Shapiro At ‘The Forward’: Everybody’s Lying About Charlottesville

After alt-right demonstrations in Charlottesville turned into clashes led by Antifa, leading to an alt-right Nazi sympathizer driving a car into a group of counter-protesters, things were bad enough.

As always, both sides of the political aisle have determined to make an awful situation worse.

The big problem is that both Left and Right now use President Trump as a cognitive shortcut. The Left sees everything Trump says as antithetical to truth and decency; the Right sees everything the Left says as motivated by animus and untruth. This means that no matter what Trump says, either Left or Right will be wrong, since the truth of his statements has no bearing on this cognitive shortcut.

This has particularly dire ramifications for Charlottesville.

The Left has determined that everything President Trump says is wildly horrifying, no matter what the content. If Trump says that Antifa is a violent group, then the Left must declare that Antifa is equivalent to the allied soldiers of World War II.

That’s absurd, but that’s the case actively being made by journalists like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, who tweeted: “Watching Saving Private Ryan, a movie about a group of very aggressive alt-left protesters invading a beach without a permit”, and Hillary Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon, who posted a picture of Normandy with the caption, “Also confronted the Nazis without a permit”). In the pages of The Washington Post, historian Mark Bray defended Antifa as a necessary countermovement to stop neo-Nazism, gushing, “their willingness to physically defend themselves and others from white supremacist violence and preemptively shut down fascist organizing efforts before they turn deadly distinguishes from liberal anti-racists.”

The problem is that Antifa isn’t merely anti-fascist — it’s fascist in its own right. It’s a communist and anarchist movement dedicated to the use of violence against anyone they deem worthy — up to and including normal Trump voters and conservative Republicans. By allying with Antifa, the Left lends credence to the alt-right’s claim that they are victims of violence rather than perpetrators of it.

Meanwhile, thanks to the overreach of the Left, many on the Right have determined that everything Trump says is correct.

Read the rest here.