In Charlottesville, Near Site of neo-Nazi Rally, Beto O'Rourke Blasts Trump as Enabler of Hate

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - Beto O’Rourke has accused President Donald Trump countless times of enabling white supremacy for the way he handled a deadly clash involving neo-Nazis.On Tuesday night, the El Paso Democrat became the first contender for president to campaign near the site of the August 2017 protest, where torch-wielding demonstrators waved swastika flags and chanted “Jews will not replace us” and other incendiary slogans.As he did throughout his Senate candidate and now, in his bid for the White House, O’Rourke condemned Trump for insisting that there were “many fine people” among those demonstrators.A young man raised the issue of hate speech in the first question O’Rourke took from the crowd.“Klansmen, Nazis, white supremacists -- in his words, very fine people,’” O’Rourke said. “Asylum seekers areanimals’ and an ‘infestation,’ which is the way I would describe cockroaches in my house. Not human beings. It’s a term you would expect to hear in the Third Reich in the 1930s.”One woman was killed when an Ohio Nazi sympathizer rammed his car through a crowd of counterprotesters.Later that day, Trump seemed to suggest a moral equivalence between hate groups and counterprotesters. "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides,” he said from his golf resort in New Jersey.The so-called alt-right movement took Trump’s comments as a wink of support. "He didn't attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us," wrote Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.  Continue reading...