Google engineer James Damore was recently fired for circulating a treatise on the company’s intolerance to conservative thought. His missive built on two premises; that women, without exception, are less equipped to solve complex problems under stress than a failed rodeo clown who mucks shit at pony rides, and that the Right believes differences are inherent while the Left believes they accrue from discrimination. Democrats, accordingly, buy votes with entitlements. Republicans enrich their friends at the expense of the disenfranchised. While both are wrong, they are far from morally equivalent.

The same can be said of Charlottesville. It is true, as Mr. Trump noted, Antifa demonstrators didn’t have a permit, but they also didn’t run people over with a late model Dodge. The driver, one James Alex Fields, is a registered Republican dumbass that managed to kill the one white woman in a whole damn sea of afros. And as we learned during the Bachelor in Paradise sex scandal, we’re losing enough of our pussy to them darkies as it is. His plan, in other words, backfired.

And there’s been a lot of that lately. Anthony Scaramucci thought he could deracinate his enemies from the White House by calling them cock-suckers: instead he lost his job, his wife (read: half his net worth) and the tax abatement on the sale of his company all in the span of one day. Ten undocumented Mexicans thought they were getting a free ride to WalMart only to be braised to death in the back of a tractor-trailer. Indiana Republicans put up a Facebook page to collect Obamacare horror stories, but were overwhelmed with testimonials of how the ACA had saved constituents’ lives. And in a fun-house-mirror kind of warped symmetry, Trump’s firing of FBI Director Comey as a means to ground the Russia investigation is precipitating his impeachment in the same way that Bill Clinton’s entreating then Attorney General Lorretta Lynch to drop the inquiry into Hillary’s use of a private email server lead to her defeat.

But let’s be clear: backfire is but a subset of irony. The latter describes any event that seems deliberately contrary to expectation, while the former is restricted to those episodes that boomerang specifically against the originator. For example: the Ohio State Fair Fire Ball splattering 18-year-old Tyler Jarrell onto the concrete shortly after inspectors gave the amusement ride the thumbs up is ironic. Zed getting his nuts shotgunned off in Pulp Fiction as the climax to raping Marsellus in the pawnshop basement is a backfire. Got it?

Back to Charlottesville: There were 2 million fewer African American voters in 2016 than in the prior presidential election. In the key swing state of Wisconsin, the black voter participation rate fell from 78% to less than half over the same span. I guess they felt as if they didn’t have a dog in the hunt, but the result is that they are now being hunted like dogs. Both sides blame the escalation on police indifference during the preliminary fistfights and skirmishes, but the cops, having strained to not antagonize either party, are now themselves in the crosshairs. And while the animus for the gathering was to forfend the removal of a sculpture of Robert E. Lee, the melee has only accelerated the nationwide purge of — in Trump’s words — the “beautiful statues and monuments” that glorify the Confederacy.

While I concede that these symbols represent a vital and enduring piece of American history and should unhesitatingly be preserved, it might be best to gather them all up from our multiethnic public spaces and truck them down to Southern Appalachia. Imagine, then, one giant Dollywood-like park among the verdant rolling hills where a lifelike figure of George Wallace will block the entrance, endlessly repeating his infamous “segregation forever” speech. Once inside, patrons can raise the rebel flag, eat funnel cake, or piss on the thousands of Obama urinal cakes cascading down Splash Mountain. But don’t look for any egalitarianism here because while everyone gets a Congressman Buddy Carter (R-GA) bumper sticker that says, “Snatch a Knot in Their Ass,” only those wearing a Make America Great Again hat will be given a job at Google.