This weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, Nazis (you can call them white supremacists, alt-right, neo-Nazis, but let's be real, they're Nazis) marched in the name of saving Confederate statues while repping the president of the United States. Ku Klux Klan rep David Duke summed it up like this:

The riot that would "fulfill the promises of Donald Trump" exploded into violence as the Nazis clashed with counter-protesters, and one Nazi carried out a terrorist attack on a group of anti-racist protesters by plowing his car into them, killing one and injuring others. This terrifying event would demand a statement from ANY president, but considering this particular president not only inspired this march, but also has a history of courting these hate groups and refusing to actually denounce them, it was doubly important to hear what President Trump had to say. The result was not good.

First he condemned the violence "on many sides." We're talking about a rally of Nazis, and Trump is looking around and being like, "We all have a hand in this." Nope. The Nazis are the bad guys. Full stop.

Then when Trump was leaving the event, he was given a chance by a reporter to reject white nationalists and Nazis outright. He did not take that opportunity.

This cowardly display from Trump is not entirely unexpected, as Trump seems terrified of criticizing these racists because they support him. It wasn't until a day later that a Trump spokesperson released a statement saying that of course he rejects white supremacists and neo-Nazis, but even that "clean-up" statement, which was not delivered by Trump himself, still made a point to implicate "all sides."

This false equivalency is so dangerous, as it not only lets LITERAL NAZIS slightly off the hook for what happened (after all, it's really everybody's fault, right?), but it also legitimizes those Nazis by saying they are the same as the liberal protesters they are fighting, when that's very much not the case. And lest you think I'm being outrageous for reading his statements this way, that's how the Nazis took it, too!

This is something that we all must reject. The Republican Party should use this moment not only to distance themselves from Donald Trump, as we've already seen happen with people like Marco Rubio, but also to fight against an administration that allows this to happen. If working with the Russians isn't enough to make them reconsider Trump, surely supporting Nazis should be. For some reason, though, I'm not getting my hopes up.

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