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.”
Russia makes inroads with American right via guns, religion
The anti-Trump
Mark Kelly, astronaut and anti-gun activist, aims for civility.
“One of my favorite things to do is — and it makes my staff a little nervous at times — is to go and talk to protesters,”
.. “I’ll walk across the street. I walked across the street to the gun show,” he added. “So, I mean, that’s why I like to engage with them, and sometimes it usually doesn’t go so well right in the beginning. But if I stand there and listen and then engage them in a positive way — and I understand these people, I own guns — usually, by the end, it’s a pretty positive experience for all of us.”
.. If Kelly has devoted himself to a cause, he’s equally intent on projecting an air of respect to people who don’t agree with him, on an issue
.. “I feel that if somebody is going to show up and be involved in the process, they have a right to be heard,” he told me.
.. “If you’re a felon, you shouldn’t be allowed to own a gun or possess a gun — so why do we make it easy for felons to own and possess guns?” he asked. “The same goes for domestic abusers, even people that are suspected terrorists, people who are dangerously mentally ill. … Frank Luntz is a Republican pollster, and he polled NRA members on background checks, and that came out at 74 percent. Nationwide, it’s about 90 percent.”
.. What makes Kelly unique as a messenger is the fact that he’s been a lifelong gun owner and a congenital badass.
.. “I almost died 10 times before I was 15 years old,”
.. “I’ve been shot at 39 times,” he told me with a sheepish grin, “in airplanes.”
.. “You often hear the folks on the other side, the gun guys … about how, if everybody has a gun, everybody will be safe — ‘Well, if I was there and I had a firearm,’” he said. “People don’t realize what an emotional and crazy experience it is to have somebody trying to kill you. … And that’s where I kind of get back to this concept that people think they’re Clint Eastwood. It is not the movies.”
U.S. must atone for its original sins: Slavery, guns
Public television switched to re-runs of fireworks from cloud-free July 4ths of yesteryear. It all seems a grand metaphor for a country that is in a fog, squinting for clarity and the joy of color.
.. They are America’s original sins: Slavery and guns…and they have never been washed clean.
.. The necessity of a large and unified new nation to defeat Great Britain and create a truly independent United States meant massive concessions to the plantation owners of the South, including the notorious decision to count (non-voting, of course) slaves as 3/5 of a person, to boost that region’s representation in Congress.
.. But within the new nation, fears of an all-out slave revolt only grew as the population of black people in bondage eventually swelled to 4 million. It is here that the second vine starts growing: The American romance with gun culture. Remember the 2nd Amendment, which establishes the right to bear arms in the guise of “a well-regulated militia”? By the time that amendment was drafted into the Bill of Rights in 1789,militias in states such as Georgia that were essentially slave patrols with the goal of putting down any blacks who dared seek their freedom.
.. As early as 1840, antebellum historian Richard Hildreth observed that violence was frequently employed in the South both to subordinate slaves and to intimidate abolitionists.”
.. As I mentioned here recently, invest two hours of your time at your local cinema to watch The Free State of Jones, which portrays how terror against freed blacks was launched in the South with virtually no gap after the war — white men trading their gray Confederate caps for the white hoods of the Klan.
.. But just as we ignore the horrors of the post-Reconstruction South, we also forget that the reaction to the civil rights era — especially when many American cities erupted into full-scale revolt — had arguably a greater impact on how we live today. Those uprisings led directly to the “law-and-order” administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and to “white flight” that left urban neighborhoods devoid of services, and created separate and unequal school districts.
.. The two most important developments were this: A draconian “war on drugs” that targeted urban drug use (while ignoring, largely, illegal recreational drugs in the suburbs); this in turn paved the way for stepped-up police activity and then so-called “broken windows” policing that led to the unprecedented and shocking mass incarceration of blacks — the New Jim Crow.
.. It was in the aftermath of 1960s racial unrest that the National Rifle Association went from a sensible, moderate voice for sportsmen to become the lobbying group for lucrative merchants of death that peddled fear and promised manhood until, remarkably, there were more guns in the United States than people.
.. Police in the United States are more likely than their counterparts in other nations to be killed by a civilian with a gun. That in turn makes police more suspicious and more anxious in traffic stops
.. Then think about how Castile — a working man with a responsible job caring for children in a school cafeteria — was pulled over and cited a remarkable 52 times by the police.
..Was he profiled and harassed because he was black? If so, it would fit the pattern of so many formerly middle-class towns that balance their budget by fining and harassing their citizens,