On Sunday morning the White House, in an unsigned statement, came out swinging against ‘nephew-nazi and all extremist groups.’ Leave it to the Trump administration to bungle even the wording of neo-Nazi in its belated attempt to distance itself from the sanguinary events that took place on Saturday in the bucolic town of Charlottesville, Virginia, where the radical right gathered to chant ‘blood and soil’ and carry Nazi flags. Their mission was to decry the impending removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who lost the Civil War to Ulysses Grant. The odious David Duke, a leading neo-Nazi who speaks worshipfully of Donald Trump, had slithered out of the swamps of his home state Louisiana to make a cameo. All that was missing were lederhosen and a beer hall. The rabble had already roused itself. It was a very different and more sinister world than the one in which Bertie Wooster could send Roderick Spode, the 7th Earl of Sidcup and the head of the fascist Black Shorts, fleeing with a reference to his pursuits as a lingerie designer.
In Charlottesville a melee ensued in which white supremacists and the alt-right, more often than not one and the same, attacked counter-protesters.
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