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Notes -
Charlottesville re-examined
Nine years ago, James Fields Jr drove his Dodge Challenger into a large crowd of protestors in Charlottesville. 99.99% of Americans believed him to be an evil Nazi murderer and viewed his life sentence as just. However, to the degree that the alt-right still exists, several in this group still believe that Fields was the victim of a miscarriage of justice, and that his self defense claim was ignored by a rigged trial. I didn't pay much attention to this event or the trial when it happened, so I thought it would be a fun epistemic exercise to see whether they had a case. Thankfully for the purposes of recapping, the trial was short; opening testimony began on November 29th, 2018, and closing statements were delivered December 6th.
For reference, an imgur album with relevant maps and images.
#1. Background and Police Planning
The Unite the Right rally on August 12 was planned to be held in Emancipation Park (previously named Lee Park, and afterwards Market Street Park) in downtown Charlottesville from noon to 5 pm. This park is bounded by Jefferson, Market, 1st, and 2nd East Streets to the north, south, west, and east, respectively (Pic 1). The police traffic plan for that day is described in the Heaphy report [1], on pages 103-105 (Pic 2). The focus was on preventing traffic from reaching Jefferson and Market. In addition, police would limit access to the downtown pedestrian mall area. This area is located between Market and Water Street to the south; it is bisected east-west by "Main Street", which is only for pedestrians. Two car roads cut north-south through the mall; 2nd Street West, to the west, and 4th Street, to the east. It is important to note that these numbered streets, all the way until 9th street East on the furthest east side, are one-way roads; 4th street was south only.
Officer Tammy Shiflett guarded the important 4th-Market St intersection. She would block traffic attempting to head west on Market or south on 4th, using a sawhorse and her cruiser (Pic 3). However, by around 12 pm, the officer felt unsafe as various groups of protestors and counterprotestors passed her. With no protective gear, she requested backup. At this time, a fight had broken out at the Market Street parking garage one block to her east (video). Officers arriving at the garage were told about Shiflett's request and decided to retrieve her, along with her car. This was not communicated to the traffic commander, so they did not know that the intersection was now only "guarded" by a sawhorse ([1], p. 152-3).
#2. The paths of Fields and the counterprotestors
Fields drove from his home in Maumee, Ohio on the evening of August 11 and arrived at around 2-3 am on the 12th. He parked in a McDonalds and got some rest. He walked into downtown Charlottesville in the morning, and met a group of neo-nazis, Vanguard America, who handed him a shield; he was seen in several photos marching with them in Emancipation Park [2].
Around this time, Hayden Calhoun and his then-girlfriend Sarah Bolstad also arrived in the area. They parked at the Jefferson School garage (Pic 1), then walked to Emancipation Park at 10 am. They stayed for about 45 minutes, left to use the bathroom, and by the time they returned, violence had broken out and an unlawful assembly was declared [3]; this occurred at about 11:31 am ([1], p. 146). Another protestor, Joshua Matthews, parked at the Market Street parking garage and went to Emancipation Park in the morning. After the unlawful assembly was declared, many of the protestors, including Fields, Matthews, Calhoun, and Bolstad, decided to go to McIntire park, a couple of miles to the north, hoping that the rally would continue there. However, police at the park told them to leave, so they decided to go back downtown. Fields and Matthews met up first, and later invited Calhoun and Bolstad to join them, claiming safety in numbers [4,5,6].
They stopped by a gas station convenience store located on Preston Avenue, about a thousand feet north of the McDonalds where Fields's car was parked; security footage showed Fields in the store at 1:13 pm (Pic 4, [7]). Afterwards, they got into Fields's car, and he drove to Water Street to drop off Calhoun and Bolstad at the Jefferson School garage. A livestream shows Fields's grey Dodge Challenger approaching the parking garage, about 5 and a half minutes before the attack (Pic 5, [8]).
