Libertarianism.org: Racism is Antithetical to Individualism

A great read.

Article

Bannon: 'The Trump Presidency That We Fought For, and Won, Is Over.'

Bannon assigns blame for the thwarting of his program on “the West Wing Democrats,” but holds special disdain for the Washington establishment—especially those Republicans who have, he believes, willfully failed to provide Trump with meaningful victories.

And, he believes, things are about to get worse for Trump. “There’s about to be a jailbreak of these moderate guys on the Hill”—a stream of Republican dissent, which could become a flood.

Bannon says that he once confidently believed in the prospect of success for that version of the Trump presidency he now says is over. Asked what the turning point was, he says, “It’s the Republican establishment. The Republican establishment has no interest in Trump’s success on this. They’re not populists, they’re not nationalists, they had no interest in his program. Zero. It was a half-hearted attempt at Obamacare reform, it was no interest really on the infrastructure, they’ll do a very standard Republican version of taxes.

“What Trump ran on—border wall, where is the funding for the border wall, one of his central tenets, where have they been? Have they rallied around the Perdue-Cotton immigration bill? On what element of Trump’s program, besides tax cuts—which is going to be the standard marginal tax cut—where have they rallied to Trump’s cause? They haven’t.”

Bannon believes that those who will now try to influence Trump will hope to turn him in a sharply different direction.

“I think they’re going to try to moderate him,” he says. “I think he’ll sign a clean debt ceiling, I think you’ll see all this stuff. His natural tendency—and I think you saw it this week on Charlottesville—his actual default position is the position of his base, the position that got him elected. I think you’re going to see a lot of constraints on that. I think it’ll be much more conventional.”

 Weakly [sic] Standard

Rush Limbaugh: ‘We Are on the Cusp of a Second Civil War’

America is under attack from within. Our culture, our history, our founding are under the most direct assault I have seen in my life. And I’m sure it’s the same with you. We haven’t seen anything like this. You might even get away with saying that we are on the cusp of a second civil war. Some of you might say that we are already into it, that it has already begun. However you characterize it, though, we are under attack from within. And it’s being bought and paid for by people from outside America, in addition to inside.

Rush Transcript

Proving we need more history than less:

New Orleans' Joan of Arc Statue Vandalized With 'Take It Down'

PJ Media

NPR/Marist Poll(!!): Trump Is More In Touch Than You Think

As not reported on CNN:

• A strong majority (62 percent) of Americans favor leaving the Confederate statues standing as historical markers 

• Overwhelming numbers of Republicans (86 percent) favor this, as do 61 percent of Independents 

• The only group with a majority favoring removal (57 percent) are “Strong Democrats” — as opposed to “Soft Democrats,” who slightly favor keeping them (52 percent) 

• When defined by political ideology, only Liberal/Very Liberal people muster a majority for taking statues down (57 percent). Among self-described Moderates, 67 percent favor leaving the statues standing. A whopping 81 percent of Conservative/Very Conservative people favor the statues staying in place 

• Unsurprisingly, the Northeast is the region of the country most in favor of removing the statues — but even there, a majority (53 percent) backs leaving the statues standing 

• Here’s a stunner: 44 percent of African-Americans polled believe in keeping the statues standing. Of Latinos, 65 percent believe the statues should remain 

• Comfortable majorities — no less than 60 percent — in each age cohort support the statues
This is barely an issue with white Evangelicals, 85 percent of whom back the statues. Only nine percent favor removal, with the rest unsure 

• On Trump’s response to Charlottesville, 52 percent believe it hasn’t been strong enough
Of that number, 52 percent of Independents believe Trump has fallen short; only 30 percent are satisfied

Full Article from American Conservative and Poll Results

Althouse: NYT Commendably Admits The Left Has A Violence Problem

The new article today seems to acknowledge the inadequacy of the 2-day-old article. The older article seemed intent on pushing back Donald Trump for talking about the "alt-left" as well as the "alt-right." The term "false equivalence" — which was a big media talking point earlier in the week — appears in the older article. I thought "false equivalence" was being used to say, essentially: When one side is worse than the other side, you're not even allowed to compare them.

There was something false about saying "false equivalence." Strictly speaking, the label applies only when 2 things are said to be the same. It shouldn't work to exclude all comparisons when people are being clear about the similarities and differences.

