Mr. Trump seems to have concluded what many other conservatives did about the tragedy in Charlottesville, Va.: As tragic as it was, it was incited by a small, unrepresentative group of bigots purporting to speak for the right whose antics would be exhaustively covered in the news.
.. “They think there were 300 or so racists who showed up to a rally, and who got exactly what they wanted: Violence, and violence in a way that inspires the nation’s elite to double down on iconoclasm in a way they hope grows their movement,” said Ben Domenech, the publisher of The Federalist, an online magazine.
.. Mr. Trump and conservatives have pointed to several recent episodes as evidence of the left gone mad.
- They include the comedian Kathy Griffin’s posing for a picture with a fake severed Trump head, and
- a production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” that featured a Trump-like actor as the emperor who is fatally stabbed onstage.
- Some seized on the shooting that seriously injured Representative Steve Scalise
- One recent web video from the National Rifle Association accused liberals of attempting to “bully and terrorize the law abiding” as it implored Americans to “fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.”
.. Of at least 372 murders that were committed by domestic extremists between 2007 and 2016, according to a study by the Anti-Defamation League,
- 74 percent were committed by right-wing extremists.
- Muslim extremists were responsible for 24 percent of those killings,
- and the small remainder were committed by left-wing extremists
.. the emphasis for many conservatives is not on statistics that indicate who is the more violent offender. Rather, he said, the point is about the general tenor of political debate, which people like him believe is weighted against them.
.. “You don’t have a ton of reporters banging on the doors of Democrats asking them to denounce Antifa,” he said, referring to the militant Marxist-inspired group that rioted at Mr. Trump’s inauguration and often shows up looking for confrontation at sites where conservative writers like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos are scheduled to speak.
.. Mr. Trump is no mere bit player in the discussion of political violence. At various times, he has offered to pay the legal bills of supporters who get in brawls at his events and stated, without offering any proof, that paid agitators were responsible for protests against him.
.. Alex Jones .. said people who protested the white supremacists over the weekend were probably actors
.. Mr. Jones played down the significance of the violence, saying it was likely staged by “Democratic Party activists” who are looking to “overdemonize” whites and “put chips on the shoulders of the so-called minorities.”
.. Demographically, blacks are 12 times more likely to attack whites for no reason,” Mr. Jones went on, providing no evidence for his claim. “It’s a fact.”
.. He then recounted his own experience watching a Nazi rally he said was attended by Jews posing as Nazis, evident by their “curly hair, and you know, dark eyes.”
.. Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theory peddler, was gleeful as he posted on Twitter about the violence on Saturday. “Civil War is here!” he wrote.
.. There is also a new political term to describe the circular firing squad in which right and left have blamed the other for the country’s degenerating political debate — “whataboutism.”
.. Guy Benson, a conservative writer and an author of the book “End of Discussion,” which argues that the left has tried to shut down political debate by declaring certain topics off the table, said he sees a “whataboutism overreach” among some conservatives.
.. “Round and round we go with this one-upsmanship of who’s worse,” Mr. Benson added, “and that’s a really terrible way to argue.”
Trump, Obama and the Politics of Evasion
O.K., now here’s hoping you’re revolted by each of the six preceding points. Because, if you are, then maybe we can at last rethink the policy of euphemism, obfuscation, denial and semantic yoga that typified the Obama administration’s discussions of another form of terrorism.
.. Islamist terrorism, or what former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano used to call “man-caused disasters”
.. Napolitano’s “man-caused disasters” didn’t survive the political laugh test, but the fantastically elastic phrase “violent extremism” did.
.. there is a record of what Obama believed were the causes of terrorism. “Extremely poor societies and weak states,” Obama explained in 2007, “provide optimal breeding grounds for disease, terrorism and conflict.”
.. “lack of opportunity for jobs” as the “root causes that lead people to join these groups.”
.. If Iran had taken Americans hostage and killed hundreds of our soldiers, well, as Obama often noted, hadn’t we helped overthrow the Mossadegh government back in 1953?
.. it indicts him all the more, since it’s precisely the sort of bizarre and blatant evasiveness he used to denounce in his predecessor.
.. But it should also be a reminder that when it comes to looking the other way in the face of extremism and violence, failing to call evil groups by their correct names and providing economic alibis for moral depravity, liberals have their own accounts to settle.
Comments
.. Obama’s reluctance to conflate “Islam” with terrorism and violence was a credible effort to differentiate the vast and growing world population of muslims from the aberrant, militant minority of radical Islamists. It was a formalist, intellectual position, easy to misunderstand, and vulnerable to exploitation by Republicans and Right Wingers wishing to exploit blind hatred (for political gain) of muslims based on horrific terrorist stereotypes.
I don’t see the equivalence between the Obama administration’s carefully considered strategy to separate religion from politics, and the Donald’s unwillingness to confront the re emergent darkness of an unamerican fascist movement.
.. Wow – even with this, the right wing cannot avoid false equivalence.
Let me say this in simple language that Brett can understand. If the response to C’ville was to say “this proves that all white people must be monitored and condemned because they are all fascists”, or “this means that all christians and all supporters of the second amendment are dangers to the republic”, then we might have a comparable situation. But that didn’t happen.
.. However, they never avoided condemnation of the acts of violence. It is a world of difference.
