Code-switching Narratives
Apparently Trip Gabriel of the New York Times and his quoted sources didn’t get the memo on President Trump being “unfit to lead,” mentally ill and an “idiot, incompetent, liar.”

Paul Begala, the Democratic strategist, said his party was “driving straight into a trap Trump has set”…”I just think it in some ways dishonors the debate to allow Trump to hijack it.”
Democrats have cautioned about a rush to remake civic landscapes, in some ways echoing President Trump but warning that his use of the issue is intentionally divisive.
[Sen. Schumer] said Mr. Trump and Stephen K. Bannon, then the president’s chief strategist, were “trying to divert attention” from the president’s refusal to offer a full-throated* denunciation of neo-Nazis and other white supremacists
“[Democrats] have let Trump and even the white supremacists take the issue away from what it ought to be, this radical racist element growing in American society.” [said Larry Sabato, a ‘political scientist’** at the University of Virginia]
It’s amazing how someone that is supposed to be so mentally unfit to hold office is also somehow an all-knowing, all-controlling mastermind playing groups of people like they’re pawns on a chessboard into making decisions against their own will.
The inability of Democrats and fellow travelers to introspect after their 2016 election loss has lead to such a level of self-gaslighting that many now believe (or at least purport to believe) that President Trump is pulling strings across the nation to bring down a diverse and ever-changing retinue of monuments and street names to divert attention from his nuanced response to Charlottesville.
Certainly this has nothing to do with something so base as energizing their base, perish the thought!
[Helen Gym, Philadelphia councilwoman] is less concerned about turning off voters who support the president than in rousing members of the Democratic base, including minorities, who did not vote in November.
“My concern is about the number of people who stayed home, who felt government doesn’t speak for them,” she said. “I’m trying to show government can be reflective in a time of anguish.”
Maybe you should introspect as to why you decided it would be a good idea to nominate a candidate that called black youth “super-predators” instead of finding inanimate scapegoats to explain away why your base of black voters stayed away in 2016.
Even Gabriel wants to get in on the action by simultaneously erecting an imaginary moral high ground with a throwback weasel word (“Of course, many people argue that what’s important is doing what’s right, not necessarily which side wins politically.”) while quoting yet another #science-tist that sees black voters as single-mindedly obsessed with symbolic iconoclasm.
Stephen J. Farnsworth, a political scientist** at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, argued that in the most pressing state contests, November’s election in Virginia for governor and other state offices, it’s not at all clear that the left loses by fighting over the statue of Lee and other monuments.
“The groups most likely to vote in presidential elections in Virginia and not show up the next year are younger voters and African-American voters,” he said. “Both of those groups have been highly charged by the incident in Charlottesville. That’s going to work to the Democrats’ advantage.”
Just so everyone has it clear: this is totally not a cheap political ploy to sow division (over statues that previously existed during Obama’s tenure and years before without uproar) and distract from your own failings in a desperate attempt get out the young black vote for your corrupt Clintonite candidate in an off-year election. Also, even if this strategy-that-totally-doesn’t-exist doesn’t pay off, you at least have a self-validating moral high ground of your own imagination to retreat to thanks to Gabriel.

Even with stalwart Democrats such as Begala and Schumer trying to talk down the seemingly unending mission creep of fellow traveler activists, and attempts by ‘political scientists’** to rationalize it as politically savvy, post-Charlottesville nationwide polls show a majority of Americans don’t really care about Confederate monuments. Furthermore, “support for changing street names and other less tangible symbols falls off sharply.”
So between national polls showing little support for such Cultural Revolution-esque iconoclasm and former Atlanta mayor and civil rights leader Andrew Young saying these disputes are divisive and distract from real issues (“I’m always interested in substance over symbols.”), there’s also the very real danger of playing right into the perceived victimhood of the legitimately racist segment of the alt-right. Ironically, this plays into the post-election Choose Your Own Reality where everyone on the Left has only the purest of intentions and absolutely zero personal biases and everyone to the Right of Bernie Sanders is an Indiana Jones villain out of central casting.
Maybe after accidentally reading 1984 as a how-to book, they thought the CIA aiding groups they’ll later fight was a multi-tasking life-hack.
I honestly have no idea when this post-election wailing and gnashing of teeth will reach its ultimate high tide before receding. There’s A LOT of residual gaslighting from the election that has yet to work its way through the Democratic side, with many truly doubling-down on their fascist fantasies so hard that their confirmation bias has created a positive feedback loop where anything and everything is proof that they’re surrounded by Nazis and only they themselves are the true, beknighted ones to save us from ourselves.

*What’s with the obsession over the term “full-throated”? Maybe it’s a media meme to conjure the Watergate ghost of Deepthroat? A hankering to harness the power of meme magic and self-visualization to bring back the good old days and conjure up an impeachment?
**For when you absolutely, positively have to value #science-ism above all else that you label a poly sci teacher a “political scientist.” Waiting with bated breath for a sociology adjunct somewhere to be called a “social scientist” in the near future.
