It was a reporter on the scene, who told it as it was.

In his sometimes clumsy way, Trump was making the same point as New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who was on the ground in Charlottesville covering the event.

She noticed that the far left counter-protesters were intent on instigating violence and tweeted that “the hard left seemed as hate-filled as the alt-right. I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.”

Then for some reason felt the need to change that.

Later, perhaps sensing she was in danger of transgressing some sort of unofficial party line, she amended her thought. She added that the leftists were “violent, not hate-filled. They were standing up to hate.”

Of course, “standing up to hate” (of whites) is exactly what the alt right would say they are doing as well.

Close call for one of nation’s chief narrative-suppliers.

And that tweet by Ms. Stolberg would hardly have been missed by the nation’s First Tweeter, who caught hell for taking that eyewitness account and running with it, as we know.

Read the whole on-target analysis of “What Trump Got Right About Charlottesville, Was the apoplectic media watching the same press conference?” by SCOTT MCCONNELL at American Conservative.

Especially on a country-to-country basis, according to which equality is on the uptick.

City Journal’s Harry Stein gives chapter and verse of his own and his wife’s ancestors’ history, including near misses in survival of the latter by accidental near-drowning of one after falling off the Mayflower and another’s almost being shot by a Union soldier for cheering Jeff Davis — all part of our national history which he terms “rife with moral complexity.”

Then this about the president:

All of which is a preamble to saying that, in his exchange with the churlish and ignorant press corps in the aftermath of Charlottesville, Donald Trump got it right when he said: “This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

He may not have been the ideal messenger—with his combative style, manic egotism, and casual relationship with facts, he never is—but he laid out a case that for months has cried out to be made, and he did it so clearly that the refusal of the media and the elites of both parties, not just to credit it, but even to acknowledge it, speaks volumes. Though Trump has never quite defined what his notion of making America great again actually means, preserving that which needs no fixing—including the history that is our common legacy—is a key part of it.

Trump’s a diamond in the rough, full of flaws but a master case of seeing what you get. He flails but says things no one else in high position says but millions think. No wonder he got elected, no wonder he has so many enemies.

Other administrations brag about or promise transparency, notably the one just ended; but none has been so transparent as his. It’s enough to make one’s undoing — or greatness.

There’s more more more in this excellent piece, about anti-fascist mobs and media facilitators, by an accomplished veteran of news writing and commentary, including a dozen books. Bravo.

Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg has a possible answer, referring to Trump supporters.

Trump claims he’ll “send in the Feds,” to solve Chicago’s crime problems, then dispatches a few federal agents who do little. He imagines a mythical police officer offering to solve the problem in a few days if given a free hand. . . . [H]ow could anyone be naive enough to believe him?

I’ll answer that. Because the notion that pervasive problems are easily solved is the key to Trump’s appeal, the drug these people are all high on. Elect this fraud and the coal industry will return. Get rid of these foreigners, these minorities, and we’ll reclaim our Eden. [Italics mine]

I have another question, upon what drug do those feed on who think Chicago and Illinois Democrats have it in them to solve our many problems? Why are they so sure Gov. Rauner does not?

They have our best interests at heart?

It’s hard, after all, to imagine that the hard-core left has any noble purposes in this violence. The first figure arrested in Durham was picked up after a press conference of the World Workers Party, a Marxist melange that stuck with the Soviets through Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Lately they’ve been on the barricades defending — wait for it — North Korea.

It takes a lot of Communist commitment to believe Trump is worse than Kim Jong-un. There’s no reason to imagine that the left is going to settle for a few statues of Lee.

The left wants to attack the very legitimacy of America, of which Washington is the real symbol. And going after statues and other cultural icons is part of the Marxist playbook. [Italics mine]

Read Orwell about it:

It was written about by George Orwell in his dystopian novel “1984,” a quote from which is making the rounds this week.

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In it, one of Orwell’s characters warns of how “every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.” “And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute,” adds Orwell’s character. “History has stopped.”

They disrupt in a most destructive manner.