Welcome to the Dig, a podcast from Jackabin magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

Today I'm kicking off a new thing that we're going to try. A second weekly episode that will be posted on Fridays.

The regular Tuesday episodes of The Dig are long and in-depth interviews with scholars,

journalists, and activists.

And they are, to be sure, not typically pegged

to the 24-hour cable news and Twitter cycle.

That's why I started the show and why I presume you listen to it.

But I think the second weekly episode,

a shorter interview making sense of some of what happened

over the past week will be a nice compliment.

My first guest for this mini-digglet is Sarah Jones, a writer at the New Republic. She is a really brilliant newish voice on the left.

You probably know her and she has been my guest before.

We're going to talk about the recent white supremacist violence in Charlottesville and the false equivalency created by the notion of an alt left, a term that Trump recently invoked.

What about the alt left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?

This is sort of thing. Let me ask you this. What the fact that came charging that they came

charging with clubs in the hand swinging clubs do they have any problem I think they do

so you know as far as I'm concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day.

Wait a minute, I'm not finished.

I'm not finished, fake news.

Wow, gross as always.

But the term was actually popularized by centrist liberals

as part of an ongoing smear campaign

...