Meanwhile, around 1 pm, a confrontation occurred along Garrett Street, south of the train tracks. Counter protestors threw rocks at militia protestors, and a woman fell and struck her head on the ground. The militia took a position near the Friendship Court Apartments, a predominantly African-American housing complex, which inflamed the counter-protestors. The CPD arrived and separated the groups, and an ambulance arrived for the injured woman. Counterprotestors in other areas heard about these events through their communications networks and headed south to assist. When they got there, the incident was over, and they merged with a group from another park on Water Street. This larger group, of several hundred people, marched east, arriving at 4th Street, where they decided to turn left and head towards the mall ([1], p. 154-6).
#3. Approaching the collision
After dropping off the couple, Fields drove to the Market Street garage, by continuing until he reached 10th Street East and turning left twice to get onto Market Street, going west. Here is where we run into some confusion. There were 3 vehicles involved in the attack; a burgundy minivan, driven by Lizete Short; a silver Camry, driven by Tadrint "Tay" Washington; and Fields's grey Challenger. The minivan can be seen in the livestream arriving at the intersection about 4 minutes before the attack. According to Mrs. Short, she was driving west on Market Street and "someone in a colored vest" waved for her to make a left turn onto 4th street [9]. She doesn't remember the presence of a sawhorse blocking her path.
Ms. Washington, who arrived only a couple of minutes after the minivan, gave a slightly different account. She also was driving west on Market Street, but said that a road block near the parking garage forced her to turn right, up towards Jefferson Street. From there, she tried to continue west but another roadblock forced her to turn left onto 4th (remember that this is a one-way road). Then, reaching the intersection, the right turn onto Market was blocked, and she remembered that there was a roadblock near the garage, so she continued down 4th towards the mall. Meanwhile, she testified that a grey Challenger was following her, making the same turns. [10]. She specifies under cross examination that the first roadblock near the garage was a police car, and doesn't remember anyone waving her through the intersection. She does remember a sawhorse on 4th street, but says that it had been pushed to the side.
What was going on here? The barrier near the parking garage is plausible, since there was a fight there requiring an ambulance, and police likely decided to remain and interdict traffic (also, the CPD headquarters are right next door to the garage). But how could Mrs. Short have passed this, while Ms. Washington did not? Since Ms. Washington appears to have demonstrated better eyesight and memory, her account seems more plausible. In addition, there is no account in the Heaphy report of anyone replacing Officer Shiflett's post. Despite this, helicopter footage from 1:23 pm shows that there was an additional sawhorse blocking traffic west on Market Street at that intersection (Pic 6, [1] p. 156). Maybe someone remembered to put up some kind of barrier afterwards. The other roadblock, on Jefferson, is indicated in the traffic plan, so that has a solid explanation.
Either way, after dropping off Matthews, Fields was alone, and decided to call it a day. At 1:39 pm, he looked up how to get back to Maumee in Google Maps. According to the digital forensic expert, he was on 4th Street, and the directions told him to turn left onto Market Street to exit the area [12]. Instead, likely for the same reason as Ms. Washington, he followed her straight into the mall, towards the counterprotestors.
#4. Dwayne Dixon
Several counter-narratives were offered in the aftermath of the incident. A false flag can be dismissed out of hand, as can the heart attack theory (the aorta being ripped in half does not qualify as such). A more plausible theory centers around the person of Dwayne Dixon, a leftist, rifle-toting professor and member of the group "Redneck Revolt". They had volunteered to provide security for counterprotestors, but decided to stay at nearby Justice Park (Pic 1) instead of heading directly towards the rally. Dixon got himself involved in this case with a rather stupid post, bragging on January 7, 2018 that he had "chased off" James Fields with a rifle before the attack [13]. This could clearly demonstrate self-defense; thus, Dixon was to be the defense's key witness.
