Samira wrote:
No, he really didn't. He said there was too much hatred on all sides, and it gives him a sad.
Which is an accurate statement though. The problem is that there's a lot of "side taking" going on, both in politics and especially in the media. I have no love for white supremacists, but they have just as much right (that pesky 1st amendment thing) to assemble and speak as any other group (like say Black Lives Matters). In this case, they applied for the proper permits, had a scheduled time and place to assemble, and thus had the "right" to be there. The counter protesters, of course, also had a right to show up (at the same time and place). What neither side had a right to do was to start blocking traffic on streets in the area, assault random people on said streets (or each other for that matter).
Someone in the comments section of the linked article raised a question: What would have happened if no one had showed up to counter protest? Probably nothing. No violence. And no death. You'd have a group of people most of us don't agree with, having their say, as they are legally entitled to do. And the rest of us can allow their speech to influence us to whatever degree it will do so (most of us, in the negative, one would hope). The key point is that you judge the speech based on the speech itself.
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He did not specifically condemn the white supremacists at the heart of this mess, as he has repeatedly failed to do.
Because they were not the only part of this, nor the primary reason the march turned violent. The sad part is that this has been going on for some time. I've commented on it in the past. It seems as though assemblies only turn violent when there are liberals involved. And if this was just restricted to angry liberals protesting the speech of white supremacists, we all might even be a bit more willing to accept such things (well, not the death via road rage of course). But it's not limited to this. The left has been acting to systematically block conservative speech of all kinds for years now. See protests at universities designed to prevent a conservative speaker from speaking. Happens all the time. Heck. This goes on, in a less violent manner, via the implementation of "safe spaces", and policies claiming to protect people from triggers (which is code for "don't allow conservative speech").
The left seems to have decided that it can't win an argument by actually engaging the other side, so they just shut down the other sides ability to speak (or at least to be heard). In this case, it was a bunch of people saying things that most of us reject automatically disagree with. Although I suspect there were a lot of people showing up for this that had nothing at all to do with white supremacy, but rather a quite reasonable opposition to the removal of a statue of a man who is arguably the one "clean" symbol the South had coming out of the Civil War, with no connection to slavery or racism at all. One can argue the frustration many have with symbols that in their mind have nothing to do with racism or slavery being co-opted by the left and made into those things, so strongly that they must be removed from public sight for fear of offending people. Which, yeah, is another one of those "eliminate speech we don't agree with" practices.
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Put it this way: white supremacists are extremely encouraged by his response. So maybe he's not a ****, but he is certainly #1 with *****, and apparently content to be.
I can't speak to what white supremacists may think, but I'd say the left is far more encouraged by his response than anyone. It's a response that they can use to further paint Trump, the GOP, and all conservatives as being associated in some way with white supremacy, racism, slavery, etc. For Trump, it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If he condemns just the white supremacists, then he allows the left's tactics to succeed, and along the way gives weight to the associative denial process (and encourages more of it in the future). If he condemns "all" violence, he's labeled as somehow protecting or siding with said supremacists and the left piles on with that narratives.
It's the exact same thing that BLM does when someone response that "all lives matter". It's designed to be a trap. If you don't put that "all" in there, then you are supporting the language itself, which suggests that black lives matter either more than other lives, or at least differently (both of which are innately racially biased, which we conservatives tend to not like to do), or you do, and are bashed for being insensitive to the cause, and thus presumed to be in opposition to the idea that black lives matter
at all.
IMO, it's an ugly way to present a position from the start. But that's what our politics have turned into lately.