In the case of Charlottesville, there was no logical fallacy in saying there were 2 opposing factions that arrived on scene ready to rumble as long as you're also clear that the 2 sides were different. One side wanted to exercise its free speech rights to express bad, ugly ideas. The other side wanted to interfere with the exercise of free speech rights and was motivated by hostility to ideas that deserved hostility.

In the new article, there's less concern about stepping on the "false equivalence" talking point. There's a recognition that people like Nauert are headed in a violent direction and are gaining adherents. Maybe acting like they're nothing (or nothing any good people dare speak about) is dangerous. Right after that quote from Nauert, there's this subtle discarding of the "false equivalence" talking point:

Others on the left disagree, saying antifa’s methods harm the fight against right-wing extremism and have allowed Mr. Trump to argue that the two sides are equivalent....

Now, Trump never said "the 2 sides are equivalent." He didn't say "equivalent" and he didn't even say "2 sides." He said "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides." But those who were pushing the "false equivalence" idea needed to rely on the idea that one side is bad and the other is good, and they needed to minimize antifa. Now, the NYT admits the left has a violence problem. Good!

Athouse Blog

Althouse: NYT Won't Admit It Found Conclusive Proof Trump Is Not a Racist

It seems apparent that the NYT set out to find out if there's any evidence that Trump is a racist. Read the article. They found strong evidence that he is absolutely not any sort of a racist. The headline ought to come out and celebrate his excellent record.

Althouse Blog

Althouse: Removal of Confederate Statues By Whites Manifestation of White Privilege

The statues were put up by white people who wanted to express something, and they are now being taken down because white people are ashamed of what they expressed back then. They want to delete the old evidence and use the deletion as the creation of new evidence — evidence of how kindly white people really are. Why should white people have such an easy time covering up their shame? Removing the statues can be portrayed as a kindness toward black people, but critical race theory teaches us to presume that what white people do they do for themselves.

Althouse Blog

The man who presaged Trump,

PAT BUCHANAN: AMERICA'S 2ND CIVIL WAR

“They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee – and what a leader! … No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller.”

So wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in his magisterial “The Oxford History of the American People” in 1965.

First in his class at West Point, hero of the Mexican War, Lee was the man to whom President Lincoln turned to lead his army. But when Virginia seceded, Lee would not lift up his sword against his own people and chose to defend his home state rather than wage war upon her.

This veneration of Lee, wrote Richard Weaver, “appears in the saying attributed to a Confederate soldier, ‘The rest of us may have … descended from monkeys, but it took a God to make Marse Robert.'”

Growing up after World War II, this was accepted history.

Yet, on the militant left today, the name Lee evokes raw hatred and howls of “racist and traitor.” A clamor has arisen to have all statues of him and all Confederate soldiers and statesmen pulled down from their pedestals and put in museums or tossed onto trash piles.

What has changed since 1965?

It is not history. There have been no great new discoveries about Lee.

What has changed is America herself. She is not the same country. We have passed through a great social, cultural and moral revolution that has left us irretrievably divided on separate shores. 

And the politicians are in panic.

Two years ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe called the giant statues of Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson on Richmond’s Monument Avenue “parts of our heritage.” After Charlottesville, New York-born-and-bred McAuliffe, entertaining higher ambitions, went full scalawag, demanding the statues be pulled down as “flashpoints for hatred, division and violence.”

Who hates the statues, Terry? Who’s going to cause the violence? Answer: The Democratic left whom Terry must now appease. . .

“Where does this all end?” President Trump asked.

It doesn’t. Not until America’s histories and biographies are burned and new texts written to Nazify Lee, Jackson, Davis and all the rest, will a newly indoctrinated generation of Americans accede to this demand to tear down and destroy what their fathers cherished.

And once all the Confederates are gone, one must begin with the explorers, and then the slave owners like Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Madison, who seceded from slave-free Britain. White supremacists all.

Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun must swiftly follow.

Then there are all those segregationists. From 1865 to 1965, virtually all of the great Southern senators were white supremacists.

In the first half of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson and FDR carried all 11 states of a rigidly segregationist South all six times they ran, and FDR rewarded Dixie by putting a Klansman on the Supreme Court.

While easy for Republicans to wash their hands of such odious elements as Nazis in Charlottesville, will they take up the defense of the monuments and statues that have defined our history, or capitulate to the icon-smashers?

