RUTHFULLY YOURS

Southern slaveholders were rapists. We know this because only 73% of the DNA of African-Americans is African; the rest is Caucasian with a small fraction of Native American. Most of the admixture of DNA, a McGill University study concludes, occurred before the Civil War, that is, when slaveholders and their white employees could use female slaves at will. Keep that in mind the next time Foghorn Leghorn sounds off about the honor of Southern womanhood. To own slaves is wicked; to rape female slaves and sell one’s children by them is disgusting in the extreme. Yet that is what the Old South did, and the DNA evidence proves it.

This simple fact bears on the problem of Confederate monuments, which is far from simple.

Nonetheless “Gone With the Wind” remains the highest-grossing Hollywood film of all time (in inflation-adjusted dollars). Why do Americans wallow in nostalgia for the antebellum South? Partly for the same reason we like gangsters: We like the idea of getting something for nothing. We’ve always had a split personality, part Yankee farmer and part riverboat gambler. But part of our sympathy for the South, I think, stems from our horror at the scale of butchery required to win the war. Full disclosure: I’ve never been able to watch GWTW, except in brief segments. I wanted Scarlett O’Hara to pick cotton until her hands fell off.

Why hasn’t Hollywood ever made a film about Sherman’s march through Georgia? This is my favorite moment in American history. He killed very few people (and almost no civilians) but he burnt plantation houses and humiliated the South. As Machiavelli wrote, a man will forgive the murder of his father before the loss of his inheritance. Not Grant, who killed off Lee’s army, but rather Sherman–who kept casualties low but the flames high–is hated in the South. That shows what the South really was fighting for, just like their song says: “We are a band of brothers/Native to the soil/Fighting for the property/We gained by honest toil.” Sherman might be our greatest military commander of all time, yet we do not celebrate his achievements.

The wound that the Civil War left in the white South has never healed. Fully 28% of military-age Southern men died in the Civil War, comparable to the German death toll in World War II. The Germans were the better soldiers, with a killing efficiency 20%-30% higher than their British and American enemies, and the Confederates were the better soldiers in the Civil War, defeated by superior Northern numbers and industrial capacity–at least until Sherman’s Westerners arrived in Georgia. The fact that the Southerners were brave and capable soldiers is not by itself a cause for celebration.

I can accept the idea that Robert E. Lee was a decent man. Decent men fought for causes even more wicked than the Confederacy. Would the Germans erect a monument to Field Marshal Rommel, a professional soldier murdered by Hitler? Of course not. They are left to mourn their dead in private. America had a different sort of dilemma. We fought the Civil War to preserve the Union, including a South that was only sorry that it lost. In the interests of unity we tolerated (and even promoted) the myth of Southern gallantry, the Lost Cause, and all the other baloney that went into D.W. Griffiths’ “The Birth of a Nation” and GWTW. We allowed the defeated South to console itself with the myth that it fought for “states’ rights” or whatever rather than to preserve a vile system of economic (and sometimes sexual) exploitation. Meanwhile the freed slaves had a very bad century between Appomattox and the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Don’t expect them to look with understanding on the supposed symbols of “Southern heritage.”

Chautauqua Institution, originally a cultural center, is now a disseminator of Islamic messaging to reach out to uninformed Christians and Jews programmed to accept multiculturalism. Featured speaker Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic Center for Middle East Policy, is part of the worldwide movement financed by oil money.

In a lecture on August 9 at the Institution’s center at Chautauqua, N.Y., he spoke of American anxiety, incongruously blaming occasions such as buying jam at the grocers, where, alas, so many choices will cause regret that one hasn’t purchased the best option. He sees no beauty in the many fruits, flavors, or quality, or why, if one manufacturer makes jam and employs and pays a decent wage to improve life for himself and his neighbors, another cannot do the same in another locality.

Blind to possibilities, Hamid is instead guided by Islamic rules, allowing only one jam, or having one of his housebound wives make it. He prefers that leadership dictate one’s lifestyle by force; create one nation, the Ummah; one law, sharia; and one goal, world domination.

Where democratic nations have excelled in science and technology, medical advances, improvements in agriculture and water technology so that humanity may flourish, the Islamic culture is based on shame and honor, along with a high illiteracy rate to impede progress. Their greatness will come when all vestiges of advanced societies are destroyed.

