DAVID HARSANYI: Why CNN’s Normalizing Of A White Nationalist Matters. “It’s transparent partisan attempt to smear Republican voters.”

Which brings me to the purpose of CNN featuring white supremacist Richard Spencer on as a pundit yesterday. These are kinds of people, you see, who say “love it or leave it.” These are the kinds of people who support the president. Literally, the chyron read, “White Nationalist who once backed Trump calls Trump’s racist tweets ‘red meat.’”

Spencer was there to reiterate a point. CNN and other networks have decided that Trump’s tweets are objectively racist and they will repeat that his tweets are racist hundreds of times a day just in case anyone disagrees. They won’t make the same kind of journalistic judgments about the anti-Semitism that infects a sizable faction of the progressive left. They won’t do the same for Ilhan Omar’s tweets.

Well, white nationalists get a “jolt” from Republicans winning elections in the same way terrorist Hamas or Antifa goons get a “jolt” from Democrats winning elections. CNN would never ask an Islamic radical or masked leftist arsonist to talk about Ilhan Omar’s anti-American sentiments in an effort to tacitly tie her to those groups.

There are plenty of articulate conservatives out there who don’t melt down every time the president tweets something stupid. Whether you agree with them or not, they could easily have provided a pro-Trump perspective (which is what I imagine CNN was looking for, but didn’t get, from Spencer).

What they got was arguably even “better,” since the headline impression of Spencer’s appearance was that Trump had gone too far even for him.