After the appalling incidents in Charlottesville where neo-Nazis paraded through the streets and were met with counter-violence by Antifa activists and a young woman was killed, Trump condemned both sides. The BBC, along with the rest of the media, immediately plugged the prevailing anti-Trump response that he had not specifically condemned white supremacists.
The problem with Trump’s response to the attacks was not only that he did not specifically condemn white supremacists, which he should have. The people who marched with Nazi insignia are scum who have no place in a civilised society. They should have been called out at the time and condemned utterly. Trump should also have specifically condemned the left-wing violence of Antifa and BLM, which has been allowed to spread and be accepted as normal.
Political violence, whatever its source, should be condemned utterly.
The USA faces a rising tide of political violence, which is not going to get better any time soon as it has been stewing and encouraged for a decade now. That there is open violence on the streets of America should come as no surprise. During the Obama years political violence was allowed to go virtually unchecked.
The riots and looting in Ferguson after a white policeman shot a black thug was symptomatic of the automatic reaction of a growing number of people. Violence is increasingly accepted as a first response. Young people marched through Ferguson and Dallas shouting ‘Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon. What do we want – dead cops. When do we want them – now’. And after Ferguson was trashed and five white Dallas policemen murdered, BLM were not held to account.
A Huffington Post editorial by Jesse Bern during the 2016 election encouraged violent resistance to Trump: ‘there’s an inherent value in forestalling Trump’s normalisation. Violent resistance accomplishes this’. Bern went on to urge liberals not to ‘ignore the history of successful violent insurrection in the US’. There is no record of Bern being questioned by the police or being called out by Democratic politicians. Violence is the newly accepted norm.
Before the 2016 Presidential election, a video aired showing how Democratic operatives paid people to start fights at Trump rallies in order to create a perception of violent right wing anarchy, a tactic called ‘bird-dogging’. Wikileaks revealed that bird-dogging was approved by Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook in a July 4, 2015 email. This coincided with a DNC plan to cite ‘incidences of violence’ in order to create the perception that ‘Trump is dangerous’. Unsurprisingly violent assaults against Trump supporters rocketed. Violence was being employed by a mainstream political party as an election tool, and thus normalised.
When House Majority Whip Republican Congressman Steve Scalise was shot in June by Bernie Sanders supporter Phil Montang, an official with the Nebraska Democratic Party, was captured on audio railing: ‘I’m glad he got shot. I wish he was f—ing dead’. When his violent hatred was revealed he was fired by the party, but his outburst is indicative of the mindset and acceptance of political violence by many in the USA today.
Failed Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Kaine (VA) has tweeted, ‘Democrats have to fight in the streets against Trump’. People listen when leading politicians call for action against other politicians. Witness the scenes at Berkeley when Milo Yiannopoulos was invited to speak. Open violence and arson on the streets, the constitutional right to free speech trashed, $100,000 worth of property damage, and no repercussions from the police or university authorities. Democrat Congresswoman Val Deming (FL) even described the violent Berkeley riot as ‘a beautiful sight’, and refused to condemn the rioters.
In Charlottesville, Deputy Mayor Wes Bellamy has a history of racially-charged, sexist, angry and divisive posts on social media. His tweets included gems such as ‘I dont like whit [sic] people so I hate white snow!!! FLM!!!’, ‘I hate seeing white people in Orangeburg’, ‘White women = Devil’, ‘I tune out when white people talk in community meetings. I really need to work on that smh… “Obama shrug”’. After his Twitter outbursts went public Bellamy was forced to step down from Virginia Board of Education but continues to serve as the deputy mayor of Charlottesville, and condemn white racism.
When you spend enough time accusing everyone who merely disagrees with your politics of racism, you make the term racism meaningless. That’s what has been happening in the USA over the last decade. By the time the election came around, Hillary was defining ‘deplorable’ Trump voters as racists. When you spend enough time crying wolf, a real wolf eventually appears. A real wolf appeared in Charlottesville.
For political reasons, the Left spent a decade dismantling any meaningful definition of racism. The outcome of labelling everyone who disagreed with them a racist was to eliminate social sanctions against actual racists. And the actual racists were happy to take advantage of the new climate and march with torches.
The horror that was Charlottesville is what happens when hate and street violence become accepted as a normal part of political life. Every normalisation of extremism inevitably normalises extremism in the minds of the opposing side. When we see Neanderthals carrying Nazi insignia marching through an American university town, we realise that the Left’s chickens are coming home to roost.
The radical Left and their enablers wish to see the miniscule number of American neo-Nazis gain prominence in the minds of people as this will further polarise America. It wants to see American democratic values and norms dismantled by violence so speech with which it disagrees can be eliminated. Charlottesville is what happens when civil society fails. Those responsible for the failure throughout America are those who set the terms of public discourse; politicians, academics and the media.
(Image: Mark Dixon)