Charlottesville detective Steven Young took notice, and went to interview Dixon in March. Dixon claims that he saw a grey Dodge, similar to Fields's car, slowly circle Justice Park three times; on the third pass, along 4th street, Dixon took a step towards the car and told the driver, whom he thought was a cop, to "get the fuck out of here" [14, 15]. This occurred about 30 minutes to an hour before the attack occurred. Dixon gave essentially identical testimony during the trial. The prosecution brought Young up to the stand (for the 4th time), testifying that geolocation data from Fields's phone did not show any circling, and that he was only detected near Justice Park at 1:38 pm [7], when he was driving along Jefferson behind Ms. Washington's Camry.
#5. The Collision
As Ms. Washington pulled behind the minivan, she noticed that the Challenger was reversing back up the hill. Fields stopped on the mall for a brief period (Pic 7 shows this mall area). Witnesses testified that no one was near the car and that it had a clear path to reverse back up 4th street to the intersection [16]. Security footage from a nearby restaurant on the mall captured the car pulling up, and then briefly reversing about a minute later before accelerating forwards [15]. The scraping sound of the bottom of the low-clearance Challenger running over the speed bump was particularly striking [17].
We have a great deal of video and photographic evidence from multiple angles. One piece of evidence the defense used was a photo taken by Ryan Kelly indicating that the brakes were being applied as a counterprotestor jumps out of the way (Pic 8). Based on the position of the sign and cross referencing with google maps, this appears to be about 30-40 feet after the speed bump. Logically, a strange noise coming from your car is a good reason to brake. After this, the brake lights stay unlit even as Fields continues forward into the crowd.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=p6LOKZdLLlE - a collection of multiple angles; collision occurs around 7:30 into the video. At 6:50 you can see the Challenger slowly backing up in the background.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=sn5f5qyf7io - Brennan Gilmore's video, taken from the sidewalk near the mall. The brake lights, after appearing briefly at the beginning of the video, do not turn on as Fields continues forward into the crowd of people running out of his way.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ROdcSWgfqBI - By far the best footage is from the overhead police helicopter. This clearly puts the lie to many of the counter-narratives. The car was not surrounded by protestors when it began to accelerate; he had a clear path to reverse all the way back to the intersection, and was not trapped in any way; there was nothing stopping him from turning back onto Market Street and leaving the area. Another counter-narrative is that Fields never actually hit anyone, and that the damage was done by the other cars that he ran into. Even though this in no way absolves him of responsibility, it is indeed false, as can be clearly seen at 1:41 - not that this footage is necessary when a piece of Heather Heyer's flesh was found on his windshield [9].
The Gilmore video shows a protestor stepping into the street and giving his car a smack on the rear with a bat. Some have suggested that Fields stepped on the accelerator in a panic when this happened, although the video is too shaky to tell with confidence. However, it is hard to claim self defense when you're already halfway into the crowd and people are jumping out of the way. Even if he did have a moment of doubt, it could hardly serve as a fig leaf.
One might ask why Fields did not go faster. A police expert, using the overhead video footage, suggested that Fields reached a top speed of 28 mph; the collision with the Camry accelerated it from a standstill to 17 mph within 150 milliseconds. The defense, obviously, did not bring this up: "Your Honor, my client could have inflicted even more damage" is not a great defense, especially when your client did kill someone and cripple several more. However, we can make some educated guesses. 4th street is narrow, and there was a large parked pickup truck on the right side of the road. Just beyond it, on the left side, is a telephone pole. The Camry and minivan cover the middle (Pic 9). Fields would easily have been able to see all three of these obstacles; colliding with any of those things at significant speed risked serious self harm.
As counterprotestors swarmed his car, breaking the back windshield, he slammed the accelerator in reverse, flying back up 4th Street, past the mall, past the intersection, where he turned left to speed east down Market; he was eventually caught by police about a mile away, and surrendered with minor resistance. Upon learning that he had killed someone, he began to hyperventilate and cry. In jail, he told the magistrate that he felt a “really weird” emotion when he saw the counterprotestors. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said [15].
