#Trump doesn’t back supremacists and other commentary

Media critic: Trump Doesn’t Back Supremacists

If you believe the left-wing media, President Trump made it clear “he was on the side of the neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and the Proud Boys” at the presidential debate, observes Jonathan Tobin for The New York Sun. In fact, “Trump didn’t refuse to condemn white supremacists”; he just “didn’t state that position, which has been repeated many times during his presidency and put into policy, in the sort of normative declarative statement that, in theory, would have ended the discussion.” Part of the problem is that Trump knows his condemnations never satisfy “those eager to pin the label of ‘extremist’ on him” and that “impels him to petulant defiance that is foolish but not racist.”

From the left: Prez’s COVID — a ‘Dune’ Sequel?

President Trump’s illness is “an astonishing development at the end of the most bizarre presidential campaign in modern history,” exclaims The Week’s Matthew Walther. What happens next? What will his supporters say if he’s forced to suspend campaign activity? More fundamentally, “how was this allowed to happen”? “A senescent emperor addicted to quack therapies contracts a plague that originated far away in the land of his greatest enemies, amid jeers and cries of joy from half of his subjects, who despise him, and a curious admixture of support and shrugs from the rest, who must decide whether to pray for his life or laugh in the face of danger,” writes Walther. It “reads like the plot of one of the later, weirder ‘Dune’ sequels. But this is America in 2020.”

Iconoclast: ‘Anti-Racists’ Are Just . . . Racists

For proof that today’s fashionable “anti-racism” is really racist, look no further than at how alt-right guru Richard Spencer and anti-racist scholar Ibram X. Kendi recently found “common ground,” urges Spiked Online’s Fraser Myers. Kendi went on a “bizarre tirade against interracial adoption,” suggesting that the practice amounts to “colonization,” as he tweeted. “It turns out that white supremacists share a similar disgust with interracial adoption. ‘Not wrong,’ concurred Richard Spencer,” who wants to reconstitute Europe as “white racial empires.” What unites the two is a view of “race as a defining feature of one’s character, one’s values and one’s place in the world.” The rest of us need to “reject racial thinking in all its forms.”

Legal beat: A ‘Constitutional Crisis’ That Isn’t

When President Trump said he’d nominate a Supreme Court replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Joe Biden called it a “constitutional crisis,” notes attorney John Murdock at First Things. Yet there is no “constitutional crisis.” The Constitution contains no “limitation on this process linked to the final year of a presidential term.” Nor does “history provide a clear norm against this practice.” On the other hand, there may be a “credibility crisis,” given “the statements made across the political spectrum” when President Barack Obama tried to name a new justice in the 2016 election year. “The ubiquity of the hypocrisy — enveloping as it does everyone from Mitch McConnell to Chuck Schumer to Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself — either mitigates or magnifies the nature of the phenomenon depending on your perspective.”

From the right: A Distorted View of Violence

“If Chris Wallace’s goal” at Tuesday’s debate “was to deflect from the months of left-wing violence from Black Lives Matter extremists and Antifa” and instead blame it on President Trump and his supporters, “he did an excellent job,” Evita Duffy and Kylee Zempel snark at The Federalist. Wallace suggested white supremacists and militia groups have added to the violence in places like Kenosha, Wis., but violence there was “spurred by left-wing extremist groups, not white supremacists. We know — because we were there.” Wallace “seemed to be cherry-picking one instance of violence” at the expense of “accurately” depicting the lawlessness. He can pretend “the right is to blame.” But “we talked to people on the ground. Voters know who the peaceful protesters were and who the rioters are.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board