ŒV: This whole business about white-supremacist rioters (and who knows, maybe there are four or five who want to go mingle with violent throngs of people they hate and fear) seems a transparent rationalization based on many people’s beliefs that because their side is Good…

ŒV: …that necessarily everything and everyone on their side is good, just as everything and everyone on the other side must be evil. This is childish thinking, and it’s historically been more prevalent on the Left both tactically (pas d’ennemies à gauche) and psychologically…

ŒV: …in their insistence on the inherent goodness of man. But we see it on the Right now, too. Trump, a corrupt and venal man (as obvious to any observer since the 1980s), is deemed King David or whatever aspect of the Godhead the q-people are associating him with this week. …

ŒV: So, for a lot of liberals, if there are masked white people rioting alongside black protestors, the fact that the protestors’ cause is just (and that black people are involved, whom liberals tend to mascotize and fetishize as pure lambs, defending whom redeems their white…

ŒV: …selves) that therefore the white rioters must be wicked (which they obviously are) and somehow secretly in opposition to the Good. So they see them as the Other, and stick a label on them. This is much easier than policing their own ranks for bad guys. Which the Right has…

ŒV: …recently found, as well, now that an older generation’s fumigation of the Right, however imperfect, has dissipated and new creeps have shown up—and some old creeps have taken off their taqiyya masks. Don’t make politics a religion. Don’t conflate good policy…

ŒV …with goodness. Don’t think, “The Left is the Good; the Good is the Left.” Or the Right. You’ll find yourself making up transparently stupid rationalizations for neo-Nazis or fascists calling themselves “anti-fascists.” The world can’t be redeemed through politics. …

ŒV: But it can be burned. Right now it’s time for the decent Left to grab the reins. (As, say, the mayor of Atlanta has been doing.) Down the road, it may be the Right’s turn.