Hamid described the universal condition as a “struggle,” but he meant “jihad,” as struggle is rarely part of the Western vernacular. Hamid is a moderate, unweaponed jihadi, hoping to conquer by message, to convince his conditioned audience that his culture is superior, and particularly to reach those who have chosen the altar of liberalism over Judaism and Christianity, from which derived those freedoms, morals, and ethics imperative to happiness and peace. Judaism and Christianity do not struggle for meaning; struggle is a proclivity of all forms of fascism, because authoritarianism provides no contentment.

The divisiveness that Hamid sees in America comes not from democracy, but from those who seek its destruction. Our laws provide respect for human rights, religious freedom, worker rights, a secure peace by combating international terrorism, stability, prosperity, open markets and economic development, improvement in the global environment and human health, and the enemy hopes to use our laws to defeat us. Arab-American author Nonie Darwish penned a warning: “America must protect its democracy, culture, and sovereignty from nations with aspirations of conquering us from within.”

We need only look to the Islamic Middle East to see Hamid’s “rich tapestry of traditions and contentment” — the rampant violence that has now created a “lost generation” of Middle East men — 30,000 suicides, 35,000 deaths from interpersonal violence, a ten-fold increase of fatalities from HIV/AIDS in 25 years (a side effect of FGM on women), and 144,000 deaths from wars in 22 Islamic nations.

It’s not every day this columnist finds himself on the same side as WikiLeaks, Glenn Greenwald and the American Civil Liberties Union.

That’s especially true for the ACLU, because these days it has too often let progressive politics trump its founding mission of protecting core civil liberties such as speech and due process. All the more reason, however, to applaud the ACLU for the principled—and unpopular—stand it took in Charlottesville, Va., for free speech.

In two tweets put out just hours after James Alex Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into the crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring many others, the ACLU’s national office explained its work in Charlottesville this way. “The First Amendment is a critical part of our democracy,” it said, “and it protects vile, hateful, and ignorant speech. For this reason, the ACLU of Virginia defended the white supremacists’ right to march.”

This, of course, hasn’t tempered the outrage on Twitter , where the attacks on the ACLU are mostly variations of “How could you?” Or in the New York Times , where a Princeton prof complained that the ACLU goes out of its way “to defend the rights of provocative speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter to speak on campuses but has been virtually silent on cases involving leftist or progressive faculty members who face suspension for provocative comments.” On Monday Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe piled on, suggesting the violence was the ACLU’s fault.

The unkindest cut came from within, when a board member of the ACLU’s Virginia chapter resigned in protest of . . . well . . . the ACLU. “I won’t be a fig leaf for Nazis,” declared Waldo Jaquith.

Plainly Mr. Jaquith, when he joined the ACLU, somehow hadn’t noticed that way back in 1977 the organization had defended a similarly provocative plan by Nazis to hold a march in Skokie, a Chicago suburb where Jewish Holocaust survivors constituted a high percentage of the population. In the end the ACLU prevailed at the Supreme Court but lost many donors and members in the process. (Ironically, the Nazis never did march in Skokie.) CONTINUE AT SITE

After leaving the White House in January 2017, Barack Obama and his family set out to do what all newly retired presidents have done—go back home, or find a new one. In Obama’s case, though, the new residence is in Washington, D.C. At first, the Obamas presented their choice as temporary—they wanted to let their younger daughter, Sasha, finish high school in Washington, they said—but their purchase of an 8,200-square-foot, $8 million mansion suggests a permanent stay. Obama’s postpresidency is thus shaping up to be virtually unique in American history: rather than departing Washington, he is planting his flag there, establishing, in effect, a shadow presidency.

Obama’s move breaks with long-standing precedent. Conscious of threats to the safe transfer of executive power in the young republic, America’s early presidents departed Washington on the expiration of their terms. After relinquishing his commission as general following victory over the British, George Washington was compared with Cincinnatus, the retired Roman general who assumed emergency powers, saved Rome, and then returned to his plow. Washington repeated his valiant act when he declined a third term as president—Garry Wills calls him a “virtuoso of resignations”—and set the standard for future executives by going home when his political work was done.

