She'd looked at life from both sides then!

FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2019

Sheryl Gay Stolberg in chains: It was Tuesday, August 15, 2017. Speaking at the gorgeous Trump Tower, patron saint Donald J. Trump had already said it:

"You have some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides."

The great communicator didn't leave it there. He also said that there had been "violence" and "blame" on both sides! To review his remarks, click here.

Who was Donald Trump talking about? There were very fine people on both sides? To what two "sides" did he refer?

Just like that, he sought to explain! Donald J. Trump said this:

TRUMP (8/15/17): I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.

The neo-Nazis and the white nationalists should be condemned totally! Thus spake Donald J. Trump, and not for the first time that day.

The day before, he'd said the same thing, live and direct from the White House. That's right! On Monday, August 14, the great man had said this:

TRUMP (8/14/17): To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend's racist violence, you will be held fully accountable. Justice will be delivered...Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the K.K.K., neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.

Taking a page from Nixon's book, Donald J. Trump had decided to "bring us together!" Who, then, was he talking about when he said there were very fine people on both sides? When he said there was violence and blame on both sides?

In terms of the violence and blame, he was talking about the "alt-left" antifa forces who had battled with the neo-Nazi and white supremacist crackpots on Saturday, August 12. That's fairly clear from the transcript of his remarks, but facts like that, by rule of law, have of course been disappeared.

The Coopers and Lemons will now insist that he was speaking in praise of the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists. To make it easy for you to swallow that pill, they refuse to show you the videotapes where he says precisely the opposite.

Were there really "far left" groups engaging in violence that day? So it seemed at the time. As you may dimly recall, the New York Times' veteran reporter, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, was on the scene that day. As you may dimly recall, she tweeted this at one point:

STOLBERG (8/12/17): The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding "antifa" beating white nationalists being led out of the park.

As you may dimly recall, this unacceptable observation produced an instant storm on Twitter.

In thrall to our obvious moral greatness, our tribe sought to frog-march Stolberg away. Before long, she had gained new insights from this re-education campaign:

STOLBERG (8/12/17): Rethinking this. Should have said violent, not hate-filled. They were standing up to hate.

Our heroic forces had actually been standing up to hate! They weren't hate-filled, they were just violent! When they were beating white nationalists being led out of the park, that is.

You can see each of Stolberg's once-famous tweets within this Buzzfeed report. For what it's worth, Buzzfeed's Blake Montgomery summarized the violence at the park like this:

MONTGOMERY (8/14/17): Each side did engage in intense violence and attempted to seriously injure the other. But when the battle lines were formed, the right came better equipped and ready to use force to defend their belief that white people are better than nonwhite people.

Each side engaged in intense violence! Until it became necessary to wipe such thoughts away!

At any rate, when Trump said that "both sides" engaged in violence, those seemed to be the two sides he had in mind. As you can see in the transcript of his remarks, he described the two sides as the "alt left" and the "alt right." That seems to be who he meant.

Did Donald J. Trump make an adequate statement about what happened in Charlottesville? That is a matter of judgment. For ourselves, we can think of no time in the past ten years when he has made an adequate statement about anything. We regard him as badly disordered and therefore as deeply dangerous.

That said, we focus on the "journalists" here, not on the pols. And when you look at the Rosensteinian way way Stolberg succumbed to that tribal "rethinking," we're forced to tell you this:

Our tribe has tended to behave in such ways over the past ten years. So have the Twitter mobs who came after Stolberg for reporting what she'd seen.

In the past month or so, the Coopers and Lemons of this world have discussed Trump's remarks on several occasions. They're very careful to sift the facts, and the videotape, thereby helping us reach pre-approved, tribally pure conclusions.

They tell you Trump was referring to the neo-Nazis when he said there were "very fine people." They refuse to play the videotape where he explicitly says the opposite, as he did several days in a row.

Beyond that, the behavior of antifa has been wiped from the map. Violence and hatred belong to The Others. Upon rethinking, our own brave team, The Very Good People, were standing up to hate!

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Our liberal tribe is quite unimpressive, except within our own minds.

Dating perhaps to the death of Trayvon Martin, we've become almost as expert as The Others at inventing and disappearing facts to serve our tribal purposes. We're stupid, weak, not very honest, and yes, we're filled with childish loathing for The Others, who must always be Very Bad.

In short, we're all-too-human, all the way down! We're highly skilled at taking dictation from our tribal leaders—and the seamier elements of our tribe may perhaps tend to rise to the top, especially within the corporate press, from which platforms they dumbly lead us.

We're so dumb we wanted Michael Avenatti to run for president! His client, who was shaking Trump down for cash, was billed as a "feminist hero!"

We treat Trump's surrender to this shakedown as a disturbing crime. In these ways, we write Tucker Carlson's program for him every night.

Donald J. Trump is the highly disordered culmination of a long, disordered process. Morally and intellectually, we've been in decline for decades now. Above all else, we're very dumb, and we run on the tribal rocket fuel known as joy of loathing.

Many of our liberal stars have been leading players in this idiotic process. Our rank and file sounds off on Twitter in the typical ways.

This wasn't invented by Donald J. Trump; he's just the worst so far. Meanwhile, he seems to be mentally ill. What's Cooper and Lemon's excuse?

Tomorrow: Remarkable! Two of CNN's "boys of cable" ogle Tyra Banks