Editor's note: Bradley Blankenship is a Prague-based American journalist, political analyst and freelance reporter. The article reflects the author's opinions, not necessarily the views of CGTN.

I grew up in Northern Kentucky, in the Cincinnati Metropolitan Area, in a predominantly white, sparsely populated county. When I was just an infant, I was baptized Catholic and later attended a private Catholic school attached to that very same church building until around the age of 12.

Many of my peers and family members went on to attend schools in this same network, including the all-boys Covington Catholic High School – the same one whose students were involved in the January 2019 Lincoln Memorial confrontation.

One of my younger cousins was also at the so-called "March for Life" alongside Nicholas Sandmann, the young man who was infamously videotaped during the debacle. Whether one chooses to believe the villainous media rendition of these young men, or to buy into the "innocent victim" persona Sandmann's lawyers painted of them, there is no doubt, at least based on my interactions, that their political descent into the far-right has been an ongoing process. 

Many of these young men have latched onto prominent alt-right voices such as Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and others who spout bigotry, xenophobia, sexism, intentional misrepresentations of their political opponents, as well as sympathetic views towards far-right leaders such as Augusto Pinochet and other butchers. I've heard on multiple occasions from this group the exact same garbled talking points spouted by these insidious political actors. 

When I left private school, joined public school and quit going to church, my connection to this community was loosened. But my incidental run-ins with the radical right were not. The latter half of my junior year of high school was spent at Randall K. Cooper High School in Union, Kentucky, a comparatively wealthy public school district, attended also at the same time by James Alex Fields Jr., the perpetrator of the Charlottesville car attack in August 2017 that killed one woman and injured 28 other people. 

Though I didn't know Fields personally, several of my classmates said in retrospect that he was an open Nazi who was fascinated with Adolf Hitler. According to one former classmate, during a European trip on their class' senior trip, Fields refused to take a shower in France, saying the country was "disgusting," and uttered anti-Semitic statements whilst at a Nazi death camp.

Derek Weimer, a former teacher at Cooper High, who taught Fields, said after the incident that he was aware of Fields' radical ideas and felt that he and other adults had failed after hearing about Fields' act of terror. 

"I felt it my mission to explain how vile the Nazis were," the teacher told the Blade at the time. 

Perhaps Weimer was one of the only ones because Fields found a home amongst other overtly racist kids who grew up in similar environments – all of their behavior and outward shows of bigotry ignored by the adults around them. This was no doubt the case with 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, the suspect of a fatal shooting this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who was arrested early on the morning of August 26.

According to news reports, the teen is a former member of a youth police cadet program and was also spotted in the front row of a rally for U.S. President Donald Trump in January. The young man's social media is littered with images of weapons, "Blue Lives Matter" propaganda and posts praising the president. 

Videos show Rittenhouse fraternizing with law enforcement, apparently seeing himself as an unofficial police officer there to protect property from 'violent' Black Lives Matter protesters. This apparently paid off because Rittenhouse fled the scene without any police interference.

"How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?" asked Fox News host and white supremacist darling Tucker Carlson in a complete dismissal of Rittenhouse's hideous crime, painting victims as perpetrators. 

Let's ignore Carlson for the hack he is and ask a more serious line of questioning. When I saw the video of Nicholas Sandmann in 2017, I immediately asked myself where the boys' parents were. Why were they allowing them  to be in this situation in the first place? 

The answer is that they don't see any problem with minors being politicized so long as it's for their preferred cause, i.e. for reactionary politics. Covington Catholic actually sends its students every year to the March for Life to promote the church's political agenda and kids are actively encouraged by adults in the community to engage in Republican politics. 

The same goes for young white men sucked up into other programs – youth police cadet programs, Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) and so on that have deep sympathy for the political right. 

Nicholas Sandmann is not a violent extremist, but he reflects a type of grooming and is now being paraded by the national Republic Party like a cheap prop against the so-called "cancel culture." I have no doubt that his very unearned status as a martyr has contributed to the further radicalization of other young white men who also see themselves as victims.

In even more extreme situations, it should be clearly understood that young white men like James Alex Fields Jr., Kyle Rittenhouse and others didn't come from a vacuum. They are in fact groomed from a young age to be political, even radically intolerant. Such political activity is only seen as a natural action, one obviously rooted in clear class incentive and white privilege.

All around, the fact is that these violent attacks by young white men are the culmination of a long tradition of acceptance of the most reactionary and hateful political tendencies alive today in the United States, emboldened by the administration of Donald Trump, by the white middle class.

I have lived it and I can safely say that these people – not just the absurdly wealthy or card-carrying Nazis – are the true bulwark of America's growing fascist tendency.

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