Apparently folks who live in Charlottesville decided to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee and rename a park named after him as "Emancipation Park", so Charlottesville became a meeting place for white supremacists and alt-right folks from all over the country to hold a rally. And hold one they did. Roughly 0.001 percent of Americans showed up, equating to a few thousand people--less than the average attendance of a Single-A minor league baseball game. It was not a large crowd by any stretch of the imagination, but a loud and vile crowd, filled with hateful scum-of-the-earth people. And, naturally, people came to protest the human trash cans showing up in Charlottesville, and this included some members of the Fascist group called Antifa. So the most violent extremists from both groups clashed, the cops initially acted on stand-down orders, and some 20-year-old terrorist neo-Nazi piece of human excrement showed up and plowed his car into and out of a crowd of protestors, killing one woman and injuring 19 other people. Pure evil.
There is no excuse for racism. There is no defending racism. There is nothing to do but to state, very clearly, that racism is wrong. Hating people because of the color of their skin is wrong. Hating people because of where they were born is wrong. And there is nothing right about the alt-right, whether right is taken to mean conservative or the opposite of wrong. Conservatives are in favor of the Constitution and small government. White supremacists, simply by being white supremacists, are against the Constitution and many of the pillar values that America stands for. And declaring one race as superior to another certainly does not lend itself to small government. It lends itself to fascism, not unlike Adolf Hitler. And say what you want about President Trump--I'll give some thoughts on him in a minute--but stop comparing him to Hitler. Stop calling him a Nazi. We saw real Nazis descend upon Virginia this weekend, and we got just a glimpse of what true hate looks like.
The problem with Trump is that he has often been slow to condemn white nationalists, and a bit vague. He finally clearly called out all of the white supremacists hate groups that descended on Virginia and condemned them yesterday, though he's being criticized for taking too long to explicitly call them out, despite condemning racism itself on the day the white supremacist terrorist struck. At least some of the criticism is justified though, as his vagueness and delay in making a very specific statement emboldened white supremacists, as they mistook it to mean that Trump was on their side. However, now that he's finally made a a specific statement, white supremacists can no longer pretend that Trump is a Nazi just like them, and now they are speaking out against Trump. And despite the Left implying causation on Trump, what happened in Charlottesville is not Trump's fault. It's the fault of one specific domestic terrorist. And the stuff that happened before it was the fault of the alt-right and the alt-left, and it's the same stuff that's been happening recently throughout the country, where a schism has been growing for years, but it never would have been as big of a story if this one terrorist didn't use his car as a weapon for murder.
At this particular point, the Left is most angry at Trump for saying that both sides were violent, despite the obvious fact, backed up by plenty of reporters on scene, that both sides were violent. Many members of Antifa and the alt-left are violent, even attempting murder if you can remember as far back as the shooting of Republican members of Congress at baseball practice. Many white supremacists, obviously, are violent, if you can remember anything from the ugly side of American history. Both groups can be wrong, even if you don't try to create a moral equivalency between them. The existence of Antifa is actually something that can drive more people to the alt-right who think that they must choose one extreme position against another extreme position. And apparently some people on both sides really, really care whether or not Confederate statues are torn down. I don't. On one hand, I see the need to preserve history, and I'm in favor of keeping these statues as a reminder, even a somber one, of our history. On the other hand. the Confederacy lost, and I hate what it stood for, so I really don't care if they are torn down. But this sort of thing is how we end up with clashes between extremists on both sides, and the folks who decided to take the Charlottesville statue down in the first place weren't even extremists. It was local government at work, working as local government should, but extremists on both sides invaded, and it turned into mayhem and murder, and that was even before the two police officers died in the helicopter accident trying to control the rioting.
Thanks to folks like Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos from the far-right media, in conjunction with the left-leaning mainstream media, the term alt-right has grown to apparently include a lot more people than folks who are actually alt-right white nationalists. Bannon and Yiannopoulos, while not white supremacists themselves, provided platforms and excuses for the alt-right, making it seem like some folks could come under its umbrella even without identifying with its rotten core of white supremacist values. The mainstream media pushed this narrative, as did much of the left, when they identified not just Bannon and Yiannopoulos as alt-right, but other Conservatives and decidedly non-alt-right personalities. I laughed a little bit at the look on Ben Shapiro's face earlier this year when someone at a talk he was giving at a college shouted him down and called him a Nazi, which he responded to by pointing to the yamaka on his head. Ben Shapiro is, decidedly, non-alt-right. Ben Shapiro is a Jew and, in fact, a favorite target of the alt-right. Even as recently as a few weeks ago, some were calling him alt-right. If folks keep calling people Nazis and alt-right who are not that, it's going to get harder and harder to tell when they're telling the truth and someone is actually an alt-right Nazi, and it might actually drive more people into the wretched arms of the alt-right.
If we want to end the alt-right and the alt-left, we need to stop giving these people platforms and press. Sure, they have the right to say what they want under the First Amendment, short of calling for violence, but the press doesn't have to cover them, and we have the right to not listen to them. Sadly, some number of racists will always exist, and hopefully that number continues to dwindle, because racism makes zero fucking sense. I can't even wrap my mind around why racism is a thing. It's counter-intuitive and against human nature to judge someone by skin color or nationality instead of by personality or content of character. There is something mentally wrong with racists, even more with those who are violent racists. And as far as the alt-left, if you take pride in pointing out that this was a white terrorist and not a Muslim terrorist or black gang member who struck in Virginia, but you would hate it when someone pointed out the same thing if it were a Muslim terrorist or black gang member who struck, you're part of a problem too. All terrorism and all murder is problematic, and we should focus on solutions and determining why a 20-year-old racist White supremacist can drive his car into a crowd of people or why Islamic extremists of roughly the same age can bomb the Boston Marathon. And for fucks sake, stop regressing to segregation! Blacks-only graduations or dorms or whatever makes me sick to my stomach. Because history. If you really want to do it, you have the right to in post-Jim Crow America. But know that the KKK wants the same thing, which is a thing that people like Martin Luther King fought against.
Ideally, the alt-right will disappear, and groups like Antifa will disappear as well. The massive majority of Americans in the relatively-sane and non-extremist category will prevail. And General John Kelly will tell Steven Bannon he can keep his job if he can pass a very basic physical fitness test for a male: Maybe something like doing five push-ups, five sit-ups, and five pull-ups in forty-five seconds. Bannon probably wouldn't even attempt it either. He would just walk out of the White House, hopefully forever. But then, because I just fat-shamed him and also implied something that can be deemed sexist by specifying the test was basic for males, someone out there will accuse me of being a member of the alt-right.
