Trump Justice Department Prosecutes Rise Above Movement For Charlottesville

I decided to wait 24 hours to cool off before responding to this.

Yesterday, the Trump Justice Department announced that it was prosecuting four members of the California based Rise Above Movement for violence in Charlottesville:

“When Benjamin Drake Daley arrived in Charlottesville, Va. from Redondo Beach, he stopped by Walmart to pick up supplies: white athletic tape, black spray paint and a folding tactical knife.

Later that day in August 2017, prosecutors say, Daley taped his fists as if he were a boxer or mixed martial arts fighter and showed up at the University of Virginia, where he marched through campus with hundreds of torch-toting white supremacists shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans.

Daley and several others had traveled from California on behalf of the so-called Rise Above Movement, a relatively small militant white power group based in Southern California that casts itself as an alt-right fight club. Its members meet regularly in public parks to practice boxing and other street-fighting techniques to unleash on political foes. …”

The DOJ press release, affidavit and complaint are found here.

This was announced at a press conference yesterday afternoon by United States Attorney for the Western District of Virginia Thomas T. Cullen:

In case you were wondering, Cullen was appointed by President Donald Trump:

The SPLC had the following take:

Berkeley Antifa took credit for doing the research:

Christopher Mathias credited A.C. Thompson of ProPublica’s “Documenting Hate: Charlottesville” episode which aired on PBS last month around the time of the UTR anniversary:

In case you missed it last month, you can watch that here:

JUST SO WE ARE CLEAR:

1.) Last September, the Republican Congress unanimously passed a joint resolution which blamed White Nationalists exclusively for the violence in Charlottesville, and urged “the President’s Cabinet to use all available resources to address the threats posed by those groups.”

2.) Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein instructed the FBI and US Attorney Thomas T. Cullen and Assistant U.S. Attorney Chris Kavanaugh to go after Alt-Right and White Nationalist groups.

3.) These people are now exclusively prosecuting Alt-Right and White Nationalist groups who were in Charlottesville and other places while ignoring chronic Antifa violence.

4.) They are citing Antifa blogs and ProPublica documentaries as evidence to press federal charges against Alt-Right and White Nationalist groups.

The following videos are why Rise Above Movement is being prosecuted by the Trump Justice Department: