With his latest tweet, Trump issued a Charlottesville boilerplate condemnation of all racism (except his own apparently).
Trump hopes you don't notice that he still won't condemn white supremacists.
He probably hopes for violence tomorrow so you’ll forget that after a year he still can’t condemn the same people a World War was fought to defeat.
David Duke’s speaking at the Unite the Right II demonstration, and if nothing else will be helping Spike Lee at the box office.
Expect a Trump tweet, since Trump desperately wants to become relevant in Hollywood, even if it’s reprising his role as someone whose star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is prone to defacement. Even stranger is Ivanka, like some enabler/PR flak, trying to “humanize” him.
“Trump constructs his own reality to make himself look good, even in horrible situations, and then he repeats it over and over again until his distortion becomes the only version he knows,” -— Omarosa Manigault
James Murray, an assistant director in the Secret Service’s Office of Protective Operations, warned in a letter on Monday to the Park Service that some of the same counterprotesters who seized downtown streets at the presidential inauguration in January 2017 were also interested in Sunday’s demonstrations, and were “known to have engaged in violent and destructive activity.”
“Violence can commonly occur between highly charged groups of protesters and counterprotesters,” Mr. Murray wrote.
www.nytimes.com/...
The Mother of Heather Heyer plans to march on Sunday with counter protesters
There’s two shades of white supremacist in Spike Lee’s new movie, BlacKkKlansman. The first is the obvious, stereotypical kind: the cartoonish hick, as brought to life with sloppy, gleeful bigotry by actors like Paul Walter Hauser and Jasper Pääkkönen. These are characters whose racism is their entire personality; as the film tells us through callbacks to movies like Gone with the Wind and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, they represent the white supremacist of yore.
And then there’s David Duke. Duke, played here by Topher Grace, is a polished-up, suit-and-tie type, with a gracious manner and a neighborly Howdy Doody chuckle—that is, if you’re white. He’s got a well-spoken intelligence invoking not only the real David Duke of the 1970s and 80s—the David Duke who has an eye on running for political office—but also the likes of our own era’s more outwardly respectable white supremacists, like Richard Spencer.
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Topher Grace was also eager to take a role that felt topical—and BlacKkKlansman does not shy away from comparing Duke, and what he represents, to Donald Trump.
For a lengthy period over the course of his campaign, Trump memorably danced around the question of Duke’s support, even initially pretending not to know who Duke was: “I don’t know anything about him,” he said, when pressed by John Heilemann, then of Bloomberg Television, in 2015. A specious denial, at best; in 2000, Trump had refused to run for president with the backing of the Reform Party, on the grounds that the party had grown to include Duke, who was “not company I wish to keep.”
Flash forward to last year’s Charlottesville riots: an occasion whose one-year anniversary is marked, almost to the day, by the release of BlacKkKlansman. The Charlottesville riots gave Duke respite from relative political obscurity, proving how his vicious ideas had been mainstreamed: “We are determined to take our country back,” he said then, in footage included at the end of BlacKkKlansman. “We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump.” The connection couldn’t be clearer: “We”—white supremacists—“voted for Donald Trump.”
Trump eventually did disavow Duke’s support, but he’s never disavowed Duke’s supporters—which is to say, his own supporters.
www.vanityfair.com/...