Our Favorite 12-Year-Old Cartoonist Had the Perfect Response to Trump and Charlottesville

While I find myself in heated arguments with many adults about the events in Charlottesville, my favorite take on the matter was created by a brilliant pre-teen. Out of the mouth (and pen) of babes comes wisdom and truth.

We’ve written about cartoonist Sasha Matthews, slayer of misogynist trolls and ACLU hero, before. Well, we also follow Sasha’s art activism on Twitter, and today she put out a perfectly drawn takedown of Donald Trump’s jaw-dropping press conference.

Trump’s endorsement of the white supremacist and Nazi hordes as containing some “very fine people” was mostly met with shock and dismay, like so:

Yet some people don’t seem to get it—or are unwilling to unpack the enormous repercussions of Trump’s statement. He is no longer dog-whistling at American racists so much as giving them a hall pass and a big ol’ thumbs-up. From the President of the United States.

I’ve seen too many folks rushing in to say that yeah, maybe Trump had a point, not everyone in the crowd that united under the call of the Naziest poster I’ve seen since my World War II propaganda class was there because they were part of a hate group. Some of them just really, really cared about the fate of Confederate statuary. Really, bro!

All I’m saying is that if you just really, really, really love Confederate history and take the time to defend statues of traitorous slaveholders, maybe try to do so on a day when the rest of the people with you aren’t heiling Hitler and wearing Nazi armbands. Then there won’t be this confusion.

Sasha saw right through Trump’s false equivalency Olympics and set him straight. And going forward, this should be the standard. Use intellect, humor, common sense, and subversive art to poke holes through Trump and his ilk’s thin skin. Be like Sasha.

(via Rumble Comics on Twitter, images: Sasha Matthews)

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Kaila Hale-Stern

Kaila Hale-Stern (she/her) is a content director, editor, and writer who has been working in digital media for more than fifteen years. She started at TMS in 2016. She loves to write about TV—especially science fiction, fantasy, and mystery shows—and movies, with an emphasis on Marvel. Talk to her about fandom, queer representation, and Captain Kirk. Kaila has written for io9, Gizmodo, New York Magazine, The Awl, Wired, Cosmopolitan, and once published a Harlequin novel you'll never find.

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