“Make no mistake,” writes New Yorker editor David Remnick, “white supremacists are now at the forefront of American politics.” That platitudinous “make no mistake” put us in mind of Joe Queenan’s observation years ago in these pages. The phrase is “an underhanded way of clinching an argument without having to prove your point,” Queenan wrote. It’s “a variation on the beloved old chestnut ‘Take it from me.’ ”

Remnick’s remark is, of course, ludicrous—white supremacists have no credibility whatsoever in American political life. Whatever one makes of Donald Trump’s claim that there were some “very fine people” among the neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville in mid-August, that crowd of roughly 500 people has no political influence. No one in Congress views “white nationalists” as a constituency; ordinary Americans have no sympathy with Klan wannabes and Hitler-saluting doofuses.