The American ideal of a president is essentially republican: a citizen steps forward to serve the government and returns to private life when his term is up. Washington’s diaries and correspondence of 1797 are consumed with matters of housekeeping, husbandry, and accounts. Mount Vernon had gone to seed, and Washington was forced to shore up his personal finances. Though he stayed abreast of national events and voiced his opinions to his associates, he stayed out of the affairs of government; keeping a safe physical distance from the capital reinforced that resolution.

Following Washington’s model, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe each returned to their farms, in varying degrees of insolvency. True, John Quincy Adams, finding retirement dull, soon returned to public service as a congressman, a role he embraced and thrived in, but his ambitions were not imperial. Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren went home, too, when their terms in the White House were finished.

In the modern era, only one other former president remained in Washington after his term of office ended. Stroke victim Woodrow Wilson took up residence on S Street—just a few blocks away from the Obamas’ new Kalorama home. But Wilson was an invalid—indeed, he spent the last 18 months of his presidency in seclusion, with his wife largely managing the affairs of state. Unlike Obama, he was in no position to assert his postpresidential authority or impose himself as a presence on the national stage.

Harry Truman retired to Missouri, broke, in 1953. Dwight Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg, eight years later. In 1969, Lyndon Johnson lit his first cigarette in 15 years, telling his daughters, “I’ve now raised you girls. I’ve now been president. Now it’s my time!” He went to his ranch, grew a ponytail, and died within three years. Richard Nixon skulked off to California and reengineered himself as a statesman, Gerald Ford made himself rich, and Jimmy Carter became a professional humanitarian. Ronald Reagan rode off into the sunset. George H. W. Bush splits his time between Houston and Maine; his son George W., a full-time Texan, paints. Bill Clinton arguably broke the mold through his efforts to install his wife as president, but even that ambitious enterprise was centered in New York, not Washington.

Delivering on his promises, decimating the opposition

Hard to know which body is held in lower esteem, Congress or the media. But for a long time, the media thought they were invincible, based largely on their success after forming the JournOlist in
2007 – a cabal of 400 leftists who vowed to destroy anyone who said a single bad word about the poseur “president” Barack Obama.

When said poseur denied his lifelong friendships and political associations with fulminating anti-Semites, enacted the disaster of socialized medicine and socialized public education, eviscerated our military, doubled the national debt, signed a deal with genocidal Iran, and sang the praises of peaceful lslam as dozens of horrific Muslim terrorist attacks around the world attested to a decidedly sub-human species, JournOlist went into action to squash his critics like they were so many pesky cockroaches.

COLLUSION 101

The JournOlist’s goal last year was to insure that the, ahem, legacy of the poseur would be continued by another globalist shill, Hillary Clinton, who shamelessly extorted massive “donations” from foreign government leaders and tin-pot dictators alike to fill the coffers of the Clinton Foundation, a slush fund of undisguised bribes and payoffs designed to insure access to power. Curious that this windfall completely dried up the day after Nov. 8, 2016.

Not that anyone liked Hillary or could stop themselves from cringing as she bobbled her head, affected a southern accent in front of black audiences, and lied through her teeth at every turn.

No, to the real powers-that-be on the Council of Foreign Relations, behind the International Monetary Fund, in the cesspool known as the United Nations, and among the big-money guys on Wall St. who actually buy our politicians and so run our country, Hillary was yet another Barack Obama, an easy-to-manipulate functionary, a front person to do their bidding and move them closer to the One World Government – and total power and control – they all crave.

And why do they crave such immense power? Partly for the accumulation of even greater wealth – my bank account is bigger than yours! – but also because they genuinely believe that they are immeasurably smarter than the masses and so exquisitely suited to call all the shots about everything to do with human existence from cradle to grave.

UH OH – MEGALOMANIUS INTERRUPTUS

After nearly one hundred years of planning and plotting their takeover of the Democratic Republic of big bad capitalist America, the socialists and communists and jihadists among us – who under Obama, frighteningly, were implanted in the highest positions in virtually all departments of our government, hence the avalanche of leaks – were caught off guard when along came a genuinely unanticipated wild card into the presidential race of 2015-16, billionaire businessman and successful TV personality Donald J. Trump.

