How the Media Botched Charlottesville, a/k/a What Trump Meant
A Non-Hysterical Reaction to His Unscripted Remarks on Charlottesville
By Alexander Zubatov
This is my reaction to Donald Trump’s controversial, unscripted remarks on Charlottesville. It is also my reaction to your thoughtful article and question, Amber Lisa, “What, if anything, bothered you about [Charlottesville]; and how do your concerns tie into the state of American race relations?”
From my vantage point, condemning neo-Nazis, the KKK and white supremacists is the easy part … though, apparently, not as easy for Trump as it should’ve been. (Most of us can agree on that.) The hard part is evaluating, dispassionately, the rest of Donald Trump’s remarks on Charlottesville and realizing that, despite his inelegant and tactless way of conveying the message, what I believe Trump was trying to say about Charlottesville was — despite being widely misunderstood by the angry, race-baiting, Trump-hating media — actually something that needed to be said.
Widely reported poll numbers have made clear that the hysterical media over-reaction to Donald Trump’s August 15, 2017 infrastructure press conference in which he faced a barrage of questions on the subject of Charlottesville is out of step with the views of an overwhelming majority (67%) of Republicans, and that even 32% of independents had no problem with Trump’s Charlottesville response. The well-documented liberal bias of the media (with self-identified liberal journalists outnumbering self-identified conservative journalists by a factor of five to one) may have had a little something to do with the gap between the media’s impression and that of the general public, and that gap, I suspect, would have been significantly larger had the media not conveyed to anyone who was listening the clear sense that Trump’s remarks represented an outright embrace of white supremacy or were otherwise utterly beyond the pale.
From the tenor of my comments to this point, it should already be clear that I, for one, do not share the media’s impression. To be sure, I believe Trump’s remarks were impolitic. As many have pointed out, “fine people” do not march with neo-Nazis and the KKK, and if any such fine people truly had come out to protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue from Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park, they would have immediately looked around, seen the company they were keeping and made a quick and graceful exit from the scene.
But, having said that, I understood what Trump meant and why he said it. The reality is that his points about the aggression of the “alt-left” (a/k/a the “regressive left”) and the anti-monument mob are well-taken. Trump’s comments about the slippery slope descending straight down from Robert E. Lee (by no means a prominent defender of slavery) to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are trenchant, especially in light of the fact that Al Sharpton and others have specifically called for the removal or defunding of such monuments, and in light of the fact that there are now serious calls by people like the idiot mayor of my hometown for removing an iconic, landmark statute of Christopher Columbus from a place in New York City known as Columbus Circle. Trump saw, as the myopic media did not, a direct connection between the regressive left’s attack on monuments and the swelling of the white supremacist ranks. Many Americans appreciate that connection, which appears to be lost on much of the media.
I, for one, am entirely in agreement with Mike Pence’s remarks that what we need are more monuments rather than fewer, monuments to commemorate every aspect of American history, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, the sacred and the profane. There are extraordinarily evil figures to whom any monument would be unpalatable. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and the like come to mind … though apparently the good people of Seattle think Lenin doesn’t fall into that extreme category (in a wonderful bit of irony, the statute of him that stands tall in Seattle was removed by the people of Slovakia during the Velvet Revolution in 1989, so perhaps we will see our old Confederate monuments rise up one day in some odd corner of the world, where they are seen as amusing memorabilia items that don’t carry the sting they have here at home). But, once we get beyond that rarefied realm of the-near-universally-acknowledged monsters of history, we cross over into tricky moral ground, in which slippery slopes begin, distinctions get murky, one man’s hero is another’s villain, and all in all, we are better off letting things be. Whatever else he may have been, Robert E. Lee was not any sort of extraordinary historical monster. Nor was Christopher Columbus. Nor were Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. And so, in cases like this, I do not see why we need to tear down monuments to such men, at the cost of antagonizing, riling up and potentially radicalizing large segments of society, especially when what we can do, instead, is build new monuments to our modern-day heroes to stand alongside and enter into a historical dialogue with these representatives of the old guard (an approach now being adopted in Georgia, where a new statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. is being erected alongside monuments to the old Confederacy). Robert E. Lee commemorates one important page of our history. Instead of tearing that page out of our history books (for what are monuments other than important pages carved in stone?), let us write new pages and erect effigies of heroes to represent our present age.
