The smothering Kleenex               

During a Sept. 29, 2017 Tucker Carlson Tonight interview, and surely despite his intention, Democrat strategist, attorney, and Huffington Post contributor Michael Starr Hopkins revealed the deceptive business partisans like him sought to engineer.

The host had played footage of dyspeptic California Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters hoarsely declaring the Trump White House to be 

"controlled by the KKK."

Hopkins was, of course, unable to substantiate Waters' dastardly charge, as it was a wholly counterfeit one. He did, though, cite "alt-right" Steve Bannon, the erstwhile Breitbart editor also formerly a Trump advisor.

In an aside, Hopkins called the KKK merely a "Kleenex" under whose cover speakers like himself and Waters included all ideological adversaries.

There is a tremendous problem with that. A couple, actually.

The Ku Klux Klan is a specific, un-American org. It has to its contemptible halcyon record horrifying acts of violence predicated on an unquestionably loathsome racial supremacy philosophy. The thankfully dwindling scourge in no way accords with the bedrock American beliefs of equality and justice that the Trump Revolution so boisterously affirms.

To tactically conflate the detestable Klan with a vague 'alt-right' phantom effectively condemns without individual examination any group or person so (unfairly) linked. 

In earlier times, today's anti-Trump partisans decried McCarthy-Era political intolerance. They now seize up the grimy 'guilt by association' tactic with ill relish.

The Kleenex under which they strive to smother ideological opposition in general would automatically class as beneath respectful consideration all perspectives and speakers contrary to the current season's liberal orthodoxy.

An example presents itself: 

Following the Aug. 12, 2017 clash in Charlottesville, Virginia's Emancipation Park, President Trump decried "hate, bigotry, and violence on many sides." He observed there had been "very fine people on both sides." 

Though not politically correct, his assessment was accurate. The day's advertised event was a Unite The Right rally called to protest removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. Hundreds were in attendance. 

Journalists and politicians who denounced every individual event supporter as a hater of racist bent were at best irresponsible. At worst, they were essaying a misrepresentative Kleenex maneuver.

News photos captured some armed Antifa, Resistance, Black Lives Matter, and Revolutionary Communist Party rioters charging attendees, intent on bloodletting. Some armed Klansmen, militia forces, and neo-nazis mounted like violent criminal behavior.

But extremist factions that infected the larger event were hardly representative of either its general supporters or counteragents. 

The media and political establishment connived to deceitfully link the common man of the pro-democracy Trump Revolution with the disgusting remnants of bigotry efforts.

The strategem of narrowing the Overton Window would disallow wide conversation and would also, potentially, stifle free association and effective participation in civil government.

Fortunately, the Constitution is much bigger than the claimed Kleenex.

This essay is excerpted from the author's sixth book: Ideas Afoot (Bromley Street Press.)