Charlottesville Trial Begins Today

I’ve already said all there is to say about Charlottesville.

As activists, we were slow to appreciate just how radically things had changed since Trump was elected president in 2016. We had been holding rallies to support of Confederate monuments for years before Charlottesville. The League of the South had just held two rallies over Confederate monuments in New Orleans and Gainesville, FL in the months before Charlottesville.

In all of these public rallies, we had cooperated with law enforcement beforehand without any problems. We went through the hassle of acquiring permits. It had become routine to show up at these rallies, hold our event and socialize with friends and have fun for a little while afterwards. Insofar as Antifa would show up and scream at us for a little while, we were separated from them by law enforcement. In the years before Trump Derangement Syndrome, the norm was for law enforcement to protect the First Amendment rights of both sides even in the bluest cities because this was still America.

This was all thrown out the window in 2017. We should have saw it coming in Berkeley and Portland where events devolved into chaos in these leftwing cities in the months leading up to Charlottesville. It was the fact that there had been two previous events in Charlottesville – the first torch march rally by Identity Evropa and the Klan rally in July – which threw us off. The Unite the Right rally was announced months in advance and the police presence there should have been more than sufficient to maintain order.

ABC News:

“A dark moment in U.S. history is set to be revisited when a federal civil trial begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, over a violent 2017 white nationalist rally that ended with an alleged neo-Nazi ramming his car into counterprotesters, killing one and injuring more than 30.

Jury selection is scheduled to get underway on Monday in the high-profile civil case in the U.S. district court in Charlottesville against organizers and certain participants of the “Unite the Right” rally. Nine people injured over the two-day event are accusing promoters of exhorting followers to “defend the South and Western civilization” from non-white people and their allies, according to the lawsuit. …”

My expectation in Charlottesville was that the Unite the Right rally would be tense, but peaceful like the previous two rallies there over the summer like the Pikeville rally or the New Orleans rally. In all of these cases, law enforcement had done its job and separated both sides. It was able to do so again in the follow up White Lives Matter rally that we held in Shelbyville in October 2017.

Anyway, there is a direct line between Charlottesville in 2017 and Portland in 2021. Antifa now have a free hand to terrorize cities like Portland where they have caused tens of millions of dollars in property damage. They can attack the police, vandalize churches and lay siege to a federal courthouse and get away with it. The police now sit in their cars and watch the Antifa mobs engage in violence because they no longer have the power to disperse them. The local district attorney refuses to prosecute them. Merrick Garland’s Department of Social Justice and the “intelligence community” looks the other way at Antifa violence. Even the ACLU has completely abandoned its original mission of protecting civil liberties.

Over the past five years, these leftwing cities have effectively nullified the First Amendment. Silence is violence. It is not violence though for Antifa mobs to engage in actual violence to suppress the First Amendment rights of their ideological opponents or just for the fun of destroying someone else’s property. We realized this long ago and have avoided these places ever since. The police officers who work in these cities have also realized it too and have begun to resign en masse because they can no longer do their jobs under these conditions.