from Congressman Jamie Raskin:
'A free-wheeling President Trump went off the rails today in passionate defense of participants in the terrifying “Unite the Right” protests that shook Charlottesville and America to the core over the weekend. Sounding like in-house counsel for the Alt.Right and essentially recanting the prepared statement against racism he read from the teleprompter yesterday, the President of the United States went back to aggressively blaming bad people on “both sides” for the mayhem of Charlottesville and, in the process, emboldened a grateful David Duke and the boiling cauldron of Klansmen, neo-Nazi skinheads and fascist anti-Semites planning their next moves against American democracy. While most Americans remember that we sent millions of Americans to fight Nazism and fascism in Europe in World War II and are resolved today to stop any further spread of the lethal racial terrorism on display over the weekend, Trump traffics in profoundly disturbing moral equivalencies that flatter the hate-mongers and nourish their dreams of Nazi-like race war. Trump equates torch-bearing and violent white supremacists, several of whom beat African-American counter-protesters nearly to death, with peaceful UVA students and Charlottesville residents, like my sister and her family, who braved the sea of out-of-town haters simply to stand up for their city and for basic American ideals. Trump defiantly equates the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee—a Confederate traitor to the Union who took up arms to kill patriotic Americans and a cruel slave master who oversaw the massacre of Black Union troops during the Civil War—with the hypothetical removal of statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, which no one is proposing anywhere (to my knowledge). Whatever their personal flaws and shameful complicity with slavery, Washington and Jefferson were Founding Fathers who helped to build the Union that General Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis tried to destroy by killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Washington led our forces in the Revolutionary War and unified the country afterwards. Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, championed freedom of speech and the separation of church and state, and wrote our Declaration of Independence which spelled out the founding and indispensable ideal that “all men are created equal.” No moral equivalency between Confederate traitors and Jefferson and Washington. No moral equivalency between people who march under the Nazi flag and those who defend the flag of freedom. But at least everyone knows which side Donald Trump is on now. Hang tough, America.'
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