg44vmQlT
- Jack Smith IV (@JackSmithIV) August 12, 2017

The Nazification of the alt-right

The arc of the Unite the Right rally - from an ostensible attempt to bring a broad coalition of conservative groups together to protest the controversial removal of a statue, to a "Nazified" rally for "the pro-white movement in America" - mirrors what's been happening to the alt-right as a whole. The movement's leaders have become increasingly willing to dabble in white-nationalist rhetoric and tropes, while attempting to avoid direct accusations of being themselves white nationalists.

The rise of the alt-right is one face of a broader backlash against "identity politics" and "political correctness," which have left some white Americans feeling that they're losing ground to nonwhites - or that America is losing its identity - and that political, economic, and media elites are either uninterested in defending their heritage or actively trying to eradicate it.

Among some younger, more internet-savvy people, hatred of "political correctness" has paired neatly with online troll culture, in which pushing boundaries and offending people is seen as harmless at worst and a show of cleverness at best.

In 2015 and 2016, the alt-right was an inescapable online presence, with some of its members crediting the movement's "meme magic" with the unexpected popularity of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary and, later, the general election. With Trump's election, some of its leaders have become more seriously engaged in politics, via pro-Trump organizations like the Proud Boys and the Alt-Knights.

Like Trump himself, alt-right leaders didn't start out by explicitly aligning themselves with the sort of right-wing groups and movements that almost everyone in 2017 America is willing to agree are racist - like the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. But racist rhetoric has become a hallmark of the movement, from the use of "cuck" to deride anti-alt-right conservatives to Twitter harassment of Jewish journalists by Photoshopping them into images of Nazi gas chambers.

That crosses the line into ideologies that most Americans agree are taboo. People may believe that Donald Trump supporters aren't necessarily racists, but they are willing to agree that members of the Klan and Nazis are racists. Indeed, it's a contrast with those groups that allows some people to draw the line between "real racism" and liberals "crying wolf" about racism. (This is true outside the alt-right as well - just look at pro-Trump commentator Jeffrey Lord, fired by CNN this week after tweeting "Sieg heil!" in what he claims was a joke.)

Many public figures and politicians on the left, center, and center-right have argued that the alt-right is defined by these actions - among many on the left, the term "alt-right" itself is an unacceptable euphemism that legitimizes an ideology that would be considered unacceptable if it were simply called white nationalism. Progressive writer Lindy West wrote in 2016 that the term "alt-right" was "an attempt to rebrand warmed-over Reconstruction-era white supremacy as a cool, new (and harmless!) internet fad."

Instead of responding by deliberately distancing themselves from white nationalism, though, leaders of the alt-right have deliberately blurred the distinction. They've adopted memes and hand gestures (like the "okay" symbol) as an inside joke, because people outside the movement have mistaken them for white nationalist symbols. The attitude tends to be that if "the left" is going to see them as Nazis, they might as well encourage that conception.

But there are plenty of people whose Naziism isn't ironic at all. And at an event like the Unite the Right rally, it's impossible to tell the difference between someone who's wearing a swastika pin or giving a Nazi salute "ironically" and someone who's doing it in earnest. The people who claim they're doing it "ironically" don't appear to have any problem with that confusion.

The line between "protected speech" and violent street fighting is getting very blurry

As the movement behind the Unite the Right rally has become so closely intertwined with groups universally condemned as racist, the response to the rally has started to treat it as inherently illegitimate - as an attack on the rights of people of color, LGBTQ Americans, non-Christians, and immigrants to live and worship safely in the United States.

Airbnb shut down accounts of users who were seeking accommodations in Charlottesville for the rally, citing its "Community Commitment": "those who are members of the Airbnb community accept people regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age."

And local governments have taken the initiative to shut down right-wing demonstrations before they happen - forcing them into the tricky position of deciding the line between protected free speech activity and physical violence waiting to happen.

In Portland in June, the city government attempted to revoke a permit for a pro-Trump "free speech" rally, but didn't succeed - then dispersed the rally and a counter-protest when they descended into violence.

In Charlottesville, the city government attempted to move the Unite the Right rally out of downtown; the ACLU helped defend the rally, and a judge's injunction Friday night allowed the original plan to remain in place. (Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, meanwhile, urged both would-be rallygoers and would-be counter-protesters to stay away from downtown Charlottesville Saturday.)