If we take the other path, the path of tearing down monuments, the path of destruction and hatred, then we court hatred on all sides. And this is where Trump was right, where the thing he was getting at was a thing worth saying, a thing we need to understand. If I were in Trump’s place, in other words, while I would not have spoken of “fine people” marching alongside the KKK, this is what I would have said:
I condemn in no uncertain terms all forms of race-based hatred, and there is no place for neo-Nazis, white supremacists and the KKK in our society. We abhor those who hold such hateful beliefs, and we will prosecute to the fullest those who commit violent and criminal acts in the name of such beliefs.
In saying this, however, I must also take note of the fact that, as I said, race-based hatred in all forms is unacceptable in America. An aggressive form of identity politics emanating from certain segments of the left has, in the past few years, orchestrated a regrettable rollback of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s noble dream and the governing ideal of the Civil Rights Movement that each of us be judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. Instead, these members of what has been aptly called the “regressive left” and their many supporters in media and academia have made it a point to judge people based on the color of their skin and to inveigh against white people and white privilege and the culture of what they call “whiteness” rather than against racism itself. They have directed all their seemingly bottomless anger and resentment against America and have crusaded to whitewash American history of all its real and perceived sins. They have sought to bring down monuments that commemorate historical events, wars that were fought, lives that were lost, and sacrifices that were made by ordinary people who were mere foot soldiers drafted on behalf of causes in which they had no stake beyond the protection of themselves, their families and their societies.
I believe that membership in the very kinds of white identity groups and white extremist groups that gathered in Charlottesville is rising due precisely to the fact that white people, too, are being radicalized and tempted to become conscious of and coalesce around their own racial identities in reaction to the overbroad, race-based aggression being directed against them by the media and the regressive left. For every historical monument we tear down, we will create ten or a hundred new living, breathing proponents of hateful ideologies. Monuments are there to remind us of our history, both glorious and inglorious, and they are there to ensure we do not repeat history’s many mistakes.
Let me be perfectly clear: I am not making these points to furnish a ready-made excuse for white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the like. As I have already said, we condemn these ideologies in no uncertain terms, and we hold people who embrace such ideologies fully responsible for their beliefs, for their words, and especially for their actions. But I also believe that it would be a mistake at a moment like this not to reflect on the forces on the other side that are unwittingly adding to the ranks of white supremacists in America and making our racial tensions worse than they have been in many decades. Like many Americans, I believe in combatting racism in every form, but I believe in combatting it wisely, strategically, in a manner that doesn’t defeat the purpose by antagonizing entire groups of people to the point where they become more racist than they ever were. Let this, therefore, be a moment for reflection about how far we have strayed from the ideal of seeing each other not as races but as individuals, as human beings with the capacity for endless goodness, as well as endless evil, each of whom has a choice about which way to go.
To be sure, even if Trump had made these remarks rather than the ones he made, the media would have lambasted him mercilessly for blaming the left for the actions of neo-Nazis and for turning the tragedy of Charlottesville into an opportunity for issuing broader political statements with which much of the media would undoubtedly disagree. The mainstream media’s attitude toward Trump is already so dug-in and uncharitable that those of us who are still capable of case-by-case reactions to his words and deeds can hardly expect anything better.
And yet we have a right to expect better. Just as we have a right to expect our President to realize how much his words at a moment like Charlottesville matter and to choose them with more care and reflection than he did, we have a right to expect our media to offer us a balanced, measured response to those same words. Certainly, we have a right to expect our media not to do everything in its power to use Charlottesville as an opportunity for a ratings bonanza driven by a torrent of irresponsible and sensationalistic coverage that inflames racial tensions further. If the media had been responsible and charitable, it would not have shied away from pointing out, just as I did, where Trump’s remarks went wrong. But it would also have realized, as many of those who generally approved of Trump’s response to Charlottesville intuitively did, that something akin to the statement I wrote is, in reality, exactly what Trump meant.