Is it fear that he felt when he saw the singing, chanting crowd? Or perhaps a sense of bitterness and anger, that he'd driven all this way, put so much hope into this event, only to wave around a LARPy shield for half an hour and get booted out of the city without hearing his idols speak? The prosecutor reminded the jury multiple times that premeditation does not require days or weeks of foreplanning; the formation of intent to kill can happen in a second.
As I see it, the self defense claim relies almost entirely on the Dwayne Dixon claim: that a man with a rifle threatened him down 4th Street and "trapped" him in the mall - even though the helicopter footage clearly shows that he could have left the area without interacting with Dixon in Justice Park. The claim that he was surrounded by a raving mob of protestors when he chose to begin accelerating forward - that he had a reasonable fear for his life that justified such an action - is simply not supported by the evidence otherwise.
What is striking is that the defense did not bother to call Fields as a witness. Fields could surely give the clearest account of why he felt in mortal danger and thus bolster his self defense claim. Sure, Fields would almost certainly have been shredded on cross examination, but without his testimony, this defense had no chance of success.
Finally, the photos and videos used in the trial are available for viewing at the Charlottesville courthouse [18]. I don't want to drive several hundred miles just to triple-check my assessment, but if anyone lives nearby, you have access to better material.
Sources:
Most information not specifically cited is taken from the Wikipedia page, which has the basics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack
[1] - https://www.policinginstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Charlottesville-Critical-Incident-Review-2017.pdf
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/13/charlottesville-james-fields-charged-with-was-pictured-at-neo-nazi-rally-vanguard-america
[3] - https://www.whsv.com/content/news/State-trooper-testifies-in-Fields-trial-about-reconstructing-car-attack-scene-502014661.html
[4] - https://www.whsv.com/content/news/james-fields-convicted-of-first-degree-murder-in-charlottesville-car-attack-502204161.html
[5] - https://wjla.com/news/local/witness-fields-murder-trial-deadly-charlottesville-rally
[6] - https://www.wtvr.com/2018/12/06/final-witness-in-charlottesville-trial-says-james-fields-was-calm-and-normal-on-day-of-rally
[7] - https://www.12onyourside.com/2018/12/06/closing-arguments-expected-fields-trial/
[8] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=G9Bf9XOetMw?si=1ugpMPpRx9PGlk7p&t=51 - Screaming can first be heard around at around 7:30.
[9] - https://www.whsv.com/content/news/Detective-offers-graphic-depiction-of-Charlottesville-car-attack-scene-501646121.html
[10] - https://medium.com/@socialistdogmom/the-trial-of-james-alex-fields-episode-4-transcript-db26841797d6 - I tried to cite this author as little as possible because of her obvious bias, but her descriptions are more in depth than most sites and correspond.
[11] - https://c-ville.com/day-5/
[12] - https://c-ville.com/day-8-waiting-game-fields-trial/
[13] - https://archive.is/gF1iR
[14] - https://medium.com/@socialistdogmom/the-trial-of-james-alex-fields-episode-7-transcript-6acf0d14b283
[15] - https://c-ville.com/verdict-fields-guilty-counts-car-attack/
[16] - https://www.whsv.com/content/news/james-fields-convicted-of-first-degree-murder-in-charlottesville-car-attack-502204161.html
[17] - https://www.12onyourside.com/2018/12/03/witnesses-fields-trial-scene-love-quickly-turned-into-pandemonium/
[18] - https://archive.ph/ygPM5
The specific case of Fields has never interested me much, but this is a nice writeup. I think the greater lessons of Charlottesville are the myriad of police errors that occurred (not necessarily causing this incident, just throughout the whole day) and how Fields managed to let them get off scot free, and indeed it doesnt appear anyone nationwide has been interested in learning the lessons they should from those failures.
I suspect that what you think of as errors were intended policy actually.
