Tales From The Movement: James Fields, Jr.

THREAD: @AugensteinWTOP discusses updates in the Charlottesville murder trial of James Alex Fields Jr. Follow along: https://t.co/ZZdLbJPYSQ

— WTOP (@WTOP) December 4, 2018

#COURTDOCUMENTS: In a pretrial motion yesterday, Judge Moore allowed evidence that James Fields Jr. posted this meme to his Instagram three months prior to the incident on Aug. 12th in Charlottesville. The jury has not seen these yet, but the prosecution mentioned them yesterday pic.twitter.com/EHmIoJMA57

— Siobhan McGirl NBC CT (@siobhan_mcgirl) November 30, 2018

Before we get to James Fields, Jr. crashing the Dodge Challenger into the crowd in Charlottesville, which was the coup de grâce to the Alt-Right which pretty much killed the organized movement, we should keep in mind the culture of the movement that we have already encountered.

• The spontaneous human swastika in Shelbyville
• Grand Dragon Kenny Parker’s flaming swastika
• Gabe’s tattoos and weariness with his White brothers

As with nearly everyone else, I was introduced to James Fields, Jr. in the hours after the Unite the Right rally when I heard about the car crash and his arrest on Twitter. It wasn’t until years later during his criminal trials that we began to get some better insight into who he was and what he was doing in Charlottesville and what motivated him to be there. He wasn’t a face that I recognized. Unlike Gabe, he was also on point in terms of the preppy image, fashy haircut and “optics” that the Alt-Right desired to project that day. He blended in with all the guys who were around him. Nothing about Fields looked amiss.

I remember going through all the stages of cope while being in the dark.

• It was an Antifa who crashed into the crowd
• Heather Heyer was morbidly obese and died of a heart attack, not from getting hit by the car
• Fields accelerated because Antifa were attacking his car
• It was an accident and he got mixed up and in trouble due to his GPS

He later admitted under oath to everything.

DOJ:

“At his plea hearing on March 27, Fields admitted under oath that he drove into the crowd of counter-protestors because of the actual and perceived race, color, national origin, and religion of its members. He further admitted that his actions killed Heather Heyer, and that he intended to kill the other victims he struck and injured with his car in the crowd. 

Fields also admitted that, prior to Aug. 12, 2017, he used social media accounts to express and promote white supremacist views; to express support for the social and racial policies of Adolf Hitler and Nazi-era Germany, including the Holocaust; and to espouse violence against African Americans, Jewish people, and members of other racial, ethnic, and religious groups he perceived to be non-white. 

Fields further admitted that, on Aug. 12, 2017, he attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. That morning, multiple groups and individuals espousing white-supremacist ideology also attended the rally. These rally participants, including Fields, engaged in chants promoting or expressing white supremacist and other racist and anti-Semitic views. 

Shortly before the scheduled start of the Unite the Right rally, law enforcement declared an “unlawful assembly” and required rally participants, including Fields, to disperse. Fields later returned to his vehicle and began to drive on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Fields drove his car onto Fourth Street, a narrow, downhill, one-way street in downtown Charlottesville.  At or around that same time, a racially and ethnically diverse crowd had gathered at the bottom of the hill, at the intersection of Fourth and Water Streets. Many of the individuals in the crowd were celebrating as they were chanting and carrying signs promoting equality and protesting against racial and other forms of discrimination. Fields slowly proceeded in his vehicle down Fourth Street toward the crowd. He then stopped and observed the crowd while idling in his vehicle. With no vehicle behind him, Fields then slowly reversed his vehicle toward the top of the hill and away from the crowd of counter-protestors. 

At or around that same time, the members of the crowd began to walk up the hill, populating the streets and sidewalks between the buildings on Fourth Street. Having reversed his car to a point at or near the top of the hill and the intersection of Fourth and Market Streets, Fields stopped again. Fields admitted that he then rapidly accelerated forward down Fourth Street in his vehicle, running through a stop sign and across a raised pedestrian mall, and drove directly into the crowd. Fields’s vehicle stopped only when it struck another stopped vehicle near the intersection of Fourth and Water Streets. Fields then rapidly reversed his car and fled the scene. As Fields drove into and through the crowd, Fields struck numerous individuals, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of people nearby. …”

Who was James Fields, Jr.?

He was a Neo-Nazi on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

James Fields, Jr. knew who we were. We didn’t know who he was though. He was one of these people floating around behind anonymous pseudonyms who was obsessed with Hitler. He was someone who had a great time on his school field trip at Dachau. The idea behind Unite the Right was to unite everyone from conservatives to Neo-Nazis in the broadest rightwing coalition to come to Charlottesville to attend a protest over the Confederate statues and abuses of Jason Kessler’s civil rights.

I was sold enough on the idea of White unity and setting aside our differences for the greater good to think this was a good idea at the time. I suffered from a failure of imagination. I spent too much time thinking about how the movement could grow, gain momentum and break out of the box we were in, but not nearly enough thinking about the ways in which it could fail. I wasn’t thinking hard enough about people like James Fields, Jr., who aren’t socialized, who are detached from reality and living in a fantasy world in online ghettos, who had no IRL activist experience, who are essentially stroke victims when it comes to the morality center in their brains and how those people might make rash, spontaneous decisions.

It would never occur to me to deliberately drive my car into a crowd of people. I was there because I had always loved those monuments. In retrospect, I wasn’t advancing the cause of the Confederate monuments by being there with all of those people who I didn’t know. It all seems so obvious now. I didn’t know what was going on under the hood in the hearts and minds of a lot of these people.

I mean … Fields was J-woke. He understood race. That’s all that matters, right? Do you really need anything else to form a successful movement? Do you need Christcuck morality?