Everyone witnessed the patronizing and supercilious snickering of fake journalists like ABC-TV’s George Stephanopoulos, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Greenspan, CBS-TV’s Scott Pelley, NBC-TV’s Chuck Todd, everyone at CNN, starting with its president Jeff Zucker, at the prospect of a Donald J. Trump candidacy.

Everyone – except for us Trump believers – watched and believed all the pollsters, every single one of them, predict not a mere Hillary win, but a resounding victory, right up until 8 p.m. on the night of the vote.

And, of course, everyone remembers that in spite of all the billions spent on Hillary’s candidacy, in spite of every [inaccurate] poll, in spite of a Democrat Party that over decades has become expert at rigging elections, and especially in spite of the rancid collusion of the media in predicting her win, the American people had another idea.

Yahoo News on August 14th published an article that couldn’t have gotten it more wrong than if it tried. Well, Caitlin Dickson, the leftist author, tried, and got it wrong. In “As neo-Nazis grow bolder, the ‘Antifa’ has emerged to fight them,” her focus is not on the threat Antifa poses to freedom of speech and the right of free assembly with its policy of terrorizing with force and assault supporters of freedom of speech, but rather the alleged threat that “white supremacists” pose to it. An Atlantic article blames President Trump, and even candidate Trump, for being a catalyst for the growth of Antifa, because his alleged “racist” and “fascist” rhetoric was so hated by its members and by the Left. Peter Beinart, in his article, “The Rise of the Violent Left,” in the Atlantic, claimed:

Trump’s rise has also bred a new sympathy for Antifa among some on the mainstream left. “Suddenly,” noted the Antifa-aligned journal It’s Going Down, “anarchists and Antifa, who have been demonized and sidelined by the wider Left have been hearing from liberals and Leftists, ‘you’ve been right all along.’ ” An article in The Nation argued that “to call Trumpism fascist” is to realize that it is “not well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason.” The radical left, it said, offers “practical and serious responses in this political moment.”

According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University, San Bernardino, Antifa activists participate in violent actions because “they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist.”

According to Antifa organizer Crow, Antifa is based on the idea of direct action, “The idea in Antifa is that we go where they (right-wingers) go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that. And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don’t believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to cheer on Communists and Nazis punching each other in major American cities while civil society disintegrates around them.

In Dallas, a black nationalist activist shot and killed 5 police officers at a Black Lives Matter anti-police rally. Instead of condemning BLM, Barack Obama defended a racist hate group whose role model is Assata Shakur, a wanted black nationalist cop killer, at the funerals of the murdered officers.

The left killed civil rights and replaced it with black nationalism. The racial supremacism of black nationalism that killed those officers is everywhere. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi are lionized as brilliant thinkers instead of hateful racists, Amazon has ordered a black nationalist secessionist fantasy from Aaron McGruder and Showtime aired ‘Guerilla,’ a miniseries glamorizing Black Panther terrorism.

But racism is a two-way street. So is violence. Extremists feed into each other.

You can’t legitimize one form of racism without legitimizing all of them. The media may advance this hypocritical position. Obama used the shameful “reverse racism” euphemism that distinguishes between black and white racism. But propaganda and spin don’t change the physics of human nature.

Either all racism is bad. Or all racism is acceptable.

Charlottesville is what happens when you normalize racism and street violence. Every normalization of extremism equally normalizes the extremism of the opposite side.

A civil society depends on a consensus. ‘Racism is bad’ is an example of such a consensus. If you normalize black nationalism, you will get more white nationalism. If you normalize leftist street violence against Trump supporters, you will also get more street violence against leftists.

Extremists want to eliminate the consensus of civil society. They want to destroy the idea that there’s any solution except violence through confrontations that show the helplessness of civil society.

That’s true of black nationalists and white nationalists, of Communists and Nazis, of Antifa and Vanguard, of the tankies and hipster Nazis of the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right. They’re a set of evil twins and when you unleash one, you unleash the other. Their real enemies aren’t each other, but everyone in the middle. The bourgeois normies who don’t want to replace society with their totalitarian nightmare.

Street violence raises the bar so that only the violent will participate in protests. If you “no platform” campus speakers, then the only speakers you get will be those willing to face bomb threats, arson, and physical assaults. If you fire people for their views, political activism becomes the province of anonymous trolls and unemployed street thugs. Extremism limits political discourse to extremists.

