Bret Stephens, the New York Times' token "smart" "conservative" "columnist" whose whole schtick is bemoaning the death of civil discourse whenever his work is exposed as intellectually dishonest nonsense, has some hard truths to share with you about what happened in Charlottesville this weekend. Yes, the crisis simultaneously highlighted this country's alarming resurgence of unapologetic white supremacy and revealed that the president may or may not have any interest in repudiating it, but the real lesson here, Stephens helpfully explains, is that... President Obama was, um, bad at stuff, I guess?

[M]aybe we can at last rethink the policy of euphemism, obfuscation, denial and semantic yoga that typified the Obama administration’s discussions of another form of terrorism.

That would be Islamist terrorism, or what former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano used to call “man-caused disasters” in order to “move away from the politics of fear,” as she explained in a 2009 Der Spiegel interview.

From there, Stephens spends several paragraphs tut-tuttingly noting President Obama's "broad reluctance to use variants of the word 'Islam' in proximity to 'terrorism'" when speaking publicly, including his use of "ISIL" when referring to the Islamic State. (Bret Stephens hates acronyms.) He also blasts President Trump's predecessor for blaming terrorism on economic issues and global inequality, and sneers at the then-administration's efforts to distinguish between more violent and less violent Islamist groups.

On the other hand, there is a record of what Obama believed were the causes of terrorism. “Extremely poor societies and weak states,” Obama explained in 2007, “provide optimal breeding grounds for disease, terrorism and conflict.” Later, during his administration, the State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf voiced the same sentiment when she blamed “lack of opportunity for jobs” as the “root causes that lead people to join these groups.”

Because you are a person with critical thinking skills, you probably understand that shouting RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM from the rooftops at every opportunity has its drawbacks, since doing so could foster a culture of fear and xenophobia in which every brown person is treated as a threat. Publicly repudiating white supremacists simply doesn't entail the same risks. Stephens even seems to acknowledges this, noting that after a Somali student at Ohio State University drove a car into a group of fellow students and attacked them with a butcher knife, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, “If we increase our suspicion of people who practice a particular religion, we’re more likely to contribute to acts of violence than we are to prevent them." Instead of actually responding, though, Stephens is content to point out that that attack also involved a car, and therefore it is exactly the same, QED.

Set aside for a moment the idea, apparently foreign to Stephens, that condemning ideologically-motivated terror and also identifying some of its potential contributing factors are not mutually exclusive. His points might make the tiniest bit of sense if Trump had done any of those things. But the president didn't allege, for example, that depressed economic conditions might correlate with increased antipathy towards minority groups. He simply waved his hand and decried violence, hatred, and bigotry "on many sides." To get around the fact that President Trump didn't actually say any of the things for which Stephens wants you to credit him, Stephens spends his time talking about President Obama instead, and hoping that you don't spot the difference.


He concludes with a textbook two-sentence concession paragraph that would make my seventh-grade English teacher proud.

None of this history excuses Trump’s stubborn reluctance, rectified far-too belatedly on Monday, to call out the K.K.K. and neo-Nazis by name. On the contrary, it indicts him all the more, since it’s precisely the sort of bizarre and blatant evasiveness he used to denounce in his predecessor.

You're right, Bret, because the context of "this history" to which you refer differs in very important ways from what Trump did over the weekend. This is, so far, the only coherent statement in the entire column.



It should also be a reminder that when it comes to looking the other way in the face of extremism and violence, failing to call evil groups by their correct names and providing economic alibis for moral depravity, liberals have their own accounts to settle.

The pathological need for Conservative Thought Leaders to search out the tiniest sliver of daylight into which they can slip some form of rhetorical punch is as cynical as it is inane. Racists ran over an innocent woman with a car on Saturday, and the president didn't give a shit until somebody told him he really should give a shit. Meanwhile, Stephens is out here thrashing this straw man to the very best of his ability, twisting himself in logical pretzels and vociferously stanning for points that the president didn't even argue. It presumably takes a tremendous effort to transform a column about this tragedy into 800 unedited words that "Well, actually..." a man who isn't even president anymore, but Stephens, ever the innovator, somehow found a way.

That may not be the most obvious lesson from Charlottesville, but it’s one that still needs to be learned.

Really? What other lessons could we possibly learn from Charlottesville, Bret? Ah, forget it. Looks like you've run out of column inches anyway.

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