While They Rage, Trump Builds

While They Rage, Trump Builds, by Roger Kimball.

Doubtless there are many things to criticize about Donald Trump. But being racist isn’t among those things.

What infuriates his critics … is that Trump refuses to collude in the destructive, politically correct charade according to which “racism” is the nearly ubiquitous cardinal sin of white America. He is having none of that, and his refusal to go along with the attempted moral blackmail is driving his critics to distraction. …

The paroxysms of rage that greeted Trump were a marvel to behold, as infectious as they were unbounded. One prominent commentator spoke for the multitude when he described Trump’s response as a “moral disgrace.”

I didn’t think so, but then I thought that Trump was correct when he suggested that the alt-Left is just as much a problem as the alt-Right. Indeed, if we needed to compare the degree of iniquity of the neo-nazis, “white supremacists,” and Ku Kluxers, on the one hand, and Antifa and its fellow travelers, on the other, I am not at all sure which would come out the worse. Real Nazis — the kind that popped up like mushrooms in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s — are scary. But American “neo-nazis”? They are tiny bunch of pathetic losers. The Ku Klux Klan was a murderous Democratic terrorist group in its earlier incarnations. Now it too is a tiny bunch (the Anti-Defamation League says it has 5,000-8,000 members) of impotent malcontents.