The Weekly Sift

Another slow news week. Whatever will I find to write about?

Let’s start with Antifa, the sometimes violent anti-fascist group. I won’t say I reversed my opinion of Antifa this week, but I certainly had to think again after all the Antifa-saved-my-life testimony from clergy who went to Charlottesville to protest nonviolently. So this week’s first featured post, “What to Make of Antifa?” gives a much more balanced and nuanced view than if I’d written it before Charlottesville. That should be out around 8:30 EDT.

I’ve been talking about Confederate monuments since 2014’s “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party“, where footnote [1] calls them “victory monuments”. In that post (which has over half a million hits so far) I argue that if you reconsider the Civil War in the light of Iraq, and interpret Reconstruction as the guerilla phase that followed the 1861-65 battlefield phase, then the South won that longer 1861-1877 war.

So I can’t resist talking about tearing down Confederate monuments now that everybody else is. I expose several of the fallacies the monuments’ defenders are putting forward in the second featured post, “A Few Points About Confederate Monuments”. That should come out around 10.

That still leaves the weekly summary with a lot to cover. The best way to combat the alt-Right’s (and Trump’s) propaganda about Charlottesville is with video and eye-witness testimony, so I link to a bunch of that. I find that the idea of a Unite the Right rally is a lot easier to defend than the footage of people carrying swastika flags and chanting “Blood and Soil!” So the best argument to make to your conservative friends is to show them video and say, “Look at this. Are those your people?”

Then Trump’s response and the fallout from that. I call special attention to a scandalous fact that isn’t getting nearly enough coverage: Trump’s business advisory councils dissolved after he echoed Nazi talking points, but his religious advisory council didn’t. These are the same self-styled “moral leaders” who stood by Trump after Pussygate, and they demonstrate the complete corruption of the Religious Right.

Then Steve Bannon’s exit from the White House, and whether it means anything. Anything else? Oh yeah, Trump disbanded the advisory council that produces the National Climate Assessments, because who needs all that depressing information? The Justice Department wants the IP addresses of 1.3 million people who visited a Trump-resistance site. And a few other things, before I close with an amazing video of lightning striking a river.