Do I still have to give him a chance?
I fundamentally believe in the rationality of human beings. I believe their decisions are based in rational places. So when he makes a decision I don’t like, I figure out why he made the decision. I can disagree with the decision and still recognize why he’s making it.
I have never seen him as impassioned about anything else. Never. He impassionately assailed the media for being unfair to Nazis and white supremacists. This is something that fired him up!
I take him at his word. He said he paid close attention to the news, even closer attention than the press. Either he was lying about that, or he’s gaslighting everyone; he said we can’t trust our lying eyes, our lying ears.
On that Friday night, a group of young men wearing coordinated outfits, in organized fashion, marched through the UVA campus with torches chanting Nazi slogans. Many of them wore MAGA hats, and they together chanted “Heil Trump.” When they approached the CSA statue, they were met by unarmed protesters who stood arm in arm against these racists. The “Unite the Right” group surrounded them, pepper sprayed them, and beat them with their torches. One young woman was in a wheelchair, and the fascists dumped torch oil on her and waved the torch around her.
After this confrontation, they went to a nearby church where a prayer meeting was in progress. They stood outside the church chanting more racist slogans. They raised their arms in the Nazi salute.
If you were in that group and didn’t leave, you were complicit in that. If you didn’t drive out the Nazis from your group, you accept that.
He stood in his marble tower and said many of the people who did that on Friday night were good people and the protest was “quiet” and “peaceful.” He said it was a protest about the statue. It wasn’t. It was about, “You will not replace us.” That was the theme, organized in advance. That morphed into “Jews will not replace us” that night. Still, he said these people were being treated unfairly by the press.
I made apologies for him from day one. I tried to explain the rational decision making process he must have used to come to these decisions. I just can’t find out what would compel him to support self-described national socialists, fascists, racists and white nationalists. I can’t. The best I can do is he thinks that’s what it means to be “the president of all Americans.”
Do I still have to give him a chance?
