It should come as no surprise that President Trump had to be dragged into finally criticizing the white nationalist violence that broke out at the Aug. 12 Charlottesville rally. But he then muddied the waters with his retweeting a message from a right wing conspiracy theorist and then with his assertion that both sides in the melee were at fault.. However, what's almost certain is that Trump doesn't want to alienate certain segments of his support base, one of which is discussed below, which he has been egging on to such physical confrontations since his campaign for the presidency began, and his opponents should know that by now.
It so happens that I got into an online shouting match on Facebook a few months ago with a couple of Jewish Trump supporters who strongly supported the alt-right Proud Boys in a campus clash at Berkeley with the far Left AntiFa earlier this year and then at Charlottesville. Now personally I also have no use for AnfiFa, which is a radical left organization; but for Jews to actually applaud a group at the other extreme that has ties to white nationalism and worse as the Charlottesville events confirmed is lunacy, especially in view of the fact that some of the participants there were chanting antisemitic slogans!
As might be expected, the response by the Jewish sympathizers of the Proud Boys to my original criticism of both them and that organization was at that time a salvo of ad hominems against me and of non-sequitur attacks on Hillary Clinton and former President Obama. But if after Charlottesville they can still stand by their advocacy of such a hateful ideology along with its proponents, that says a lot more about them than it does about white nationalism--and Trump.
