I think it’s time for a little trip down memory lane, don’t you?
The date was August 14, 2017, and Donald Trump was holding a press conference a couple of days after a civil disturbance in Charlottesville, Virginia, had turned deadly.
In Charlottesville, the local Hard Left-dominated city council had opted to defenestrate a historical landmark, that being a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in a prominent place in town. A protest was planned and permitted for those critics of tearing the statue down to express their opinion, and attaching themselves to that protest was a group of alt-right agitators who held a tiki torch parade through Charlottesville the night before.
Counterprotestors, including Antifa and Black Lives Matter agitators, then turned the demonstration over the Lee statue into a melee, and one of the alt-right “neo-Nazis” ended up running over a leftist demonstrator in a car.
Charlottesville was thus elevated just below the status of 9/11 in the mainstream media lexicon, and Trump was battered for waiting two days before making a statement. Trump defended himself by saying he wanted to know and understand all the facts around Charlottesville before he weighed in.
Then there was this exchange at the press conference:
Trump: Okay, what about the alt-left that came charging at [indiscernible] – excuse me – what about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? What about this? What about the fact that they came charging – they came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. As far as I’m concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day. Wait a minute, I’m not finished. I’m not finished, fake news. That was a horrible day. I will tell you something. I watched those very closely, much more closely than you people watched it. And you had, you had a group on one side that was bad. And you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. You had a group – you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent.
Q: Do you think what you call the alt left is the same as neo-Nazis?
Trump: Those people – all of those people, excuse me – I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there, because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue Robert E. Lee. So – excuse me – and you take a look at some of the groups and you see, and you’d know it if you were honest reporters, which in many cases you’re not. Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week, it’s Robert E. Lee, I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after. You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?
But, they were there to protest – excuse me – you take a look the night before, they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. Infrastructure question. Go ahead.
Q: Does the statue of Robert E. Lee stay up?
Trump: I would say that’s up to a local town, community or the federal government, depending on where it is located.
Q: On race relations in America, do you think things have gotten worse or better since you took office with regard to race relationships?
I think they’ve gotten better or the same – look – they have been frayed for a long time, and you can ask President Obama about that, because he’d make speeches about it. I believe that the fact that I brought in, it will be soon, millions of jobs, you see where companies are moving back into our country. I think that’s going to have a tremendous positive impact on race relations. We have companies coming back into our country. We have two car companies that just announced. We have Foxconn in Wisconsin just announced. We have many companies, I’d say, pouring back into the country. I think that’s going to have a huge, positive impact on race relations. You know why? It is jobs. What people want now, they want jobs. They want great jobs with good pay. And when they have that, you watch how race relations will be. And I’ll tell you, we’re spending a lot of money on the inner cities – we are fixing the inner cities – we are doing far more than anybody has done with respect to the inner cities. It is a priority for me, and it’s very important.
Q: Mr. President, are you putting what you are calling the alt–left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?
Trump: I am not putting anybody on a moral plane, what I’m saying is this: you had a group on one side and a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch, but there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You’ve just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.
Q: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides?
I do think there is blame – yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say. Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
Q: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.
Oh no, George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down – excuse me. Are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down his statue? He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? You know what? It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.
From that, Trump was excoriated for saying that the neo-Nazis were fine people.
It was an utter and complete lie, essentially a blood libel. Trump condemned the neo-Nazis and defended traditional America, the people who object to tearing down historical landmarks over stupid woke pieties that were only just beginning to tear America apart as they’ve nearly completely done now.
The false narratives around Trump’s Charlottesville press conference were preserved and burnished throughout his presidency in order to paint him as a racist. It didn’t really work, as Trump ended up with a higher percentage of the black vote in 2020 than he had in 2016. Of course, Trump suffered from a worse performance among white women who were the real target of the Charlottesville allegations; as a “racist,” he was thus unpalatable to those “persuadable” voters and paid a price when he ran for reelection.
But what price will Joe Biden pay for his own “both sides” statement? He said this Monday when asked about the anti-Semitic protests: “I condemn the anti-Semitic protests, that’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians, and how they’re being…”
I just showed you the transcript of what Trump said back in 2017, which makes it quite clear that he was delineating a difference between citizens with a mainstream point of view and the agitators who caused all the trouble.
How is this not unmistakably worse?
There are rioters on college campuses all over America, most notably perhaps at Columbia and NYU, demonstrating on behalf of a terrorist organization, Hamas, that started a war by killing more than 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7 of last year and taking well more than 200 hostages, almost all of whom they’ve since killed.
Israel’s response to Oct. 7 was to invade Gaza, from which the attack began, and eradicate Hamas.
Hamas is attempting to hide within the civilian population of Gaza. Which is nothing new. In fact, it is standard operating procedure for Hamas.
Hiding among a civilian population, for the purpose of using civilians as human shields, is universally recognized as a war crime.
Israel has spent decades absorbing attacks by Hamas and related jihadist terror groups based in the Arab areas surrounding Israeli territory, almost all of which use indiscriminate attacks (in the ubiquitous cases of rocket attacks) or directly target civilians. Now, after the worst outbreak of those attacks resulting in the highest casualty count of Jews since the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust, the Israelis have recognized that it’s no longer possible to attempt to coexist with these people and that Hamas must be eliminated from the equation.
No serious person fails to recognize the necessity for Israel to do this. There can be no coexistence between Israel and Hamas, and Israel is not the reason why. Hamas has controlled Gaza for decades, and, in that time, billions of dollars in aid money have poured in, and those resources have been spent on guns, bullets, rockets, and a maze of terror tunnels to facilitate attacks on Israeli civilians.
As for Palestinian civilians, they overwhelmingly support not just Hamas, but the overall mission of killing so many Jews that the rest either leave what is now Israel — so that Arab Muslims can have the region for themselves — or accept dhimmitude — a semi-slavery second-class citizenship status prescribed in Sharia law for non-Muslims.
A while back here at The American Spectator, Dov Fischer correctly noted that, in their attitudes, the “civilians” of Gaza are significantly less blameless than were those of Germany during World War II. No one expressed much approbation then, nor since, over the firebombing of German cities like Dresden as a means of breaking the Germans’ will to continue fighting, and ultimately, German civilians were happy to be conquered by Americans and British — if only because the alternative was to be brutalized and raped by the Soviet troops coming from the other direction.
The Israelis are killing fewer Palestinian civilians as a ratio of the combat fatalities they’re inflicting than we did in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Some of that is the changing and more surgical nature of war, and some of it is Israel’s attempt not to do exactly what they’re being accused of doing — which is inflicting “genocide” on the Palestinians.
But Joe Biden just told you that he “condemns” you if you recognize the truths outlined above. He says that if you “don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians,” that you’re on the same plane with the rioters spouting real “From the river to the sea!” genocidal rhetoric on those campuses and elsewhere.
Unforgivable. And from an American president. For the sole purpose of pandering to the vote of sniveling, overprotected, indoctrinated little monsters on college campuses and the Arab vote in Michigan.
It’s a damned shame we don’t have an honest media in this country. If we had one, they would eviscerate Biden infinitely worse than what Trump received after Charlottesville.
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