How rightwing writers covered Trump's reaction to Charlottesville

Six months into the maelstrom of Donald Trump’s presidency, we received a reminder this week that things can always get worse. When an antifascist demonstrator was allegedly killed by a man who had attended a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, on a weekend that had seen a torchlight parade on the University of Virginia campus and a paramilitary parade through city streets, Trump talked about how there were “some good people” among them, and apportioned some blame to the “alt-left”.

Trump has been increasingly politically isolated since the remarks – it’s not every president who is implicitly criticized by the joint chiefs of staff. For many conservative pundits too, this was the last straw. But there are some who just can’t bring themselves to chastise Trump, and others who want to blame everything that happened on the left.

Donald Trump just gave the press conference of the alt-right’s dreams

Publication: National Review

Author: Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. As such, he has never been a Trump fan. But it’s hard not to read a note of panic in his recent assessments of the president.

Why you should read: The conservative movement, for which National Review has always served as a flagship, has never really been averse to leveraging racial politics. Republicanism in the period where they were the right’s gatekeepers just always did it in ways that were coded, while movement grandees such as William F Buckley policed the right flank of conservatism and purged Birchers and open white nationalists. Lowry’s exasperation about Trump is no doubt partly born of authentic horror at the events in Charlottesville. But it’s also about Trump’s disregard for the respectability politics that the movement tried to enforce. We might also wonder if it is the response of someone seeing chickens come home to roost.

Extract: “What makes this all the more puzzling is that it is so easy to say the right thing here. Do not call anyone at a racist rally a ‘very fine’ person. It’s not hard to name and condemn an act of alt-right terrorism. It’s not hard to name and condemn the alt-right without equivocation. And it’s not hard to also condemn political violence on all sides. If you think Trump did those things, and sent the right message to the racists, think again. Alt-right Twitter overflowed with gratitude. Richard Spencer declared that Trump ‘cares about the truth’, and others complimented him for his ‘uncucking’.”

Yes, NYT: the ‘alt-left’ exists and threatened a Google protest

Publication: Newsbusters

Author: Corinne Weaver is a staff writer for MRC Culture.

Why you should read: To understand Newsbusters, and its parent organization the Media Research Center (MRC), imagine a more shrill, rightwing Media Matters. The site is one of the many rightwing outlets that are pushing the line that antifascists and the “alt-left” are the most grievous threat to civil peace in America. Good luck with that.

Extract: “It’s fine. Conservatives can’t possibly suffer from hate crimes, says the Anti-Defamation League, cited by the New York Times. In a quote from ‘analyst’ Mark Pitcavage, the term alt-left ‘did not arise organically and it refers to no actual group or movement or network’.”

Trump’s amazing Q&A on Charlottesville: What about the alt-left?

Publication: Hot Air

Author: Allahpundit is one of the conservative bloggers still standing from the first wave of citizen media in the early aughties.

Why you should read: Again, Allahpundit has never been a big Trump fan, but he’s aghast over Trump’s equivocations on fascist violence. It’s one example of a groundswell of opinion out there from Bush-style conservatives who, for all their many flaws, are not down with Nazis. Once again, he seems flummoxed that Trump cannot draw the simple rhetorical lines that previous presidents were usually able to.

Extract: “Short of him overtly endorsing the alt-right, which he can’t do (I think?), I don’t know what more he could have said here to make them happy. He stressed that not everyone who was at the demonstration in front of the Robert E Lee statue on Friday night was a white nationalist, that some perfectly decent people were part of the group. This group? The one carrying torches and chanting things like ‘blood and soil’ and ‘Jews will not replace us’? He went to bat for Robert E Lee too, wondering whether statues of Washington and Jefferson will be next to fall if the Lee statues come down. Some leftists do want all memorials to slaveholders torn away but I don’t know why Trump would play their game by making monuments an all-or-nothing proposition. He could have drawn a distinction by noting that Lee was a traitor who fought against the country founded by Washington and Jefferson. It’s not hard to draw a line there. If you want to.”

Laura Ingraham TORCHES Krauthammer after he attacks Trump’s condemnation of alt-left violence

Publication: Gateway Pundit/Fox News

Author: Cristina Laila is one of the writers who Jim Hoft has brought on board as he tries to scale up his blog into a fully fledged conservative media outlet.

Why you should read/watch: The unflaggingly pro-Trump Gateway Pundit does a gushing write-up of just one of the fights that has broken out on the right over Trump’s press conference. In the blue corner is Laura Ingraham, who along with Sean Hannity is one of the staunchest pro-Trump voices on talk radio. In the red corner, Charles Krauthammer, representing Bush-era neoconservatism. The winner is less important than the terms of the argument, and the way it shows how the breaches on the right have been widened Trump’s shrugging attitude to neofascism.

Extract: Watch the video and read the fawning over Ingraham – it’ll take three minutes.

Two identity politics movements that hate one another

Publication: Commentary

Author: Noah Rothman is a widely published author on the neoconservative right.

Why you should read: For every pundit that is appalled by Trump’s “both sides” rhetoric, there’s one prepared to offer a more sophisticated rendition of it. Rothman is not even a big Trump fan – from his perch at Commentary he has remained critical of the president. But he just can’t let a chance go by to have a dig at the left. This piece is an elaborate and carefully hedged bit of horseshoe theory that feints at the radical right, but tries to put the blame for what’s happening in this country on a nebulous notion of “identity politics”. As is normal in such cases, Rothman minimises the central disagreement between progressive movements and fascists: one group is mobilizing in favor of equality, and the other is struggling vehemently against any small move towards it.

Extract: “The white nationalist right and the identity-obsessed left speak different languages but use the same vocabulary. To a great extent, both perceive themselves to be the victims of a system that is biased against them at an institutional level. Both believe that the other is wildly exaggerating and, in fact, that the system is tilted in their favor. In this narrow sense, one group is a funhouse mirror reflection of the other. This observation will doubtless elicit howls of bitter protest from both groups as a wildly unfair assessment of their respective movements. So be it.”