Lee – Jackson Day In Virginia

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Most of you will recall that the late unpleasantness in Charlottesville last August — the antifa et al. attacks on Klan/Neo-Nazi/etc. (permit-holding) demonstrators and vice versa — was occasioned by a long-simmering local debate over removing a statue that honored Robert E. Lee from a park.

As it happens, tomorrow, January 12, is a state holiday in Virginia, Lee-Jackson Day, and state government offices will be closed.

If all goes as just now predicted, tomorrow the Washington Post will publish my letter commenting on these two events. Watch this space, which I will update with a link if/when the letter appears.

UPDATE 7:00PM

My letter has just appeared online in the Post, here.  It was followed almost immediately by a comment accusing me of making an “appalling” argument that “seeks nauseatingly to establish a moral equivalence between the two sides … recycling the kind of argument regularly seen from, or on behalf of, white nationalists…. If you ask me,” the first commenter wrote, “the predictable presence of excess attaching itself to the pro-American side doesn’t begin to raise the moral standing of the despicably anti-American one.”

Of course, a) no one did ask him; or b) made any argument or inference about “moral equivalence”; or c) even remotely suggested that the violent antifa attacks on the Klan marchers did anything to raise the “moral standing” of the latter. By the same token, however, the fact that that violence — quaintly described as a “presence of excess” —  was “predictable” did nothing to support the moral standing of the “pro-American” attackers or their defenders and enablers.

Say What?