This column by David French needs to be printed off and posted on bulletin boards and refrigerators.

Let me begin by saying, “YES! Antisemitism exists on the left as well.” And I am truly exhausted with people trying to defend slogans that truly mean one thing and someone else saying it “means another thing.” We’ll never be able to set that aside, but let me say this: If the white men protesting in Charlottesville in 2017 were to be believed, saying “BLOOD AND SOIL” was not antisemitic in their view and their meaning. Do we believe it? Good God no! (Or, we shouldn’t.)

We are far too loose with meaning and historic context and it is damaging.

But the “right”… the party of Reagan and Lincoln. The party that could be counted on to support Israel… is now the remake of the party of Charles Lindbergh. And it is frightening.

They are using catch phrases like “white genocide” to use the coded language of white offense, but, HEY, that’s okay because the Jews really don’t like us anyway! (And, oh, by the way, the Jews have all the money and control the elite media and the banks.) We just insist on old tropes that are never proven. All we need to do is raise the question and then we can then deliver the hate.

The ghost of Charles Lindbergh is haunting us. Lindbergh, readers may recall, was the hero aviator who flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. He later grew to admire German fascism and gave a famous speech in September 1941 in which he accused Jews of attempting to push America into World War II.

“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war,” he said, “are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” And while Lindbergh expressed sympathy for Jews facing Nazi persecution, he went straight to the same tropes that were deployed last week, claiming that the Jewish people’s “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

We want to place blame. We, as whites, want to be offended. It’s like we go looking for reasons to be angry!

You want to hold a middle ground in this country? You’re elite.

We are not just “progressively better” as a society or a culture.

Evolution is a concept that applies to biology, not human nature. It turns out that humanity does not grow out of the darkness of the past. It has to be contested by every generation. We are neither imprisoned by darkness nor ever fully captured by light.

America is no exception. From before the founding, our so-called new world has been plagued by all the sins of the old. Set against that human depravity, however, are the great aspirations of the founding, including the central declaration that “all men are created equal.”

To the extreme right and the far left we are shouting in anger from positions of privilege and the ones who get crowded out every time are the poor and marginalized. We refuse to do ANY self-examination on the far left or the far right, and then act in hatred toward the “other side” as we run through the territory of the marginalized, not ever listening to them.

We are stuck in our self-righteous camps trying to defend our slogans and memes and tweets and posts… and we aren’t sitting in a camp somewhere with a refugee. We aren’t sitting in a kibbutz waiting with a family for word of a kidnapped loved one. We aren’t sorting through the rubble of a hospital destroyed by air raids. We are too busy being right in our own minds.

I can sit with a Palestinian in their grief. I can sit with a Jewish family in their grief. Where I don’t want to hang out anymore is with some white American to the left or the right just spouting information they’ve found pleasing to their ears and they haven’t had a conversation with the ones getting hurt.

Which reminds me of a Gregory Porter song worth your time. “Take me to the alley.”