Alternate headline: Trump reads this site?
He could certainly do worse. He could watch CNN.
Apparently these are the rules: If Nazis are involved, Nazis are 100 percent at fault for anything and everything that happens, no matter who else may have done what. That's irrelevant. The people on the other side could show up with submachine goes and open fire. Doesn't matter. If you acknowledge that this played any role at all in causing the problems, you might as well be putting David Duke's name into nomination for the presidency.
Those are the rules. As you might expect, Trump doesn't follow the rules:
Let's start with the statement he'll probably catch the most heat for: A lot of people where aghast when Trump said there were "very fine people" there on both sides. That seems to suggest that "very good people" showed up for a neo-Nazi rally. That, of course, would be an absurd assertion.
But I think I understand what he was trying to say. He was trying to make the point that you don't have to be a white supremacist to object to the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, because some people simply see him as an important historical figure. It's going to be portrayed as Trump saying there are very fine neo-Nazis, but if you listened to what he said he was clearly trying to make a distinction between the one group and the other.
And as he tried to explain his point, reporters kept trying to shout over him and demand to know if he was putting the "alt-left" on the same moral plain with neo-Nazis. He kept explaining that he wasn't putting anyone on any moral plain, but they kept shouting the same question at him even as he tried to explain his point.
Now personally, I think statues of Robert E. Lee are de facto celebrations of the Confederacy, and I don't think they should be around. But I can accept the argument that not everyone who feels otherwise has to be a racist. I also suppose it's possible that some people showed up at a "Unite the Right" rally thinking it would be actual conservatives and not neo-Nazis.
Trump is 100 percent right when he asserts that the alt-left had as much to do with what happened on Saturday as the alt-right did
That aside, let's get to the main point:
Trump is 100 percent right when he asserts that the alt-left had as much to do with what happened on Saturday as the alt-right did. You can't defend the content of the white supremacist message, but they have the right to express it and they had the legally obtained permit they needed to demonstrate. They deserved to be ignored because they're fringe cranks. If they had been ignored, none of this would have happened.
But Antifa and BLM need the alt-right. Their entire reason for being depends on the idea that out-of-control white racism is everywhere, and while that's clearly not true, lunkheads like these give them something to point to as justification for their own rage - indeed, their own existence.
So when the alt-right shows up, of course the alt-left is going to show up. It's what they live for. They'll burn down Berkeley if Ann Coulter is invited to speak. What do you think they're going to do when a bunch of actual Nazis march?
Charlottesville. That's what.
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If you don't think the alt-left is capable of being as evil as the alt-right, then you don't understand the nature of evil
No one who's interested in the truth should be unwilling to acknowlege this. It doesn't let the Nazis off the hook in the slightest that you admit the truth.
Also notable: How the media spend the entire time basically trying to goad Trump into saying something hateful or awful. He did a pretty good job of not doing so, and as usual he let it be known he didn't appreciate what they were trying to do.
By the way, there is a school of thought that Naziism is so evil that no one apart from Nazis can possibly descend to the same level of evil, no matter what they do. Here's the problem with that argument: There's no doubt that Nazis are 100 percent evil. But if you think it's not possible for that degree of evil to manifest in any other form, you need to go back and study your history. Abject evil takes all kinds of forms, and the one commonality is that those who are evil choose a form that can gain widespread acceptance, at least until people realize the mistake they've made, and recognize what they've turned loose.
If you don't think the alt-left is capable of being as evil as the alt-right, then you don't understand the nature of evil. Someone should explain it to you. Donald Trump apparently can.
