The one thing that almost everybody is getting wrong about the riot in Charlottesville is that the confrontation was not a matter of left versus right, but left versus left. Both sides in this tragic showdown grew in the soil of regressive American liberalism.
As Dinesh D’Souza has pointed out, white nationalism is a left-wing creation. The KKK is the creation of the Democrat Party, which was also the party of Jim Crow legislation. It was the party that used sheriffs, police dogs, and firehoses to block school house doors to black children and to prevent marchers from crossing the bridge in Selma.
The media is relentlessly pounding the phrase “white nationalism” because it has the word “nationalism” in it. Donald Trump does not stand for white nationalism, but for American nationalism, but the media is conditioning the American people to think “racism” every time they hear the word “nationalism,” which is why 76% of Democrats, according to a Suffolk poll, believe, with absolutely zero evidence, that the president is a racist.
It was the Democrat Party whose white senators filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act and fought against the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both of those bills only became law because they had more Republican than Democrat support.
Democrat Senator Robert Byrd (when will they get around to destroying his statues, or insisting that every road and building in West Virginia named after him be rechristened?) has the distinction of being the only senator to vote against the two black nominees to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. He personally led the 52-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act, and once created a chapter of the KKK along with 150 of his buddies.
It’s absurd to cast conservatives or the “right” as the racists in this drama. The Republican Party was founded to resist and abolish the institution of slavery, while Democrats shed blood to protect it as an institution. The left simply does not want Americans to understand that the David Dukes and Richard Spencers of the world are creatures of the political left, not the political right. Duke was repudiated instantly and roundly by Republican leadership when he tried to affiliate with the party in the early 1990s. Donald Trump left the Reform Party because it embraced Duke rather than rejecting him.
Hitler, of course, is the ultimate example of a white nationalist, and he perfectly illustrates the point. He identified himself and his entire political organization as the “National Socialist German Workers' Party.” Perhaps the biggest lie the media has told in the last 60 years is that Hitler was from the far right rather than the far left. Hitler was as “Alt-Left” as it is possible to get.
The Soros-funded goons on the left, who fly under an anti-fascist banner, have carried out a relentless campaign of violence against free speech and assembly. As Peter Beinart observed in The Atlantic, “Antifa believes it is pursuing the opposite of authoritarianism. Many of its activists oppose the very notion of a centralized state. But in the name of protecting the vulnerable, antifascists have granted themselves the authority to decide which Americans may publicly assemble and which may not. That authority rests on no democratic foundation.”
The compliant media will hardly utter a word of condemnation against this obvious hate group, and they universally condemned the president viciously when he condemned them. But even Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times observed, as an eyewitness, that there was as much if not more hatred and violence coming from the Antifa rioters as from the white nationalists. Their view of America is not a theocracy but a thugocracy, and they see themselves as the thugs in charge.
CNN is out there today with a feature story seeking to smear conservative, pro-family groups like the American Family Association with the racist, hate group brush, hoping that Americans won’t notice that the SPLC, whose map CNN uses, is one of the most notorious hate groups in America, linked with both the crazed leftist who tried to shoot up the Family Research Council and the crazed leftist who tried to assassinate a whole passel of Republican lawmakers and put Steve Scalise in the hospital for months. The truth is the wholly-discredited SPLC belongs on its own hate group list.
No, ethno-nationalism, whether of the white, KKK-variety or the Black Lives Matter variety, is the mutant offspring of a leftwing political worldview.
As my producer Jeff Reed observed, what we saw in Charlottesville is the American version of the internecine battle between Sunni and Shia, groups that share the same ideology of fundamentalist Islam but are determined to wipe each other from the face of the earth. The battle we saw in Charlottesville is a battle to the political death to see which of their versions of socialism will prevail.
Beinart agrees in a way. “But one thing is clear. The people preventing Republicans from safely assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.”
Racism of any stripe, whether white or black, is fundamentally anti-Christian and anti-American. The gospel teaches us unambiguously that “there is neither Jew nor Greek (i.e., neither white nor black)...for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The purpose of the gospel is to subsume racial identity and division under a larger and higher view of man, that something or Someone greater than our differences can bring us together in profound unity.
Racism is likewise fundamentally anti-American. Every time we recite the Pledge of Allegiance, we declare that the United States is “one nation under God, indivisible.” The American ideal is of a unified nation, united by our common trust in the God of the Bible and his abiding moral standards for life as expressed in the Ten Commandments. This unity around these transcendent standards is what will make it impossible for us to be divided. We had better embrace that standard again before it’s too late.
The Talking Snake Media is in a mindless, hate-fueled frenzy because they believe they have now hung the bogus charge of racism around the president’s neck, and believe, to abruptly change the metaphor, it is the silver bullet to take President Trump out. They have hounded or cajoled one Republican after another into abandoning the president despite his unambiguous condemnation of violence on both sides of the conflict. I will guarantee you that nose counts are being taken even as we speak to see how many Republican senators would be of a mind to vote to convict the president on an impeachment charge and remove him from office. Senators McCain and Graham would be likely to lead the charge.
The media is not even talking about Russia anymore, have you noticed? The Mueller investigation is now a big yawner because they have a new, weapons-grade charge to bring against the president. They will beat the drums on this story until Trump is driven from office or the nation descends into civil war.
The venom from the left directed at the president is for one reason only: the entire establishment in D.C., media, Republican and Democrat alike, recognize Donald Trump as the greatest threat to their cushy domination of political affairs in their lifetime. In their view, Trump must be squashed because he imperils their own little fiefdoms. It’s now Trump - and his supporters among the American people - against the media, the Republican establishment, and the Democrat establishment. Whether he - and his supporters - can survive this withering onslaught remains to be seen. But much hangs in the balance.