In this Second American Civil War, whose side are you on?

Pat Buchan Full Editorial

USA Today Opinion

Trump is right — violent extremists on both sides are a threat

Neo-Nazis and the KKK are the mirror image of the anarchist and Communist left. All are a threat to our way of life.

When it comes to the violent extremist politics of the right and left, it is reasonable to say “a pox on both your houses.” So, it is puzzling that when President Trump made that very argument, he touched off yet another round of teeth gnashing and frantic virtue signaling from the press, pundits and politicians. 

It is a canard that by calling out left-wing violence the president was implicitly endorsing violence from the right, especially since he explicitly condemned neo-Nazism. Trump was fully within a time-honored intellectual tradition when he denounced “both sides” that were rioting in Charlottesville. After World War II, scholars and policymakers recognized that totalitarianism was not the exclusive product of either branch of the accepted democratic right/left political spectrum. Whether cloaked in nationalism, internationalism, populism, militarism, or religious fanaticism, the principle ends of these movements was the same: total, dictatorial control of society and the imposition of stringent ideological purity. These groups regard violence as a fully legitimate mode of political expression.

During the Weimar Republic period in Germany, Nazis and Communists fought in the streets, yet both regarded the established order as their enemy. Hence the Weimar-era adage that a Nazi was like a beefsteak, brown on the outside and red on the inside. The architects of postwar West Germany, seeking to avoid the tragic consequences of the prewar period, banned both fascist and communist political parties, recognizing that the democratic system itself needed to be protected. There is no value in being tolerant of the intolerant; or put another way, democracy is not a suicide pact.

Today’s right and left wing violent radicals are from the same mold. Indeed, there is a time-warp aspect in seeing mobs squaring off carrying banners with swastikas and the hammer and sickle. They do not pretend to be engaged in peaceful protest; in fact the entire reason for going to the streets is to foment violence. This isn’t Gandhi’s satyagraha, or Martin Luther King’s followers singing the national anthem at the statehouse in Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. Both these contemporary extremist movements rely on each other to provide conflict, spectacle and of course nonstop publicity.

Everyone understands that the neo-Nazi and KKK groups are composed of violent extremists. The apparent blind spot is with the anarchist/socialist far left, which is puzzling given recent history. Take for example the radicals who toppled the Confederate statue in Durham, NC, who were affiliated with the Worker’s World Party (WWP). Their program includes disarming police, abolishing capitalism, and promoting a Leninist version of socialist revolution. So when Mitt Romney says that the two sides are in “morally different universes," he should be aware that the WWP has previously blamed him for creating a “climate of war, racism and hatred that promotes these fascist groups.” And it is doubtful that the Mormon faith would survive in their Leninist utopia, since the WWP claims the LDS church has “a shameful history of racism.”

The root cause of this instability is the idea that the political system itself is illegitimate. Faith in American political institutions has been in decline for several decades. Thus it is no wonder that we see the rise of radical groups seeking to exploit this legitimacy vacuum. The proper response is not to condemn one group of radicals over another but to see all of them as a direct threat to constitutional government. The real contest is between the vast, law-abiding majority of democratic citizens and these small groups of twisted violent losers parading in the streets with weapons, wearing masks, throwing cement-filled soda cans. Take your pick, you can have the extremists or you can have the Constitution, you can’t have both.

USA Today Source Article

On this day 45 years ago,

East German Guards Shoot Peter Fechter As He Attempts to Climb Over Berlin Wall and Watch Him Slowly Bleed to Death

On this day in 1962, East German guards shot Peter Fechter as he attempted to cross the Berlin Wall and let him bleed to death in front of hundreds of witnesses, a story reported worldwide by TV news and one which I remember well.

It was one of the ugliest incidents to take place at one of the ugliest symbols of the Cold War.  

On August 17, 1962, two young men from East Berlin attempted to scramble to freedom across the wall. One was successful in climbing the last barbed wire fence and, though suffering numerous cuts, made it safely to West Berlin. 

While horrified West German guards watched, the second young man was shot by machine guns on the East Berlin side. He fell but managed to stand up again, reach the wall, and begin to climb over. More shots rang out. The young man was hit in the back, screamed, and fell backwards off of the wall. For nearly an hour, he lay bleeding to death and crying for help. West German guards threw bandages to the man, and an angry crowd of West Berlin citizens screamed at the East German security men who seemed content to let the young man die. He finally did die, and East German guards scurried to where he lay and removed his body. 

In 1997, after the reunification of East and West Germany, two East German border guards pled guilty to Fechter's murder, apologized, and said they would forever live with guilt for their actions.

This Day In History
Great Wikipedia Article Peter Fechter

Abraham Lincoln monument torched in Chicago

Washington Times

Althouse defends ACLU from attack by leftist, SJW lawyer upset by Charlottesville

Contextual... creative... holistic... these are the subtleties that grease the way to the end of constitutional rights. 

Thanks to the ACLU for standing up for free speech where it counts — when the speaker is hated. 

Althouse Blog

Althouse: What if Trump isn't as stupid as most people assume?

So let me say something unconventional — not because I know anything but just as a hypothesis — and that is: It's not that Trump "doesn't realize how bad this is getting." He realizes everything everybody else realizes and more. He's playing a different game, in a different way, and all along it's looked bad to almost everyone. But he's the President, and 17 opponents went down trying to play against him. He's looking ahead and strategizing and we're the ones with inadequate perception. We don't realize how good this is getting.

Just a hypothesis! I'm just inviting you into the old what-if-you-had-to-argue game. What if you had to argue that it's Trump who is seeing things clearly and making correct decisions?

And to help you get started: The media are so heavy-handed with the Charlottesville story. They're showing so much ugliness and stirring up so much anxiety, but it's not really sensible to think that neo-Nazis are making any headway in our culture. Quite the opposite. Some people are getting afraid and angry, and these people may go too far, making more and more demands. Ordinary people will seek peace. They may get disgusted with the media that won't stop giving air time to unimportant loser clowns who nobody decent supports. Ordinary people may think that the media are giving too much attention to the destruction of monuments, and it's time to build up. Construction! A Trump specialty.

Althouse Blog

From the former leftist

David Horowitz: Charlottesville Is Biggest 'Fake News' Story of Summer

The tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia, could have been an occasion to stop and consider how the tolerance for politically correct violence and politically correct hatred is leading the nation toward civil war.

Instead, the media and the political left have turned this incident into the biggest fake news story of the summer, transforming its real lessons into a morality play that justifies war against the political right, and against white people generally.

The organizers of the "Unite the Right" demonstration in Charlottesville were repellent racists.

But they came to defend a historic monument honoring a complex man and cause, and not to attack it or, presumably, anyone else.

They applied for a permit and were denied. They re-applied successfully in a petition supported by the local ACLU.

If they had come to precipitate violence, why would they have gone to the tedious trouble of applying for a permit?

Who knows what — if anything — would have happened if that had been the end of the story and no one had showed up to oppose them.

What "Unite the Right" actually demonstrated was that the assortment of neo-Nazis, pro-Confederates, and assorted yahoos gathered under the banner of the "Alt-Right" is actually a negligible group.

This supposed national show of strength actually attracted all of 500 people.

Compare that to the tens of the thousands who can readily be marshaled by two violent groups of the left — Black Lives Matter and Antifa — and you get an idea of how marginal "white supremacists" are to America's political and cultural life.

Yet "white supremacy" and its evils became the centerpiece of all the fake news reporting on the event, including all the ludicrous attacks on the president for not condemning enough a bogeyman the whole nation condemns, and that no one but a risible fringe supports.

Talk about virtue signaling!

Omitted from the media coverage were the other forces at work in precipitating the battle of Emancipation Park, specifically Black Lives Matter and Antifa, two violent left-wing groups with racial agendas who came to squelch the demonstration in defense of the monument.

Unlike the Unite the Right demonstrators, the leftist groups did not apply for permits, which would have been denied since there was another demonstration scheduled for that park on that day.

But why should they have applied for a permit, since the mayhem they had previously caused in Ferguson, Berkeley, Sacramento, Portland, and other cities, was accomplished without permits, while their criminality was presented by the media as "protests," and their rioting went completely unpunished.

In other words, there were two demonstrations in Charlottesville — a legal protest by "Unite the Right" and an illegal protest by the vigilantes of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Who started the fight is really immaterial. Both sides were prepared for violence because these conflicts are already a pattern of our deteriorating civic life.

Once the two sides had gathered in the same place, the violence was totally predictable.

