“If you want to be a conservative personality, don’t associate yourself with white nationalists and anti-Semites. This should be pretty simple.”

Good for Turning Point USA! Their action shows that they had enough sense to realize that collaborating with racists undermines their message of a freedom-based conservatism especially voters on college campuses. White Nationalists/Supremacists in the past created a crony-capitalism in cahoots with a corrupt state that intentionally shut out minorities of the free-market (Jim Crow laws, redlining, etc…).

In the picture that generated the furor and actions, you’ve got two Jews, a Hispanic, and a Chinese-American among the “white supremacist anti-semites.” (all you need is Sheriff Bart posing as a Klansman to make the picture complete) Different group of people, to put it mildly, than the KKK of old.

This is a bit off topic, but we might do well to understand a bit about what motivates these guys. You’ll probably never reach the truly fringe characters except by prayer and fasting, but those who are just “disaffected hangers on” might be reached, allowing us to better see who is really dangerous. I’d put Kathy Zhu, the asian in the picture, in this category; she was shown the door after a couple of what I’d call “borderline” tweets by the Miss World organization in a text messaging debacle.

It could be weird if it works, but perhaps “making a phone call” instead of letting things get out of hand in text messages might have helped. See also the recent paper on how to reduce polarization and division in the U.S. that was posted here, where Rosaria Butterfield and others comment on the healing (if not uniting) power of a cup of coffee.