The Truth About Charlottesville

Donald Trump Was 100% Right - and Righteous - Here's Why

A Note From Jeff:

The following essay was written by me and my frequent co-author Dr. Bruce Abramson in the immediate aftermath of the infamous “Unite the Right” Charlottesville rally of August 2017. To me, Trump’s reaction to Charlottesville was a beacon of moral clarity; the attacks on him, a calculated political assault on the very social fabric of right and wrong, good and evil. Diabolical in the most literal sense. I asked Bruce to collaborate with me on this.

But this essay never saw the light of day. The media narrative was instantaneous and overwhelming and the backlash immense. And so I sent this along to someone in the closest circle of trust to the President - because I thought it was right and true and important and because I hoped it would give them guidance in how to respond by going on offense. But they asked that I not publish it. They were on the defensive, wagons circled, and wanted to not respond. They wanted to “just let it blow over.”

I believed that, left unchallenged, the narrative would never go away, and would continue to be used as a cudgel, but agreed to defer to them. As we know, the absurd Charlottesville libel that Trump praised Nazis has become an iconic meme. Indeed, just say “Charlottesville” and this rally - or, rather, the lie about Trump related to the rally - is now the association most likely to rise in Americans minds. The Biden campaign used it four years ago and the Harris campaign uses it now. Others - especially Joel Pollak at Breitbart - have done meticulous work documenting the lie, or the hoax, or whatever you want to label it. But, tragically, to this day, with the world’s Jews reeling from genuine Jew hatred stoked by Trump’s opponents, I know many Jews who cannot forgive Trump for something he never did.

Who knows - maybe you, too, have lived believing in the lie. But here is the truth:

The Deplorables On All Sides

Nazis and Klansmen are deplorable people. 

When and where their idols wielded actual power, they used it to commit inhuman atrocities.  It took tremendous, concerted, sustained effort to defeat them - to reduce them to the hollow shell organizations they have become today—more cosplay than political force.  Contemporary Neo-Nazis and Klansmen are pathetic losers who have wedded themselves to symbols of cruelty, evil, and violence.  Though they claim to dream of lost glory, what they really seek is attention.  To a one, they have given up any hope of making a positive contribution to society.  They live in fear of insignificance and anonymity. 

The philosophy that gave rise to both Nazism and the Klan is supremacism.  Supremacists believe that they “and their kind” are entitled to rule simply because of who they are.  They believe in a natural ordering of humanity, in which they occupy the pinnacle and all other “lesser” people exist at their sufferance.  The particular variant of supremacism to which Nazis and Klansmen subscribe is called “White Supremacism.” They see themselves as heirs to the grand Germanic tribes that conquered Rome—Visigoths and Vikings. They hold those of “Latin” or “Slavic” blood in contempt, and disdain Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical Christians.  Their hatred of “blacks” and “browns” and Jews of all colors is well known, and on constant display.  They disdain the very principles of eighteenth century liberalism on which the United States was founded.  Their creed is a bizarre agglomeration of self-worship, bastardized selective pseudo-Protestantism, and fabricated pseudo-Paganism.  They are, in a word, deplorable.

Neo-Nazis and Klansmen are not, however, the only deplorable groups in America—or the world—today.  Violent as they are, given the minuscule size of their current membership and the utter contempt in which Americans from right to left hold them, they also are not the most dangerous.  Various supremacist movements plague decent people, express violent rage, and commit acts of terror.  Islamism, for example, is a classic supremacist movement.  Islamists believe that Muslims are entitled to rule the world because they have accepted the Truth of Islam.  To Islamists, non-Muslims and those adopting “false” interpretations of Islam are subject to second-class treatment, at best—more often, slavery or extermination.  Islamism is—by far—the largest and most dangerous supremacist movement in the world today.  ISIS, al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian mullahcracy, and other groups are all supremacist organizations—even though they disagree bitterly among themselves about the “True” Islam.  Many allegedly respectable organizations in the U.S. and Europe serve as non-violent apologists and fundraisers for these violent, terror-driven supremacists.

An even larger number of groups practicing a virulent form of “identity” politics are rampant in the United States.  They wield tremendous power.  They claim the right to impose their views of morality on the unenlightened and on those whose identities (race, ethnicity, religion) they deem oppressive.  They demand an ever-expanding set of privileges accorded to no other identities. They condemn disagreement and punish dissent. They too reject the classic liberalism at the heart of America’s founding.  They too are deplorable.

This past weekend in Charlottesville showcasing several of these deplorable organizations, was inarguably America at its very worst.  Regrettably, it was a scene that is becoming all too familiar.  Over the past few years alone, we have witnessed comparable explosions in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charlotte.  Charlottesville was, however, the first such occurrence since President Trump took office.  It was also the first to feature prominently Nazi and Klan symbols capable of eliciting emotional responses of revulsion wholly out of proportion to the threat these hollow shell organizations pose in the world today.

The President, who has been accused relentlessly and disgustingly by his political detractors of being sympathetic to such groups, or to the animus that drives them, decried the violence we have seen coming from “many, many sides.”  Rather than pandering to the politically correct narrative that scapegoats him anyway, the President correctly and courageously pointed out that what truly matters is not whether the supremacist hate groups are white or black or anything else: all racial hatred and divisiveness deserves condemnation.  Preferring or excusing one side is unacceptable.

