The Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, has issued a strong statement in response to the petition from some of his Yale classmates "to resign in protest of President Trump's support of Nazism and white supremacy."

Mr. Mnuchin appears to be keeping his eye on the ball:

I believe that there is a great opportunity to simplify regulations, reform taxes, and generate millions of jobs through higher growth. Additionally I will use all the powers and resources of the Department of the Treasury's Terrorism and Financial Intelligence units to combat and stop terrorist financing domestically and internationally. These are my most important priorities as Treasury Secretary.

He also makes two points about the Charlottesville controversy. First, if these Confederate monuments are so horrible, why weren't they removed during the Obama administration:

Josh Kraushaar, who is savvy, writes at National Journal that polls don't show Charlottesville damaging Trump:

The polling is simply the latest illustration of the gaping divide between elite opinion and the views of average Americans. It's clear many voters don't share the same sense of alarm about Trump as political leaders and journalists. Judging by the news coverage, you'd reasonably expect the president to have alienated the entire country with his insensitive, racially charged rhetoric. In reality, public opinion is splitting along predictable partisan lines...

to have any chance at uniting the country, political leaders need to do their best at persuading a skeptical public of the rightness of their views—and not mock, shame, or dismiss people who hold different opinions. When the elites are so at odds with the public on issues of great consequence, a dose of humility may be in order.

Tucker Carlson comments on the polarization and virtue signaling that characterize today's politics:

Part of the explanation has to be the moment that we're living in right now where hysteria has supplanted rational debate. Well, the purpose of political argument is no longer to explain your beliefs but to highlight what a morally upstanding person you are, a virtuous guy you are, using by contrast of your opponent who is by definition evil. It's childish, obviously.

"Cohn solidifies lead in race to replace Yellen, economists say," is the headline over a Bloomberg News item reporting on a poll of economists that judged Gary Cohn as Janet Yellen's most likely successor as Federal Reserve Chair, "followed by 9 percent for former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh, 6 percent for Stanford University economist John Taylor and 4 percent for Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia University's business school."

Over at Economic Principals, David Warsh floats the idea of promoting the Fed's vice chairman, Stanley Fischer: "In a rational world, he would be the leading candidate for the job, if Yellen chose not to serve a second term."

"When and how did it become acceptable to make a false accusation that someone is racist?" is the question I try to answer in my column this week, which touches on Daniel Loeb, President Trump, Robert Bork, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Please check out the full column at Newsmax here.

At 10:24 p.m. on August 15, we posted here about President Trump's manufacturing council: "The other council members could join in the mass resignations, or Trump could just fire the rest of them and shut the council down. Either approach would be an improvement over the status quo."

At 1:14 pm on August 16, Mr. Trump tweeted: "Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!"

That was quick. One wishes it were as easy for the president to dismantle other unnecessary parts of the executive branch.

It seems strange to me that a mere 500 knuckleheads in Charlottesville — in a country of 320 million — were able to set and dominate the national media agenda for an entire week.

People blame the president for failing to denounce them as rapidly and unequivocally as the press demanded, or for being a moving target on the issue, which then transformed it from being a story about 500 knuckleheads to being a story about the president of the United States. I suppose there is some truth to that. And it's also true that a counterprotester was killed, apparently by one of the neo-Nazis or white supremacists, which added to the newsworthiness of the story.

Even so, it seems to me as if the press played precisely into the hands of the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and neo-Confederates. Rather than treating them as a marginal, fringe phenomenon, they gave them tens of billions of dollars worth of free publicity. You basically couldn't pick up a newspaper, turn on the radio, or watch cable television this past week without hearing again and again about these people. To me it seemed disproportionate to their actual influence.

At least five corporate executives have reportedly quit President Trump's "American Manufacturing Council" in response to what they and a lot of other people view as the president's mishandling of a violent white supremacist, neo-Nazi, or neo-Confederate rally and counterprotest in Virginia over the weekend.

That's a good start, but I won't be completely satisfied until every executive on the council quits and the whole operation is shut down.

That's not because I think Trump is irredeemably tainted by racism. Even if the president were a person of color who is a progressive paragon of racial enlightenment, the Council would still be a lousy idea.

If the president wants advice from business leaders, nothing is stopping him from calling them on the telephone, inviting them to meetings at the White House, or going to visit their factories. Nor is anyone preventing the Secretary of Commerce from taking similar steps.

Big business is finding ways to control its health care costs, even if Congress won't. That's the topic of my column this week, which explores why companies may have an easier time than politicians in tackling health care. Please check out the full column at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

There's an emerging consensus that the press has done an awful job of covering the story of the Google engineer, James Damore, who was fired for writing a memo critical of the company's diversity efforts.

Here is David Brooks, writing in the August 12 New York Times: "The coverage of the memo has been atrocious....Various reporters and critics apparently decided that Damore opposes all things Enlightened People believe and therefore they don't have to afford him the basic standards of intellectual fairness."

Here is the Boston Globe's technology reporter, Hiawatha Bray, appearing on WBUR radio in Boston on August 10: "By the way, to me one of the most disgraceful things that has come out of this is the press coverage. It has been astonishingly inaccurate... The Washington Post on their Snapchat page actually said that he claimed that women were genetically incapable of becoming engineers. He wrote nothing of the sort."

Columbia University's new "master of science in data journalism" — which costs "just over $106,000 for tuition and fees -- plus $41,232 in living expenses" — is the topic of a skeptical look from Inside Higher Ed.

The press and politicians like to complain about for-profit colleges saddling students with lots of debt for degrees that don't generate much earning power, but between this Columbia example and Harvard's theater institute, it looks like the Ivy League is seeking a piece of the action in terms of testing what price the market will bear.

The San Francisco Chronicle asked for a piece from me about Trump and the stock market after an editor there saw my column from earlier in the week on the topic. The Chronicle piece ran today under the headline "Give Trump his due for stock market surge." You can check it out here.

The Trump Bump in the stock market was the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New Boston Post (here), New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

A New York state senator, Daniel Squadron, a Democrat who represents parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan, has an op-ed in the New York Daily News announcing that he is resigning to work with Jeffrey Sachs and Adam Pritzker on some kind of project. The piece includes the following passage:

The last election reflected a growing divide — based on geography, background, opportunity and even truth — that threatens our democracy and our future.

It's not the inevitable consequence of living in a huge country with diverse interests. Rather, this divide has been manufactured for the financial gain of the Koch brothers and very few others. For decades, they have invested in campaigns on the local, state and national levels, as well as think tanks, legislative development, and media outlets, building a unified front to advance their self-serving agenda.

Thomas Friedman makes some reasonable points in his latest New York Times column:

Some things are true even if Donald Trump believes them!...

We can't take in every immigrant who wants to come here; we need, metaphorically speaking, a high wall that assures Americans we can control our border with a big gate that lets as many people in legally as we can effectively absorb as citizens.

• The Muslim world does have a problem with pluralism — gender pluralism, religious pluralism and intellectual pluralism — and suggesting that terrorism has nothing to do with that fact is naïve; countering violent extremism means constructively engaging with Muslim leaders on this issue.