OPINION:
President Trump reverted to his true self Tuesday in telling the nation who was to blame for the Charlottesville riots on Saturday.
As on Saturday, he fingered both sides but on Tuesday he went further, much further. He got specific in aiming his ire at the white and black leftists who had descended on the quiet Virginia city garbed and armed for a rumble. Many of the white and black leftists called themselves the “Antifa,” meaning “antifascist.” They hate free speech, free assembly, capitalism, free markets, the profit motive, states’ rights — the works.
The left, which encompasses just about all the U.S. news media, the Democratic Party, and some Republicans who repeat what the left says, whether given a cracker or not, control the commanding heights in our culture.
They shoot down at you when they feel like it. You dare not, especially if you are black, call any of the left’s members intolerant and totalitarian, most especially if the intolerant totalitarians are black.
Mr. Trump had tried to mollify these particular leftists and the American left in general Monday, when he did his first about-face. Instead of simply deploring hatred and bigotry as he had on Saturday, he explicitly blamed the violence on the right-wingers — “neo-Nazis,” the “Ku Klux Klan” and “white supremacists.”
We loved his stomping on the haters — Hitlerians, Klansmen and less ideological white supremacists, but we expected the balance of stomping on the left-wing hatemongers. It never came from his lips. And that’s why he looked uncomfortable during his attempt to appease the left on Monday. He had given the left a pass. And he hated it.
We all know there’s somehow always a free press awaiting black and white liberals, progressives, Democrats and, yes, those Republican lawmakers who suddenly go blind and deaf when leftwing blacks and whites do their thing, no matter how awful to behold.
The free pass is always there, no mater how violent the left’s behavior, how much it vandalizes, burns and loots the cars and stores of whites and blacks, how many police officers it kills as if it were a black civic duty to kill cops.
The Klan and neo-Nazis descended on the city bent on baiting the leftists into a street fight that would show the world the racial-supremacy underworld still had life in it. Damnably, they succeeded. They were the news of the day — day after day.
You can’t blame some white people for wondering where the balance is in reporting and condemning bad behavior.
America has never been in greater need of leaders who will cast political cowardice and political correctness to the wind and tell it exactly as it is. One-sided moral outrage will only undermines an increasingly fragile melting pot. Mr. Trump’s second about-face Tuesday showed he’s most comfortable when following his own compass and telling swamp-dwelling advisers to go to hell.
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