Two parties, two culpabilities; but except for the initial statement of President Donald Trump, condemning both sides, only one party has been held accountable, and that happens to be the one that was in the park legally.

What is taking place in the media accounts and political commentaries on this event is an effort by the left to turn the mayhem in Charlottesville into a template for their war against a mythical enemy — "white supremacy" — which is really a war on white people generally.

The ideology that drives the left and divides our country is "identity politics" — the idea that the world consists of two groups — "people of color" who are guiltless and oppressed, and white people who are guilty and oppressors.

This is the real race war.

Its noxious themes inform the mindless, hysterical hatred of President Trump, and the equally mindless support of racist mobs like Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

It is a war from which no good can come. But it won’t be stopped unless enough people have the courage to stand up and name it for what it is.

Source article

Green Party Candidate Demands Removal of Washington and Jefferson Monuments

Source Article

Chicago BLM Demands Display of All Confederate Imagery Be Made Criminal

Lifezette

Built by the French, the 3rd biggest slave-traders of all time behind the Portuguese and Brits.  

Slavery Rememberance

AL SHARPTON: TEAR DOWN THE JEFFERSON MEMORIAL IN D.C.

The Federalist

Charles Cooke/National Review
There is no "Nazi Exception" to the First Amendment
National Review

Parental Choice - the solution to today's biggest racial injustice

Parental choice is kicking bad schools out of school choice programs

Washington Examiner

Chicago Pastor Wants Presidents’ Names Removed From Washington, Jackson Parks Because Of Ties To Slavery

Chicago CBS

NAACP Leader: I Disapprove Of Pulling Down Confederate Statues

"You can't eliminate what history is. So I disapprove with young people pulling down those statues."

The Federalist

Obama-Voter Althouse Agrees Leftist Media Hysterics Perverted Founders' Definition of Alt-Right

Althouse Blog

College Preferential Admission Policies Discriminate Against Asian-Americans

Daily Caller

Uh-Oh - the State of Virginia is Named After a Slave-Trader

Daily Caller

On this day in 1969,

The Woodstock Music Festival Begins

On this day in 1969, the Woodstock Music Festival opened in Bethel, New York.  The festival originally was going to be held in Woodstock, N.Y., 50 miles away, but was denied the necessary permits.  On the verge of being canceled, dairy farmer Max Yasgur offered his Bethel farm. 

The purpose of the festival was to raise money to build a recording studio, etc. near Woodstock, which Bob Dylan and others considered their home base.  

Despite the inexperience of the promoters, they were able to attract top acts, including Jefferson Airplane, The Who, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Jopin, Jimi Hendrix, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, among others.  

The festival opened with little-known Richie Havens, who put on a three hour show because the next acts were late in arriving given traffic jams all around the farm.  Havens’ performance rocketed him to stardom.  Others followed with career-performances, including Joe Cocker and Jimi Hendrix.  

The festival was supposed to attract 50,000 people but ended up with about 500,000 “hippies” engaging in a love fest with few incidents of misbehavior.

Despite all the “love,” Woodstock was a financial flop that nearly bankrupted its promoters until a documentary film became a hit in theaters across the country a few months later.

This Day In History
Wikipedia

Pat Buchanan, the man who presaged Trump

If We Erase Our History, Who Are We?

Article

Obama-Voter Althouse Filters Through WaPo Charlottesville Coverage and Agrees Trump Was Right - There Was Fault On All Sides

I'm looking back at the WaPo headline. I still don't really know "how a rally... turned into a 'tragic, tragic weekend.'" I see contributions from the "three groups": "white nationalists... counterprotesters... and state and local authorities...." I don't really know that the white nationalist were "meticulously organized" and "well coordinated" or how the counterprotesters became "fiercely resistant and determined" (was it entirely unorganized and uncoordinated?), and I just don't believe that the state and local authorities were simply "caught off guard."

Much more here: Althouse Blog

Alabama Native Condi Rice tells AL.com Confederate Monuments Should Not Be Taken Down

AL.com

Leftist Activists Demand New York Museum Take Down Statue of ‘Racist’ Theodore Roosevelt

Daily Wire

ALTHOUSE ON TRUMP'S THIRD CHARLOTTESVILLE STATEMENT

Some people thought his remarks yesterday represented a backing off from his much-criticized "many sides" line, but I was not one of them.  I think what he said Saturday, yesterday, and today was basically all the same thing.

