Charlottesville, a pleasant, graceful city at the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, is home to Monticello, and the University of Virginia.
Charlottesville is home also to a statue of Robert E Lee, the Confederate General. In the nineteen teens and twenties, many such statues of Confederate heroes were erected. Racism was fashionable, and the Second Klu Klux Klan formed and was at its peak. The movie 'The Birth Of A Nation', based in the popular book 'The Clansman', was showing in theaters. And in Charlottesville, a wealthy townsman, who cherished memories of the antebellum South, commissioned the statue and donated the land for Lee Park.
Now, nearly one hundred years later, many of those statues are coming down - being removed to assuage modern American sensibilities.
The main groups in attendance in Charlottesville on the right were the KKK, neo-Nazis, and other 'Alt-Right' groups, members coming from around the country. On the left were Black Lives Matter, some other violent leftists, but also many non-violent protesters, including local college students and citizenry. The local and state police failed to keep the protesters and counter-protesters separated, and both sides were ready to fight. Some were dressed in helmets, carrying shields, ready for tear gas on both sides. The right wing protesters were almost exclusively young white men, while the counter-protesters were a mix of men and women of various races. As the groups separated after one brawl, a Nazi sympathizer drove his Dodge Charger into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one, injuring 19 others.
President Trump issued a statement of condemnation of the violence 'on many sides.' It seemed important to him that we know that this is not associated with any one president, especially him. 'Not Donald Trump. Not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.' (Perhaps The Donald was thinking of some recent violent Black Lives Matter protests, during the Obama administration.)
At the rally, Klan organizer David Duke said the rally was a turning point to help 'fulfill the promises of Donald Trump'. In his statement, Trump omitted any specific criticism of the Alt-Right, the KKK, or the American Nazi Party. He also said 'We must love each other, respect each other and cherish our history and our future together. So important.'
Considering that this rally was ostensibly an Alt-Right protest over the removal of a historic Confederate hero, and that The Donald says we must 'cherish our history', and we might think we can see where our President is coming from.
Update: After 48 hours of pressure, The Donald finally read a prepared text in front of the cameras, in which he condemned violence, the Klan, and neo-Nazis.
The next day, The Donald went off script and cited violence from the 'Alt-Left', a term he had apparently just made up, and the peaceful torchlight march by those good people who were just trying to protect their heritage. (The TV News provided footage of that march, with swastikas and confederate flags, young men chanting 'Blood and Soil!' and 'Jew shall not replace us!')
Mr Trump then defended the statue of Robert E Lee.
“Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E Lee,” Mr Trump said. “This week, it is Robert E Lee and this week, Stonewall Jackson. Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?
And so, with those words, Mr Trump, the president of our nation, equated the general who founded our nation with a general who sought to destroy it. With this false equivalency, President Donald Trump let us all know just EXACTLY where he is coming from!
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