August 25, 2017, at Investor's Business Daily

By John R. Lott, Jr.

Does it hurt to accuse someone of being a Nazi or a racist who is neither of those?  How about calling someone those vile terms when he has spent his life supporting Jewish and black causes?

Over the weekend, the Democratic Party's Deputy Chair, Keith Ellison, put out an email claiming: "even with Steve Bannon gone, Donald Trump's inner circle still includes prominent white nationalists and enablers of white supremacy."  Ellison labeled one senior advisor as "a member of a Hungarian Nazi organization."

On Saturday, Howard Dean, the former chair of the Democratic Party, said: "If you want to vote for a racist in the White House, then you better vote for Republicans."  Other Democrats keep echoing those charges.

The venerable Foreign Policy magazine ran an article the end of last week asserting: "For the first time in our history, a Nazi sympathizer occupies the Oval Office."  Foreign newspapers like The Independent or The Guardian have headlines: "Donald Trump's Defense of neo-Nazi" and "The president of the United States is now a neo-Nazi sympathizer."

Sunday morning's national television talk shows, such as "Meet the Press," only could find Republicans who were critical of Trump.

If you believe what the media are telling you, we now supposedly have the first Nazi sympathizer as president, but who is also the first president to have an orthodox Jewish daughter and grandkids.  A president who pledges unwavering support for Israel and who has been a friend of the current Israeli PM for decades. Nazis are socialists, yet Trump supports less regulation and lower taxes.

Before running for the president as a Republican, Democrats had wonderful things to say about Donald Trump regarding race.  In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Jesse Jackson frequently praised Trump for his "lifetime" of helping the black community.

Days before Democratic Party's Deputy Chair Keith Ellison sent out his weekend email, the experts interviewed by the liberal PolitiFact had already shot down those claims. "Are any of these four officials white nationalists? When we asked this question of several independent experts, they all agreed that none of the four were white nationalists themselves."

So why do people believe that Trump is a Nazi or white supremacist sympathizer? ABC News' coverage was all too typical: "Trump quickly blamed both sides for the conflict, adding that there were 'very fine people' among both the protesters — which included white supremacists and white nationalists — and the counter protesters."

But Trump never came close to saying that any white supremacists or neo-Nazis were "very fine people."  At his press conference last Tuesday, Trump clearly made this point several times.  For example, "And you had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists."

When pressed by a reporter if Trump was saying that the press was threatening white nationalists unfairly Trump emphatically said: "No, no." And Trump again referred to the "bad people — neo-Nazis, white nationalists."

People were also angry at Trump's initial statement on Saturday immediately after the news broke. But compare that to the praise for a joint statement that former presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush put out last Wednesday. The Bushes wrote: "America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms."

But how is that different from Trump's universally denounced statement four days earlier: "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides. ... It has no place in America."

Is the only difference that the Bushes condemned bigotry "in all forms," whereas Trump condemned it "on many sides"?

In fact, Trump was right.  The people on the left, such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter, where not only as racist and hateful, but even the liberal and left-wing media from The Nation to BuzzFeed News to the Los Angeles Times have documented that they also instigated violence in Charlottesville.

As one University of Virginia student told the New York Times before the car attack: "I was on Market Street around 11:30 a.m. when a counter-protester ripped a newspaper stand off the sidewalk and threw it at alt-right protesters. I saw another man from the white supremacist crowd being chased and beaten. People were hitting him with their signs. A much older man, also with the alt-right group, got pushed to the ground in the commotion. Someone raised a stick over his head and beat the man . . . ."

The media's false statements are out of control, distorting what President Trump said, and the Democratic Party leaders have pushed these claims even further.

Racism is vile and must be condemned.  But lying is also wrong, especially about such serious charges.