Althouse Blog

Dilbert: Should All FDR Statues Be Taken Down Because He Jailed Japanese-Americans During WWII and Gave Their Property to White People?

Scott Adams

New Study Says Drinking Beer Leads to Mental Clarity
Link to Study

ALTHOUSE ANALYZES TRUMP'S TWO CHARLOTTESVILLE SPEECHES

Althouse Blog

Obama-Voter Althouse Blames Lack of Police Presence for Charlottesville Violence

And she rips Gov. McAuliffe too.

Althouse Blog

On this day in 1961,

SOVIET UNION BEGINS CONTRUCTION OF BERLIN WALL

On this day in 1961, East German soldiers began laying down 100 miles of barbed wire to keep East Germans from leaving for the West.  Following Russia’s unsuccessful blockade of Berlin, between 2.5 million and 3 million East Germans left the country.  By 1961, about 1,000 East Germans a day were fleeing the country.

Within months, the barbed wire was converted to a six-foot-high, 96-mile-long wall of concrete blocks, complete with guard towers, machine gun posts and searchlights. 

Berliners were outraged and many, including Berlin mayor Willi Brandt, blamed the United States for allowing the wall to be built.

From 1961 to 1989, a total of 5,000 East Germans escaped.  About 1,000 died trying.  High profile shootings of some would-be defectors were seen on the evening news and intensified the Western world’s hatred of the Wall.

The Berlin Wall “fell” on November 9, 1989, following the disintegration of the Soviet Union.  On October 3, 1990, East Germany and West Germany agreed to combine into one country.

This Day In History

Wikepedia

On this day in 1948,

Despite Foul Weather, U.S. and Britain Airlift Record Supplies Into Berlin Following Russian Blockade

Berliners watch U.S. plane land at Templehof Airport

On this day in 1948, 7,000 U.S. and British planes airlifted a record 5,000 tons of supplies despite awful weather into the sections of Berlin under their control following Russia’s blockade of the city beginning June 24.

Berlin, like all of Germany, was divided into zones of occupation following World War II. The Russians, Americans, and British all received a zone, with the thought being that the occupation would be only temporary and that Germany would eventually be reunited. By 1948, however, Cold War animosities between the Soviets and the Americans and British had increased to such a degree that it became obvious that German reunification was unlikely. In an effort to push the British and Americans out of their zones of occupation in western Berlin, the Soviets began to interfere with road and rail traffic into those parts of the city in April 1948. (Though divided into zones of occupation, the city of Berlin was geographically located entirely within the Russian occupation area in Germany.) In June 1948, the Russians halted all ground and water travel into western Berlin. 

The joint British-American effort on what came to known as “Black Friday” was an important victory for two reasons. First and foremost, it reassured the people of western Berlin that the two nations were not backing down from their promise to defend the city from the Soviets. Second, it was another signal that the Soviet blockade was not only unsuccessful but was also backfiring into a propaganda nightmare. While the Soviets looked like bullies and heartless despots for their efforts to starve western Berlin into submission, the British and Americans–flaunting their technological superiority–were portrayed as heroes by the worldwide audience.

The blockade ended May 12, 1949.

This Day In History

Wikipedia

Rich Lowry/NRO

CHARLOTTESVILLE

A couple of points about Charlottesville: 

—I don’t have a problem with Trump condemning both sides, since both sides resorted to violence. And he did denounce bigotry and hatred. But I agree that it was mealy-mouthed and wrong not to specifically name and slam the white supremacists whose march was the precipitating event here. Putting aside the merits, if you are a president people suspect is allied with the nastiest forces on the right, you should leap at the opportunity to denounce violent white nationalists. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Trump takes a second bite at the apple sometime soon, but this shouldn’t be so hard.  

—I’ve been skeptical of the rush to pull up Confederate monuments, and Robert E. Lee—the focus in Charlottesville—is not Nathan Bedford Forrest. But if the monuments are going to become rallying points for neo-Nazis, maybe they really do need to go. 

—It’s always important to maintain some perspective. We aren’t experiencing anything like the level of political violence of the late-1960s and mid-1970s. But we now have two fringes on the right and the left, the white nationalists and anti-fa, who have a taste for violence, love the thrill and attention that comes with it, and are probably going to grow stronger rather than weaker. Depressing. 

National Review