DHS Chief Won’t Say Charlottesville Nazis Were Wrong

Vice News reports:

Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen repeated President Trump’s position that “both sides” were to blame for the violence during the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August that left dozens of counter-protesters injured and one dead.

“It’s not that one side is right and one side is wrong,” Nielsen told Peter Alexander from NBC News at a national security conference in Colorado on Thursday. “Anybody that is advocating violence, we need to work to mitigate.”

Alexander had asked Nielsen whether the moral equivalency Trump drew between the white supremacists in Charlottesville and those protesting, which included antifa, made her job harder. Nielsen said that, to address extremism across the board, DHS was looking at “counter-messaging” and “off-ramping,” which is the term she uses to get someone off the path of radicalization.