The violence this week is both shocking and not shocking. We have a president bringing back the word “Nationalist” and attacking “globalists” as though those words lack the connotations they have taken on over the last century. We have a president who cages children, calls immigrants an infestation, rails that black football players who take a knee “maybe shouldn’t be in the country.”
Trump, of course, is just a symptom of the rot and not the rot itself. He is the raving id of a deranged nation, but his thundering and clowning at the podium, his bullying and name calling have ultimately granted permission for white nationalists to come out of the shadows — to march in Charlottesville and to engage in the kind of violence we witnessed this week.
I can hear the response from my Trump supporting friends — both sides, both sides, both sides. Antifa (essentially a defensive, if wrongheaded, organization) and the GOP softball practice shooter will be raised as the examples. But there is no equivalence here.
Here are two pieces I wrote this week on the violence:
Just Another Day in Post-Racial America
The Sabbath Shooting: Us, Them, and Trump
Hank Kalet 