If Democrats really want to stop the rise of Neo-Nazi violence, there’s a very easy way. Stop normalizing black nationalism and the Alt-Left. End the racist witch hunts for white privilege. Make it clear that street violence is unacceptable and that racism is bad no matter who it comes from. Allow people you disagree with to express their views without trying to destroy their lives.

But that’s the opposite of what the Dems will do. They don’t want fewer Neo-Nazis; they want more of them. They don’t want fewer attacks like Charlottesville and Charleston. They want more of them.

The Dems have become an extremist party run by the radical left. Obama, Holder, and Lynch made common cause with black nationalist hate groups against civil society. It began when Obama defended the vile racism of Jeremiah Wright and concluded with DOJ organized race riots. DNC boss Tom Perez addresses La Raza and his deputy Keith Ellison is a veteran of the Nation of Islam.

The orgiastic glee with which protesters tore down, then beat up, a century-old monument to a generic Confederate soldier in Durham, N.C., this week was alarming. The mob seemed to have lost control of itself. Who wears out his foot kicking a lump of metal? The urge to destroy could get out of hand very quickly, especially given the mixed signals sent by authorities: Durham police stood by and did nothing. Only the following day, after an outcry, did the sheriff announce he intended to seek charges.

Where does this end?

Some wise conservative thinkers are calling to put the disputes over Civil War relics behind us. My esteemed former colleague Seth Mandel, op-ed editor of the New York Post and a man of deep probity, tweeted “Take down the monuments” on Sunday. My esteemed current colleague and boss Rich Lowry tweeted over the weekend, “If these monuments are going to become rallying points for neo-Nazis, maybe they do have to go.” Then he expanded on the thought in a column.

Rich seems to think that this is a good time to issue group punishment to neo-Nazi white-supremacist scum. I share the urge. Also I have no fondness whatsoever for Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, the Confederacy, or any of its symbols, and I have no emotional or other connection to the South. I find it utterly baffling that there is a statue of Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, in Baltimore. Moreover, some Confederate statues were erected specifically to antagonize black citizens during the civil-rights era.

But it is a characteristic of leftists that they are always pushing the culture wars into new territory, even territory that the Left itself would have called absurd overreach a few years previously. On Monday, the mayor of Baltimore agreed to take down its Civil War statues. By later Monday, that wasn’t good enough: The city council unanimously voted not only to remove but also to destroy the statues. One resident, Keith Scott, was skeptical about what is being accomplished here: “If you were prejudiced when it was up, you’re going to be prejudiced when it goes down,” he told the ABC affiliate in Baltimore. Prejudice hurts people. Statues just stand there, mostly unnoticed.

Seth says, “Take down the monuments.” Let’s consider what that might mean to the Left. At Pepperdine University, a Christopher Columbus statue was taken down after a protest. There are statues of Columbus all over the country, including one in Central Park. If an angry mob surrounds that one and starts pulling it down, how will police react? A statue of Teddy Roosevelt at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City drew an angry crowd demanding its removal (and for Columbus Day to be renamed) last October. If TR doesn’t belong on the Upper West Side, how does he belong on Mount Rushmore?

Up in Boston, a writer hints that the city should remove local statues of historian Samuel Eliot Morison (who “used language in his writings on slavery that chafed readers”), Henry Cabot Lodge (“a staunch believer in American imperialism”), and even, I kid you not, Abraham Lincoln. (Thomas Ball, who sculpted the latter, wouldn’t let a black man into the house to pose for the statue, which depicts a freed slave kneeling at the president’s feet.) This argument isn’t on the fringe: It was contained in a column written by Pulitzer-shortlisted critic Ty Burr and published in one of the most prestigious newspapers in the country, the Boston Globe. My longtime colleague at the New York Post, film critic Lou Lumenick, carried the logic of Confederate-flag removal through to Confederate-film removal and called for Gone with the Wind to be placed in a museum.

President Trump’s politically incorrect insistence on blaming radical leftists for their rightful share of the violence on Saturday in Charlottesville is being met with predictable howls of outrage by the Left and the media.