.. The first difference is that the KKK and white supremacists are white and we know lots of people who are white but do not hold these ideologies. Therefore, we do not paint all white people with the broad brush of white supremacists who may incite violence. We are not passing white people in the street looking at them suspiciously or designing laws to discriminate against white people because they may harbor these views but since we can’t tell just by looking at them, we’ll just treat all white people as potential violent white supremacists.
Conversely, not many of us know any Muslims, or at least not well. So, our beliefs about them are developed by what we see on TV. If we only see this group of people as a bunch of terrorists, then every Muslim we meet are going to viewed as a potential terrorist.
.. The Obama Administration was walking on eggshells to protect millions of innocent Muslims from vengeful people who target them because of how they look, where they come from, how they worship.
Trying to balance public safety against the appropriate condemnation of violent jihadists, and people who use their religion as an excuse to murder and brutalize others, and as an excuse to commit mass murder for political gains is a tricky proposition.
The truth is that James Alex Fields, and Dylan Roof are cut from the same cloth, inspired by vile and evil rhetoric, as the lone wolf Islamic terrorists. But the other truth is that angry mobs are unlikely to go and attack random white people assuming they are terrorists. That’s not true for Muslims, as we saw in Kansas, just being there got two Indian men shot, or at the Sikh temple, or at the recent Mosque bombing.
.. This is a great example of why it’s been so hard for moderates to talk with conservatives. The conservative response is always: “But Obama” or “What about her emails”. Where’s the frank evaluation of Trump’s response?
.. Criticizing specific Islamist beliefs (e.g. martyrdom, Paradise, jihad, apostasy, etc.) is criticism of ideas, not bigotry against people. Criticism of these illiberal ideas is as legitimate and worthy an enterprise as criticism of the alt-right’s ideology. In fact, criticizing the ideology of both Islamism and the alt-right isn’t just intellectually honest – it’s also the *liberal* thing to do.
.. Linking terrorism to Islam ties all Muslims to terrorism. Linking terrorism to white supremacists ties only white supremacists to terrorism, not all white people. The situations are not equivalent.
Besides, what Obama did is part of a critique of Obama. It’s not a validation of Trump, who is operating in different circumstances. He has the burden of riches, not blackness. Trump is an independent individual supposedly capable of making his own choices and decisions, and he is entirely responsible for those.
.. Jeffery Goldberg had a long essay in The Atlantic explaining why he thought Obama’s soft talk on terrorism was tolerable – his actions, according to Goldberg, killed many terrorists and thus he was walking softly and carrying a big stick. I don’t agree but its a fair point.
We’ll see if Trump’s Justice Dept. carries a big stick re: Nazis and KKK. It must.
.. This weekend wasn’t the time for Trump to drag in the Antifa groups but they will have to be reckoned with at some point: what they did in Berkeley, Hamburg and so many other places- harassing, assaulting, rioting, vandalizing and looting behind balaclavas and kerchiefs – tears at the social fabric and is dangerous business: anarchy for the sake of anarchy.
.. Here’s a frank evaluation of Trump’s response. His statement was a measured 100% accurate response which nicely summed up the situation. Violent National Socialists (Nazis) were confronted by violent International Socialists (Antifa), and a young woman whose connections to either group is unclear, is now dead. Until you condemn both sides, your just playing partisan politics.
What the Next Round of Alt-Right Rallies Will Reveal
White nationalists all generally agree white people should be in charge, but they have many different competing beliefs about why that is the case, and how white rule should be implemented. These differences are not trivial, and for decades they have prevented a broadly concerted campaign of action by white nationalists in America.
.. Prior to Fields’s attack, Charlottesville was on track to be a clear victory for the alt-right. While attendance of 500 people is a pittance compared to most mainstream political events, it represents a marked upswing from 2016. Simply turning out that many people in one place was an unqualified win.
The fact that few participants sought to conceal their identities was a bold statement about the mainstreaming of white nationalism, which did not go unnoticed during an ominous torch-wielding event the night before the formal rally. Even after the “Unite the Right” rally itself was shut down by authorities as an unlawful assembly in the face of escalating violence, the event was seen as a show of strength.
.. When “Unite the Right” organizer Jason Kessler attempted to hold a press conference on Sunday in Charlottesville, he was chased away by a crowd of people shouting “murderer” and “shame.”
.. The question now is how the alt-right will process the backlash, and an early indicator will be seen in Saturday’s marches and rallies.Terrorism is a double-edged sword. While it can help mobilize the most radical segments of an extremist movement, it simultaneously alienates the least radical, including people who are loosely supportive of an extremist movement, or tolerant or dismissive of its rhetorical excesses... it is unclear how those within the alt-right will process its meaning. In the first 24 hours, online adherents responded predictably, with a mix of
- denialism,
- whataboutism,
- victim-blaming,
- disavowals of Fields, and
- the advancement of conspiracy theories to explain the problem away.
.. If attendance is high and the participants include more of the same Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and other white supremacists in garish costumes and armed to the teeth, it would be hard to interpret that as anything less than extremely alarming.
.. An aggressive showing by antifa groups looking to meet violence with violence could lead to further escalation
.. Some portion of the alt-right is more enamored of Trumpism than of white nationalism.
.. The only certainty is that the week ahead is bound to be interesting and consequential. By the time we reach the other side, Americans will likely have a much clearer picture of the shape and direction of white-nationalist extremism in America.