The Atlantic

Charlottesville Was a Turning Point

But which way the nation is headed remains a fiercely contested question.
Source: Steve Helber / AP

The weekend of August 12, 2017, may well have been a turning point in recent American history, but it’s not entirely clear which way things turned.

That weekend was when neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. Marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us” and employed other anti-Semitic slogans. There were multiple violent clashes, and one woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when James Alex Fields Jr., one of the marchers, drove his car into a crowd. And President Donald Trump infamously equivocated about the incident. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” and then vacillated over the course of several days, declining to mount a sincere and forceful condemnation of the march.

By any objective standard, the and his approval .

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