Jews do, or should, understand this perhaps better than any other group.  Every one of the deplorable groups mentioned, no matter that they are at odds in every other respect, share a mutual loathing for – and targeting of - Jews. Indeed, at the same time as the disgrace in Charlottesville, the LGBT activists in Chicago’s “Slutwalk” publicly and proudly declared their Jew-hatred, condemning LGBT-friendly Israel for its identity crime of being the only Jewish state, and struggling with whether to ban all Jews from their march or just those Jews who refuse to join in their anti-Semitic blood libels. The lack of real outrage over that – the failure by every politician who has ever claimed to stand for LGBT causes to denounce this public Jew-hatred even generally, let alone explicitly and by name, is somehow ignored by everyone. 

Except the President. President Trump issued the strongest Presidential statement in the face of such violence that has been heard in several decades.  It was accurate.  It was simple. The addled narratives that saturate America’s discourse and the emotional impact of seeing swastikas, hoods, and torches on display, however, required the President to return to the podium with more explicit terms.  They also allowed the media to shift its focus from important and dangerous facts on the ground to their comfort zone of decrying a Republican President. Perhaps most egregiously, it sent the media scurrying back to its fabrication that the President embraces racists.

It is thus worth reviewing what happened—and what we should learn from it.  Encouraged by the media’s recent attention to their otherwise demimonde existence, America’s tiny Neo-Nazi, Klan, and affiliated movements devised a plan to appear significant.  They pulled out all the stops.  They made a nationwide push to assemble as many of their followers as they could in a small, progressive, college town—with the nominal cause of protecting a statue of Robert E. Lee.  Their clear purpose, however, was to create a spectacle.  In pursuit of that goal, they loaded up on easily recognizable, emotionally charged symbols of hate.  For all their efforts, and for all the media’s strenuous efforts to be willing co-conspirator-publicists, they were able to attract only hundreds of believers to their cause.

Arrayed against them were an odd assortment of opposing organizations and people.  Many among them, notably but not exclusively those who identify with the violent, anti-American, coalition of Marxists and anarchists called Antifa, are haters every bit as deplorable. These leftists too went seeking to create a spectacle.  They too arrived armed with symbols of violence and hatred.  They too went looking for a fight in which they too could escape the insignificance to which they are truly entitled.  They too got what they wanted. 

True to its Marxist roots, Antifa is far less honest about its supremacist leanings than are Nazis or Klansmen.  Antifa likes to spout the language of justice.  Sadly, thanks to the compliant racism of our progressive media class, many decent Americans have fallen prey to those lies.   Far more important than whether there were fine people standing on both sides of the Battle of Charlottesville were the deplorable figures leading both armies.

Perhaps more important still is the divergence of condemnation across the spectrum of American political leadership.  Those who place themselves anywhere to the right of center were overwhelmingly critical of the white supremacists, often using language far harsher than they have ever hurled at the Antifa or Black Lives Matter leaders responsible for most of America’s recent riots.  Most of those who place themselves to the left of center have been withering in their condemnation of Neo-Nazis and Klansmen, while embracing or excusing Antifa and BLM.  Only President Trump had the courage to speak the truth: there isn’t much difference between them.  They are all hate-filled, violent, and anti-American.  They feed off each other.  They use each other to generate the attention they both crave.

Those who attack the President for daring to speak this truth are aligning with and abetting hate groups. Such attacks have become the profoundly distressing norm—even among mainstream Democrats. Disturbingly, too many Republicans who lack either the clarity or the courage to decry the soft supremacism of political correctness, joined in the chorus.  Mitt Romney’s and John McCain’s reactions – embracing the haters of one side in order to criticize the President - were particularly dangerous and disgraceful.  Far better were the words of Susan Bro, the grieving mother of Heather Heyer, murdered in Saturday’s bloodshed: “Thank you, President Trump, for those words of comfort and for denouncing those who promote violence and hatred.”

And the shameful behavior of Democrats – of Charlottesville’s mayor and Virginia’s governor - intentionally intensified the violence.  By all reports, the left-leaning political leadership in Charlottesville ordered the police to stand down, and helped Antifa wage its spectacle.  But they are hardly blazing new territory on the left.  President Obama, Attorneys General Holder and Lynch, and candidate Clinton, all endorsed the political agenda of leftist hatemongers, and excused much of their violence, setting the stage for Charlottesville.  Last year’s Democratic convention also contributed, dedicating an entire evening to showcasing reprehensible anti-police identity politics, replete, unsurprisingly, with anti-Jewish symbols and messages proudly on display—within the hall and without—that would warm the cockles of any Nazi’s or Klansman’s heart. 

Neo-Nazis and Antifa and Klansmen and Black Lives Matter are equally deplorable. It is appalling beyond words that the media have all but censored reports by those on the scene of the violence emanating from the Antifa and its fellow travelers. President Trump is right to equate them. What is truly frightening is that his counterparts on the left and political opponents on the right seem utterly committed to taking the opposite approach. Far from being morally obtuse, far from signaling support for any form of hate, Trump’s rational assessment was the one beacon of decency shining against the sickening smog of hate that is being agitated and mainstreamed in this country.  For this, he is being savaged.

Jeff