On Sept. 15, President Trump signed a resolution drafted by Republican and Democratic lawmakers condemning White Nationalists, White Supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups. The resolution urged the President and the President’s Cabinet to use “all available resources to address the threats posed by those groups.”
The resolution changed absolutely nothing. It is a symbolic act of feigned virtue from a Congress and president who badly need more people to think of them as virtuous.
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Yet according to Breitbart News, Mr. Trump has signed the death warrant of free speech in America. The outlet’s London editor-in-chief, Raheem Kassam, believes the resolution is “the first move in a long attempt to criminalize speech, or even thought, in the United States.”
Mr. Kassam bases this claim on the pledge to “use all resources to address the threats,” quoted above, and on the last section of the resolution, in which Congress “urges the heads of other federal agencies to improve the reporting of hate crimes and to emphasize the importance of the collection, and the reporting to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of hate crime data by state and local agencies.”
Hate crimes, hate groups — nowhere does the resolution mention hate speech, or speech of any kind. So how does Mr. Kassam get to an “attempt to criminalize speech, or even thought”? Congress urging the President and federal agencies to get tougher on hate crime in the aftermath of a deadly hate rally is not, “real fascism.”
But Breitbart’s ideological opposite is equally prone to hysterics. The two seem to feed each other. Indeed, the resolution that prompted Mr. Kassam’s reaction was an attempt to quell a similar alarmism on the left.
In a speech following the Charlottesville tragedy, President Trump condemned “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” A media firestorm ensued. For the progressive media and much of the mainstream media, this was the smoking gun proving Mr. Trump’s sympathy for the KKK, Nazis, and their ilk on the alt-right.
Mr. Trump should have singled out the assorted racists gathered in Charlottesville for special opprobrium, they said. Those groups were the original organizers of the rally turned melee, and it was one of their number who was responsible for the death of Heather Heyer. That’s true. But both points are valid.
To have a street war, there must be two sides willing to use violence. Antifa played a major role in the day’s chaos. The President had every right to recognize this, even if he failed to emphasize the result of race hatred that fateful day.
So the President was perhaps insensitive and impolitic. But he was not racist. Just as he was not destroying free speech when he signed the resolution on white nationalists.
The left and the right both need to chill out. Both need to tone down their rhetoric and reactions.
The media, on both sides of the political spectrum, need to end the practice of constantly accusing the opposition of “racism” or “fascism.” We are slowly draining these words of their descriptive power, turning them instead into epithets. When real racism or fascism rears its ugly head we will need to take these words back again, for proper use.
First Published September 24, 2017, 4:25 a.m.
