In a touching display of concern for fair play for anarchists, liberals in the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy are declaring their unanimous opinion that violent Antifa activists who clubbed participants in the Unite The Right rally there cannot be morally compared to neo-Nazis and KKK members.
To the extent that this is a response to President Trump's remarks at last night's press conference, one can only remark on the irrelevance of the claim. Trump in no way suggested such "moral equivalence." He reminded the rabid press corps that he had already explicitly condemned right-wing extremist violence, then went on to make the point that that did not excuse left-wing violence at Charlottesville, as it surely does not. Furthermore, Trump is also correct in saying that important factual matters are still being sorted out about that tragic night, so shrieking demands for categorical condemnation of only one side in the confrontation are premature and likely to perpetuate erroneous claims.
We've come to a pretty pass when a political baboon makes more sense than professional journalists paid to make rational judgments based on objective criteria. But - ho hum - this has been true for over two years now.
Here are some things rational people should want to know about Charlottesville with complete certainty: Who initiated the violence? What was the state of mind of the man who killed Heather Heyer? Was he in fear for his life? Was he on medications? What precipitated his lethal action? And why were the police unable or unwilling to keep the two violently opposed political groups physically separated? It's noteworthy that not one journalist asked President Trump even one of these questions last night. They were more interested in condemning "Nazism." How courageous.
At the moment, liberals want to hold "white supremacy" responsible for everything, as though that could possibly be a sufficient explanation of the horrifying tragedy. But white supremacist groups have been around for a long time, and, as President Trump correctly pointed out, they include revered figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And, he might have added, Teddy Roosevelt, whose white supremacist beliefs read like the worst of the Nazi archives. He's on Mt. Rushmore.
Trump did NOT equate the so-called alt-left and alt-right ideologically. He talked about how to apportion responsibility for the violence that erupted when the two opposed groups clashed. This is precisely what any president should be focused on in the wake of a tragedy that resulted in the death of a young woman. And it should be the focus of the press corps, too, but unfortunately is not.
It is the job of the press to discover the relevant facts and rationally account for them, not engage in moral grandstanding about how "there is no room for extremism in American life," a dubious claim if there ever was one. Tell it to the remnants of dozens of Indian nations whose cultures and peoples were enthusiastically annihilated by white supremacy. When's the last article from the press on this ongoing genocidal tradition, enforced by every single U.S. president from Washington to Trump?
The First Amendment does not say it's OK to club and mace demonstrators whose ideological convictions mirror the Founding Fathers,' but clash with the reigning establishment ideology of corporate multiculturalism. It says EVERYONE has the right to believe what they like and to lawfully petition the government for a redress of grievances. And nowhere in the Constitution does it say that people can be fired from their jobs and evicted from their apartments based on their political beliefs, as has already happened to participants in the Unite The Right demonstration in Charlottesville.
We do not need a ringing endorsement of phony multiculturalism from President Trump. We need a social revolution against a thoroughly corrupt establishment that has trashed the Constitution, eliminated any possibility of popular rule, and openly holds the American people in contempt. If we don't want that revolution led by neo-Nazis and Klansmen, let's stop promoting the toxic ideology of identity politics, which seeks to establish a "democratic" majority of victim groups ruling over a resentful white minority.
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