Neo-nazis to my right, Antifa to my left

Some comments I made on social media regarding the Charlottesville spectacle: 

It was a staged event with predicable consequences. Too many people are easily manipulated by conditioned responses. That's true on both sides. Wave a red flag and watch the bull come charging.

Sure, we should condemn neo-Nazis, but that's the cheapest, easiest form of virtue-signaling imaginable. What's impressive were, say, Christians who risked their lives to oppose the Third Reich.

Yes, white supremacy is wrong. But how we oppose it depends on the form.

In the days of Jim Crow, white supremacists had real power. Institutional power in the three branches of gov't. Likewise, the KKK was, back then, a major domestic terrorist organization.

That requires an aggressive strategy to dismantle the power structures. 

Nowadays, however, white supremacy lacks that kind of institutional clout. Ironically, the primary manifestations of institutional racism hail from the left, and are directed at another minority groups, viz. colleges that discriminate against Asian applicants. College admissions is a bastion of institutional racism. 

If we're referring to white supremacist demonstrators, that calls for a different strategy. We need to avoid playing into their hands by letting them push our buttons. If you allow a provocateur to provoke you, you give him power over you. He's succeeded in getting a rise out of you. He's gotten attention.

There's a danger of enabling otherwise powerless white supremacists, of making them more important than they really are, by acting as if their antics are consequential. That gives them a foothold. There's something to be said for ignoring them, which exposes their political impotence.