PrintSome Perspective on the President's Condemning Racial Violence
On the protest in Charlottesville this past weekend, Pajama Media’s Roger Simon, a self-described “Jewish fella,” put it well:
[T]he types who surfaced in Charlottesville on Saturday are certainly human beings of the most repellent and disgusting sort, murderous too -- pretty much violent, evil sociopaths. I wouldn’t mind if they were all rounded up, put in a space ship, and sent on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri.
Offering some “perspective,” Mr. Simon continues,
[F]or the sake of argument, let's say there are as many as 100,000 white supremacists in America today. (This is undoubtedly a vast exaggeration, but let's use it, as I said, for the sake of argument.)
Meanwhile, since the 1920s, our population has more than tripled to some 325 million. Using the figure of 100,000 white supremacists (not many of whom made it to Charlottesville fortunately), this puts the percentage of white supremacists in the U.S. at a puny 0.03%. Terrible people, yes, but no epidemic by any stretch of the imagination…
More to the point, are there more of these white supremacists than members of the equally violent and disgusting Antifa movement? Again statistics are hard to come by. (Both sides like to wear masks.) But I tend to doubt it. If anything, Antifa has been far more active, until Saturday.
Obviously, none of this is to exonerate in the slightest the human excrement that descended on Charlottesville. It's just to put them in perspective.
I hope that President Trump has more to say on this matter, but then again, U.S. Presidents have often disappointed when it comes to matters involving the hate-filled violence and rhetoric of a small number of their supporters. Take the last President, for example. Whether Ferguson, Missouri (more than once), Baltimore, St. Paul, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Oakland, and so on, time and again, President Obama refused to condemn the violent racists of Black Lives Matter (BLM). On the contrary, Obama and the Democrat Party regularly encouraged the perverse cause of BLM and gave them political cover.
In spite of their regular use of violence, destruction, and racist rhetoric, in August of 2015, the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution “affirming” BLM. In July of 2016, at the funeral of five Dallas police officers murdered by a BLM-inspired racist, President Obama continued to defend the BLM movement. After the Dallas shootings, law enforcement leaders accused President Obama of helping to encourage a “war on cops.” Politico reported,
I think [the Obama administration] continued appeasements at the federal level with the Department of Justice, their appeasement of violent criminals, their refusal to condemn movements like Black Lives Matter, actively calling for the death of police officers, that type of thing, all the while blaming police for the problems in this country has led directly to the climate that has made Dallas possible,” William Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said in an interview with Fox on Friday morning.
Additionally, BLM has long made it clear what they were all about. As Katie Pavlich noted in 2015,
It's time to expose the Black Lives Matter [BLM] movement for what it is: a racist, violent hate group that promotes the execution of police officers. The evidence is in their rhetoric and written on their shirts.
Miss Pavlich goes on to chronicle how BLM has elevated individuals like Assata Shakur, “otherwise known as Joanne Chesimard, who shot and killed a New Jersey State Trooper back in 1973.” Last year National Review’s David French highlighted a “sickening” essay by BLM that expressed support and admiration for -- in addition to Fidel Castro -- Michael Finney, Ralph Goodwin, Charles Hill, and Huey Newton. All were cop killers.
French rightly asks, “How many despots and murderers must Black Lives Matter praise before it’s consigned to the fringe of American life? How many riots and murders must it incite -- often through lies and hoaxes?” Not yet enough, it seems.
In spite of all of this, a single incident by White Nationalists in Virginia -- with not a hint of support from President Trump or his administration -- and all of a sudden the Charlottesville racists are Trump’s “people.” Of course, eager to paint anyone on the right as a racist, describing the Virginia fools as “Trump’s people” has been a regular refrain from pundits on the left. In spite of all of the evidence linking Obama, the democrats, and BLM, as far as I can recall, the liberal mainstream media never sought to label black racists as “Obama’s people.”
This should surprise no one, and I expect the double standard in this matter (and many others) to continue. Instead of proving Trump a racist, more than anything else, the events in Charlottesville again reveal the depths of corruption of the left-wing media.
Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
