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Video: Seth Meyers Makes a Powerful Statement on Trump and #Charlottesville

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The Ghost of a Flea8/14/2017 8:00:43 pm PDT

I’ve put this up before, but I think today it’s relevant in a new way.

None of the words mattered. The subsequent excuses, blame, rhetoric, diatribes…those words won’t matter.

What the Lost Cause and Nazi fetishist have in common is a sentimentality that imagine is factual: a “story” of who they are that makes them feel good, powerful. What we see over and over is that no other part of their thought process is truly fixed, and what they say and think will change to fit the needs of (1) continuing to feel entitled to act on whim, (2) explaining failure as betrayal, (3) a priori dismissing the value of veracity established through analysis or debate (because everyone else simply does not matter).

Richard Spencer can play the victim and boast of the ease with which his fellow travelers could kill the protestors (“with their bare hands”) and see no conflict. They will never try to reconcile their contempt of other’s feelings with the way they nurture their own anger, fear, and resentment as Truth.

They won’t listen, not as a mass. Individuals might peel away because they are still connected, but just as many will be reassured by the companionship and repetition.