At the protest, alleged neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, used his car to plow into a crowd of counter-protesters not far from the scheduled rally at Emancipation Park. About 20 people were injured, one of them fatally. Paralegal Heather D. Heyer, 32, was killed.

But left-wingers who descended in force on the rally site attacked people with bats and clubs, a fact President Trump stubbornly clings to despite intense pressure from the media and the rest of the Left to drop it. The people holding the “Unite the Right” rally may not all have been upstanding citizens, but holding and expressing views that are unpopular, even widely considered to be morally repugnant, is no reason to deprive those people of the right to express themselves in public.

President Trump has repeatedly denounced the right-wing extremists who organized the rally but at the same time he has stood up for their First Amendment rights. Trump stirred up a hornet’s nest during a press conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan yesterday when he was pushed by reporters to lay the blame for the violence in the Virginia college town exclusively on the “alt-right” and right-wing extremists such as neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and skinheads.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) defended the violent left-wing fascists he euphemistically describes as counter-protesters. “The violence in Charlottesville was not caused by the ‘alt-left,’ (whatever that may be),” the failed 2016 Democratic president contender tweeted. “It was caused by Neo-Nazis and white supremacists.”

That neo-Nazis and white-supremacists were involved in the melees is true, but Sanders isn’t telling the whole story.

President Trump filled in the blanks.

“What about the alt-left that came charging at the alt-right?” Trump said to journalists who sputtered with rage at his impudent refusal to toe the line. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?”

The president continued:

Let me ask you this. What about the fact they came charging — that they came charging, with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. So, you know, 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.

“Is it the same level as neo-Nazis?” a reporter asked.

“I will tell you something,” Trump said.

I watched those very closely, much more closely than you people watched it, and you have – 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.

President Trump sees himself as the antithesis of President Obama, and that’s true in ways large and small. Both men, however, share a fondness for the identity politics that continue to poison U.S. race relations.

If you were shocked that President Trump had to be pressured into condemning by name neo-Nazis, Klansmen and white supremacists, then you probably haven’t been paying enough attention. His Saturday remarks on Charlottesville, Va., where protesters clashed violently over a statue in a park of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, showed again that Mr. Trump has little use for Oval Office norms. But his initial reaction also evinced an Obama-like reluctance to denounce despicable behavior forcefully and in no uncertain terms.

When five policemen were gunned down in Dallas last year, Mr. Obama said there was no justification for violence against law enforcement—but then he added a comment about racial inequity in the criminal-justice system. After violent demonstrators pillaged Baltimore in 2015 following the death of a black man in police custody, Mr. Obama dutifully condemned the rioters—but not without also noting that “we have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions.”

What we heard from Mr. Trump on Saturday, when he said “many sides” were to blame for what took place in Charlottesville, was more of the same equivocation. Both presidents were less interested in moral clarity than in placating fringe groups out of political expediency. The difference is that Mr. Obama’s caucus mostly indulged his racial innuendo, while Mr. Trump’s called him on it. That’s why the president reluctantly issued a more forceful second statement on Monday.

Calls are now multiplying for Mr. Trump to rid his White House of chief strategist Steve Bannon and other alt-right sympathizers, and you’d get no objections to doing so from this columnist. But who’s to say for certain that Mr. Bannon’s presence is the root problem? When Mr. Trump took his time last year disavowing David Duke after the former Klan leader endorsed him for president, Mr. Bannon had yet to join the campaign. Perhaps Mr. Trump’s problem is not his staff.

The president’s inability to denounce white nationalists properly on his first try is troubling, but more so is these groups’ growing prominence. Race relations declined sharply under Mr. Obama, according to polling in the final months of 2016; by the time Mr. Trump entered office, they were already at their tensest since the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. The videos captured, and spread widely through social media, of police encounters with black suspects no doubt contributed to the problem. The data show a steep decline in police shootings in recent decades. But anecdotal evidence, no matter how unrepresentative of reality, packs a more powerful punch than the recitation of dry statistics.

Mr. Obama’s attempts to advance black interests through heightened group identity and us-against-them rhetoric didn’t help. He embraced openly antiwhite groups like Black Lives Matter and racially polarizing figures like Al Sharpton. The subsequent rise of the alt-right may be history repeating itself. CONTINUE AT SITE