| | | | What Do America's White Nationalists Want? | | In the National Review, Kevin Williamson considers the aims of Charlottesville's "angry white boys":
"The fact that they get together to play dress-up — to engage in a large and sometimes murderous game of cowboys and Indians — may give us our answer. They want to be someone other than who they are. That's the great irony of identity politics: They seek identity in the tribe because they are failed individuals. They are a chain composed exclusively of weak links.
"What they are engaged in isn't politics, but theater: play-acting in the hopes of achieving catharsis. Their online personas — knights, Vikings, reincarnations of Charles Martel — will be familiar enough to anybody with a Dungeons and Dragons nerd in his life. But sometimes, role-playing around a card table isn't enough: Sometimes, you need a stage and an audience. In the theater, actors and audience both can forget ourselves for an hour or two. Under the soft glow of the tiki torches, these angry white boys can be something else — for a night."
"In the morning, they wake up with the same faces. And there is something in the faces," Williamson writes. "James Alex Fields Jr. has more than a little whiff of Dylann Roof about him, and we know what Dylann Roof wanted: to murder black people. Sometimes, it is worth taking angry white boys at their word."
-- Meanwhile, the Boston Globe's STAT News reports on how ancestry test results have disappointed some white nationalists:
"With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there's a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity, and then using online forums to discuss the results."
"[But] many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is not as 'white' as they'd hoped," STAT News reports. "In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years' worth of posts on [white-nationalist website] Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news."
"About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what they found. 'Pretty damn pure blood,' said a user with the username Sloth. But the majority didn't find themselves in that situation," according to STAT News. "Instead, the community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results."
| | President Trump Must
Go: Rothkopf | | In the Washington Post, David Rothkopf weighs in on Trump's press conference yesterday:
"Donald Trump on Tuesday afternoon gave the most disgusting public performance in the history of the American presidency," Rothkopf writes. "Framed by the vulgar excess of the lobby of Trump Tower, the president of the United States shook loose the constraints of his more decent-minded advisers and, speaking from his heart, defended white supremacists and by extension, their credos of hatred."
"After several days in which Trump and his advisers wrestled with what should have been a straightforward task — condemning the instigators of the unrest that rocked Charlottesville, Va., this past weekend — Trump revealed the reason that finding those words was such a struggle. He, too, is an extremist."
"From the United Kingdom to Italy to the Vatican to China, the violence in the United States and the racism of the extremists were decried by leaders who seemed to grasp the values for which the United States has fought throughout the past century."
"Some of us have long been urging people to see that the Trump presidency was 'not normal.' But we are past such discussions now. There is only one conclusion that any American patriot of either party can draw. Trump must go," Rothkopf writes.
| | Does Trump Deserve Credit on North Korea? | | | The President might not, writes Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times, but one trio in the administration does: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"On Monday, North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, backed down, announcing that he had decided to 'delay' his plans for a missile strike on Pacific Ocean waters near the U.S. territory of Guam."
"Give the president and his aides some credit — especially Mattis, Tillerson and Dunford for building a ladder to help their boss down from the limb he climbed on," McManus writes.
"Even some Democratic foreign policy experts are willing to give the Trump administration kudos for making headway on one of the world's most intractable problems," McManus notes.
"'There's a fairly considered policy running underneath all that noise,' Ely Ratner, a former advisor to former Vice President Joe Biden, said. 'They're pursuing a maximum pressure strategy with a sanctions regime that is unprecedented.'"
| | In Fortune, Shannon O'Neil provides some much-needed context on the NAFTA negotiations that began today in Washington:
"In large part because of NAFTA, Mexican and Canadian factories are more partial to U.S. suppliers than any others in the world: Of Mexico's exports to the United States, 40% of the value is made in America; for Canada, it is 25%. In contrast, U.S. factories barely provide 5% of the inputs into products made in the rest of the world."
"These regional supply chains that power America's car sector, aerospace industry, and numerous other advanced manufacturing facilities support 14 million U.S. jobs, many of them the higher-paying ones Trump repeatedly promises to bring back. Failed NAFTA negotiations would put many of these in jeopardy," O'Neill notes.
| | Will King Charles III Bring Down the British Monarchy? | | With reports that Queen Elizabeth II is considering passing on power when she turns 95, four years from now, Prince Charles may finally get his shot at the throne. Emily Andrews considers the possible consequences of his reign in Prospect Magazine:
"Senior courtiers and high-ranking Whitehall mandarins privately share the fear that the Prince of Wales could morph into a meddling, dangerous monarch," Andrews writes. "An opinionated king, who can't stop interfering in the issues of the day under the pretext of 'wanting to make a difference.' One who wants to remould the role from a stately, silent figurehead decked out in fancy uniform to that of a far more pro-active sovereign—potentially threatening the whole constitutional basis and future of the monarchy itself.
"For many in Britain, King Charles III—and despite past reports he may reign as George VII, Charles III is almost certainly what it will be—still seems a distant prospect. The Queen, now 91, shows little sign of frailty, even as her husband retires from public life. Yet for those grey men—and, yes, it is still mainly men—who silently operate in Whitehall's shadows, the historic transition is one they have secretly discussed for decades."
"Fate has conspired to ensure that his reign will follow the most turbulent political era since the Second World War," Andrews notes. "Ever since the Arab Spring in 2011, dictators have been overthrown, peoples displaced and traditions trashed. The UK has witnessed Brexit and the rebirth of left-wing politics in the space of just 12 months. And in the US, of course, there is Donald Trump. In this context, is the toppling of the monarchy really so far-fetched?"
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