Charlottesville 2

What the liberal/progressive/left is trying to do with Charlottesville is to associate Trump supporters with White Supremacists and in this way demonize Trump supporters so that they will not have a voice when Trump is overthrown in a coup. Or it can be put in a different way: Charlottesville is being used by someone to discredit Trump and the people who elected him in order to pave the way for a coup, and the liberal/progressive/left is enabling the plot.
Upon reflection, I think that for most of the liberal/progressive/left the denunciations and one-sided interpretation of Charlottesville are just the ingrained knee-jerk reaction of people brought up in Identity Politics. In Identity Politics, everyone is a White Hat except racist, sexist, homophobic, gun-nut white males. The only tolerable white males are those who accept this characterization of themselves. All others are ‘white supremacists’ or ‘nazis.’
From what I read on progressive websites, those imbued with Identity Politics are letting the emotionalism of the politics run away with them. My friend, Rob Kall, who is fair and open-minded and posts my columns on OpEdNews, including those to which he takes exception, writes: ‘Trump is Now the Leader of White Supremacists and Nazis.’ Rob reaches this conclusion because Trump held both sides responsible for the violence in Charlottesville. By seeing equivalence between the two sides, Trump ‘made it clear that he was siding with the White Supremacists, giving them aid, support and encouragement.’ (You might remember Jean Kirkpatrick who denounced liberals for seeing moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and the US.) I doubt this is the way Trump saw his statement. From the news videos I saw, there seemed to be plenty of hate on both sides. Certainly, there is plenty of hate for Trump among progressives.

This post was published at Paul Craig Roberts on August 16, 2017.