The problem is that while the law sees a clear distinction between speech and action when it comes to violence - a peaceful Nazi rally is protected by the First Amendment - many of the people attending do not.

The recent right-wing resurgence has fed a rise in an American "antifa" (short for "anti-fascist") movement, dedicated to violent resistance of ideologies that it sees as inherently violent (or, in simpler terms, dedicated to punching Nazis). While the counter-protesters to Saturday's Unite the Right rally planned peaceful resistance, some were prepared for self-defense; local activist Emily Gorecenski told the Guardian that she was carrying a gun because "The second amendment is one of the few civil rights I have left as a trans woman."

And many rally participants, for their part, were more than willing to beat up counter-protesters - as was demonstrated during a related march Friday night on the campus of the University of Virginia, which devolved into a brawl when marchers assaulted counter-protesters around a statue of Thomas Jefferson.

After stepping in somewhat belatedly on Friday, police officers took an aggressive stand Saturday to prevent the rally from going forward as planned. Both the city of Charlottesville and the state of Virginia declared states of emergency Saturday, minutes before the scheduled start time of the rally (but after clashes had already begun). Shortly before noon, police assembled at the rally site and declared the assembly "unlawful" before the rally actually began, then moved immediately to disperse the crowd.

But it's too late to keep the Unite the Right rally from becoming violent; to some, its concept was inherently violent, and few appear invested in stopping physical violence from erupting in its wake.

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Unite the Right, the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, explained

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Hundreds of protesters descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday for a "Unite the Right" rally: a belated coming-out party for an emboldened white nationalist movement in the United States. The rally was dispersed by police minutes after its scheduled start at noon, after clashes between rallygoers and counter-protesters, and after a torchlit pre-rally march Friday night descended into violence.

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Over the next two months, The Atlantic will explore many different visions of the American dream, in stories, videos, and photo essays.

Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

In 1961, right in the midst of the period Cullen described, Eleanor Roosevelt took to The Atlantic to voice this concern. In an essay called "What Has Happened to the American Dream?" the former First Lady wrote:

The future will be determined by the young, and there is no more essential task today, it seems to me, than to bring before them once more, in all its brightness, in all its splendor and beauty, the American dream, lest we let it fade, too concerned with ways of earning a living or impressing our neighbors or getting ahead or finding bigger and more potent ways of destroying the world and all that is in it.

Proclamations of the dream's death haven't really let up. "The fact is, the American dream is dead," Donald Trump recently declared as he announced his bid for President. Alternet and Mic.com have dueling arrays of charts to show anyone who claims the dream is still alive. Here at The Atlantic, we've gone as far as to declare it dead in the South, at least. Four years ago, The Onion was actually on the scene reporting shortly after the official time of death.

Visions of a successful life in the U.S. and abroad
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Yet the octogenarian dream has proven remarkably hard to kill off. Again and again, its death has been noted, and mourned. Politicians promise they'll revive it. (The second half of Donald Trump's quote: "The fact is, the American dream is dead-but if I win, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.") And yet somehow, a few years later, it turns out to have been alive enough to have its death proclaimed all over again.

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Over the next two months, The Atlantic will explore many different visions of the American dream, in stories, videos, and photo essays. In 1961, right in the midst of the period Cullen described, Eleanor Roosevelt took to The Atlantic to voice this concern. In an essay called "What Has Happened to the American Dream?"

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Item title reads - Ideal Home Exhibition. Olympia, London. Various exterior shots of Georgian house at exhibition. People look around the house. M/S of woman in dining room. C/U silverware, plate and cutlery. M/S woman working in modern kitchen, she places a cup on the table and takes an oven cloth from rack above table.

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Angel Madrid

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http://
www.huffingtonpost.com/jose-antonio-vargas/jose-antonio-vargas-meaning-of-american_b_1647894.html

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/akbar-ahmed/what-is-an-american_b_240790.html

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Amanda B.

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Jordi Isidro

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Luis M

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http://www.anonymousartofrevolution.com/2013/01/what-is-your-opinion-about-food.html

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/akbar-ahmed/what-is-an-american_b_240790.html

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https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-07-04/what-it-means-to-be-an-american-in-2016

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https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-07-04/what-it-means-to-be-an-american-in-2016