Let’s be clear: White supremacy in any form, including its latest, alt-right ideology, is despicable. It’s evil, without value, bereft of merit. We unequivocally condemn racism and the tragic events that sprang from it Saturday on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Don’t blame the statues of old Confederate leaders for the mayhem. They’re lifeless stone and bronze relics of a dead, defeated rebellion that redeemed us of our national sin of slavery.

The statues are dead. Evil is alive and well. And hatred is the tool of evil.

Individuals and groups alike must resist the seductive nature of hate — nothing good ever comes of it.

Evil has a knack for heaping hate into a spiritual vortex, like a hurricane lurking off the coast. It will pull individuals into its path of destruction, stir up storms within them and collect energy from their stirred-up hatred to sustain the vortex — and then all hell breaks loose.

James Alex Fields got pulled into the vortex of hate. Was it his intention from the start to ram his Dodge Challenger into protest marchers, killing one of them? Did the idea percolate as he drove alone down Interstate 75? He’d had at least a shred of conscience when he left Toledo — the last thing he did there was drop off his pet cat at mom’s house for safe keeping.

Heather Heyer lost her life in the vortex. A 32-year-old paralegal and veteran social activist from Charlottesville, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time when Fields romped on his accelerator. She never knew what hit her.

On the other hand, her name will haunt Fields for the rest of his days — which will be numbered by a judge. He’s charged with second-degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and failing to stop at the scene of a crash that resulted in a death. Due process assures him a complete picture of the woman whose life he cut short.

The vortex destroyed Virginia State Police Lt. H. Jay Cullen and Trooper Berke Bates. Their helicopter crashed a few hours later Saturday as they monitored the demonstrations from the air. Bates would have celebrated his 41st birthday on Sunday with his wife and their 11-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. Cullen, 46, the pilot, played college hockey. He leaves a wife and two sons.

Charlottesville and its police department got lost in the vortex, too. Unedited video accounts of the terrorist attack — that’s what it was, a terrorist attack — show a lapse of six minutes before the city police arrived. Reportedly they were under a “stand-down” order that originated with Gov. Terry McAuliff.

It would seem prudent for police to shadow large groups of protestors or even set up barricades or police lines to contain them, in part for the groups’ own protection. Remember last summer’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland? Can you imagine a six-minute delay in police response there?

On a spring day in 1998, the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan showed up in Butler for a rally. About 300 people gathered to hear a message of hate spouted out by 25 out-of-towners wearing bedsheets, assembled on the front porch of the Butler County Courthouse. The city arranged for 101 state and municipal police officers, mostly to protect the klansmen from dissenting audience members.

A mile away in Memorial Park, more than 3,000 counter-demonstrators gathered for a rally of love and unity.

Twenty years ago, the strategy was to ignore the white supremacist message as much as possible and deny them the satisfaction of a confrontation. It was not to feed the vortex of hate.

The strategy worked, too. Of course, the world back then was much larger and less complicated, without social media.