I don’t know how much more outrage can be generated over what happened in Charlottesville over the weekend or at Trump for what he said/didn’t say. I suspect as long as the article draw clicks we’ll continue to see them but one thing is for certain, discussion about Charlottesville has officially passed into the realm of the absurd. BuzzFeed (yeah, I know, right?) just posted a story titled Trump’s Response Leaves Some Wondering: Is He Scared Of Upsetting White Supremacists?. Luminaries like Keith Ellison and Evan McMuffin McMullin are quoted and then they bring out The Big Gun^TM:

“He was vague and not biting or specific,” Rev. Al Sharpton, who is preparing for a march of ministers in the name of social justice and civil rights this month in Washington, told BuzzFeed News. “He will not denounce Nazism or white supremacy by name. It’s telling and insulting. It will intensify our 1,000 Minister’s March and I’m glad we have Jewish faith leaders up front with us.”

Al Fu**ing Sharpton?

Let’s not put too fine a point on it here. Sharpton is a liar (see Tawana Brawley). He is a crook (see anything to do with his business practices). And he is a stone-cold, vicious racist and anti-Semite. In 1991, helped keep the Crown Heights riots going:

Against the objections of New York Mayor David Dinkins, who sought to calm tensions, Sharpton led a march of some 400 protesters through the neighborhood. He and his followers chanted “No justice, no peace.” Some marchers were heard yelling anti-Semitic epithets. The march ended without incident.

In a eulogy at the boy’s funeral, Sharpton criticized Jewish merchants in Crown Heights for selling diamonds from apartheid South Africa. He also said: “All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no coffee klatch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’.” Among the banners hanging to commemorate the boy, one read “Hitler did not do the job.”

Many Jewish leaders and others say Sharpton incited the violence or at least perpetuated hostilities. They disapproved of his decision to hold the march on the Jewish Sabbath. Some already had criticized him days before the riots for remarks he delivered at an unrelated rally in Harlem: “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”

Sharpton incited the arson and murders of eight people at Freddie’s Fashion Mart in Harlem:

On Friday, December 8, [1995], at 10:12 a.m., Roland James Smith, Jr., 51, a Harlem resident with a criminal record going back 30 years, walked into Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned clothing store at 272 West 125th Street, pulled out a gun, ordered all the black customers to leave, spilled paint thinner on several bins of clothing and set them on fire — a fire that resulted in killing 8 people including Smith.

The prelude to that incident included Al Sharpton using his radio show to whip up anti-white and anti-Jewish hatred that resulted in the mob and the fire and the murders:

Soon after the massacre, the Jewish Action Alliance, a New York-based civil-rights group, released audiotapes and transcripts of several of Sharpton’s weekly radio show in which Morris Powell, leader of the 125th Street Vendor’s Association, can be heard using racial and anti-Semitic language to encourage Harlem residents to boycott Freddy’s. Learning from his Crown Heights experience Sharpton let others push the anti-Semitic hatred but it was all done on his show.

“We are going to see that this cracker suffers,”  Powell is heard telling a crowd in one broadcast on  Aug. 19.

“Reverend Sharpton is on it. We have made contact with these crackers. We don’t expect a lot out of them. They haven’t seen how we feel about anything yet. We are going to show them.”

He also said

They think they gonna drive this man out of business, they gotta be out of their minds. We are not gonna stand idly by and let a Jewish person come in Black Harlem and methodically drive black people out of business up and down 125th Street. If we stand for that, we’ll stand for anything. Which we’ve been doing.

At a rally recorded on Sept. 9, Sharpton is heard telling a crowd:

“I want to make it clear to the radio audience and to you here that we will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.

Sharpton later claimed to have no role but not only did his radio show serve as an electronic version of Der Stürmer, Sharpton was with the mob when the arson took place.

Everyone is entitled to believe what they want to believe both about the significance of what happened in Charlottesville and about what Trump said and when he said it. But when a racist, an unindicted co-conspirator in arson and murder, and a virulent anti-Semite like Al Sharpton is quoted on Charlottesville in a non-ironic, non-mocking way, it is a sure sign that every reasonable thing that can be said about that event has been said.