it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it was intentional. The car rammed the crowd at speed, backed up, and sped away. This horrific incident capped a day of street brawls after hundreds of alt-right activists, neo-Confederates, and outright Nazis marched together to express and defend their “blood and soil” white nationalism.
.. It would be much easier to write off this small band of racists if they weren’t also part of a larger alt-right movement that was responsible for an unprecedented wave of online threats, intimidation, and harassment throughout the 2016 campaign season. Journalists, writers (including me and my family), and ordinary citizens were targeted with obscene and threatening images, racist messages, “doxing,” and sometimes promises of physical violence — all for the sin of criticizing Trump.
.. Violence then started to spill into the real world. A man wielding a sword hunted and killed a black man in New York City. A member of an “alt-Reich Nation” Facebook group killed another black man in Maryland. A man opened fire on two immigrants at a bar in Kansas, killing one. A white supremacist in Portland murdered two men on a train who intervened when he harassed a Muslim and her black friend. And that’s not an exclusive list. Meanwhile, the online hate campaigns roll on.
.. Incredibly, key elements of the Trump coalition, including Trump himself, gave the alt-right aid and comfort. Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, proclaimed that his publication, Breitbart.com, was the “the platform for the alt-right,” Breitbart long protected, promoted, and published Milo Yiannopolous – the alt-right’s foremost “respectable” defender – and Trump himself retweeted alt-right accounts and launched into an explicitly racial attack against an American judge of Mexican descent, an attack that delighted his most racist supporters.
.. In other words, if there ever was a time in recent American political history for an American president to make a clear, unequivocal statement against the alt-right, it was today. Instead, we got a vague condemnation of “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” This is unacceptable, especially given that Trump can be quite specific when he’s truly angry. Just ask the Khan family, Judge Curiel, James Comey, or any other person he considers a personal enemy. Even worse, members of the alt-right openly celebrated Trump’s statement, taking it as a not-so-veiled decision to stand against media calls to condemn their movement.
State of Emergency Declared in Charlottesville After Protests Turn Violent
Inside the park, which was encircled with metal barricades and police, hundreds of white nationalists gathered around the Lee statue, chanting phrases like “You will not replace us,” and “Jew will not replace us.”
Outside the park, a huge mass of counter-protesters grew, shouting phrases like “Nazi scum.” By 11:35 a.m., police had retreated, the barricades came down and street fights broke out. People were seen clubbing one another in the streets. Pepper spray filled the air as the police attempted to contain the situation.
Firing Damore makes a martyr of him. To figures of the far-right “alt-right” movement (a rebranding of neo-Nazis, in my humble opinion) he became an instant hero, another sacrificial white male victim of liberal, pro-diversity “Social Justice Warriors,” the alt-right label for those of us who think our society benefits from its diversity.
For example, Damore’s memo omits evidence that bias, conscious and unconscious, still holds women back in the tech fields. A study by university computer students last year, for example, looked at 3 million “pull requests” for computer code at GitHub, an open-source repository of codes with which users can build software. The study found that “code written by women was requested at a higher rate (78.6 percent) than code written by men (74.6%),” according to The Guardian, as long as the gender of the woman was not revealed. When the code author’s gender was revealed, the acceptance rate dropped to about the same as men.
.. Firing Damore makes a martyr of him. To figures of the far-right “alt-right” movement (a rebranding of neo-Nazis, in my humble opinion) he became an instant hero, another sacrificial white male victim of liberal, pro-diversity “Social Justice Warriors,” the alt-right label for those of us who think our society benefits from its diversity.
Mark Steyn bio
Introducing him at the United States Senate in 2015, Ted Cruz called Mark Steyn “an international bestselling author, a Top Five jazz recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist“.
All of which happens to be true.
Mark is the author of After America, which was a Top Five bestseller in the United States and a Number One bestseller in Canada; America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It, a New York Times bestseller in the United States and a Number One bestseller in Canada; and his most recent bestseller, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn.
“A Marshmallow World“, his Christmas single with Jessica Martin, reached Number Seven on Amazon’s easy listening bestsellers, and Number 41 on their main pop chart. Their subsequent full-length Christmas album, Making Spirits Bright, reached Number Four on the jazz chart. Mark’s latest CD is his cat album, dedicated to his own beloved cat Marvin: Feline Groovy: Songs for Swingin’ Cats was a Number One jazz bestseller and a Top 30 album on Amazon’s pop chart.
Steyn’s human rights campaign to restore free speech to Canada led to the repeal by Parliament of the notorious “Section 13” hate-speech law, a battle he recounts in his book Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West.
Mark is also a popular guest host of America’s Number One radio show The Rush Limbaugh Program, as well as the top-rated Fox News TV show Hannity. In Canada, he can be heard on AM640’s John Oakley Show in Toronto. In 2017 he began his own Mark Steyn Show.