Possibly. I don't think there was a premeditated effort to let antifa and white nationalist have an all out street brawl, but that was the effect of the poor staging and deployment of officers.
There was apparently a widely held belief among those in local government that the best approach to riots was to allow them to burn themselves out. This was what we saw in Kenosha, where officials ordered police to establish a perimeter to contain the riot, but not to actually charge in and break it up. The same thing happened in my own city. There was daylight mass organized looting of the mall -- already closed due to COVID -- and police stood by a block away and just let it continue.
I mean, but this wasn't one protest. It was a protest with a counterprotest. Best practices has always been to keep them separated to avoid violence. They essentially let the brownshirts and communists have at it.
I think the covert agenda was to provoke an altercation where at least one protester is compelled to fire a deadly shot, thus producing one or more tragic and heroic liberal martyrs for the mainstream media to then sanctify.
Charlottesville PD thinks that deeply leftist in its agenda? Seems dubious.
Not Charlottesville PD, but the officials who were controlling it. The governor, the city mayor, the deputy mayor etc.
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At the time I felt like this was a railroading of justice. The case progressed to so fast given the conflicting evidence. It's as if they wanted to make an example of him.
The sentence and hate crime conviction rather demonstrate that.
Sort of an interesting contrast to the usual narrative that you get light sentencing for killing someone with a car: both Fields and Darrell Brooks (the Waukesha parade attack guy) got sentences centuries longer than the 1992 WTC bombers. Car-based terrorism seems to accrue more charges and sentences than other forms.
The intent might be disuassive, since it's terrorism that's within easy reach of almost everyone.
Viz. the "trucks of peace" driving into Christmas markets and such, in European cities. IIRC there have been at least a dozen of those over the past decades.
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Have you since changed your mind?
no, because I haven't looked into the case since then
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Solid and fact-based post.
IMO the error of the Charlottesville protest was all optics. As the White undergrad admissions rate at UVa decreases by 7.5 points per decade, there are only 60 years until there are 0 White undergrads at UVa, or at least a South Africa style pittance alloted to the dispossessed kin of Jefferson. A protest against replacement is a no-brainer if your interest is to increase the wellbeing of your group. (Were you a Tibetan, a
wiggerUyghur, or a Kurd, this activity would be amply funded by USAID). If you want to signal strength, ie with a torchlit march, you need control of every single camera in the vicinity. You should have hand-selected thirty people and gone somewhere private and just made it seem like it was a big march. The point of this, I suppose, would be to recruit members. Of course the media would be there and find the ugliest person saying the dumbest thing and link that to your movement. This is 101 stuff. And you didn’t actually want to signal strength anyway, you wanted to signal victimhood. You needed to show a White Virginian having to work at a slaughterhouse surrounded by Hondurans who don’t speak English, and then show a random Muslim from Pakistan getting a scholarship to UVa with a clear look of superiority on his face. Then you had to send those flyers to wealthy Virginians, and do such things hundreds or thousands of times, and then do like fifty other things, and then you get to do a public torchlit march. The ancient victory triumph is the last of the things you do, not the first thing you do.I ask you to consider that the rally, despite its name, was specifically organized to protest the planned removal of General Lee’s statue. This is the starting point that needs to be considered first.
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Wealthy Virginians have 0 sympathy for West Virginian slaughterhouse workers.
Yes, that’s why you have to present them with these stories hundreds or thousands of times.
I can't speak for wealthy Virginians explicitly (although Albion's Seed logic suggests they are similar), but traditional elites in the UK have always favoured well-behaved foreigners over our native working class*. Seeing the story hundreds of times just confirms the obvious moral and intellectual superiority of the kind of immigrant who sends their kids to UVA over West Virginian slaughterhouse workers.
* Traditional English left-populism, now defunct, said that this is because the traditional elite were Norman settler-colonialists for whom the native working class were foreigners.
That’s a post-1960s change. It shouldn’t be difficult to find the opinion that the British had on other races in the 1800s. “Seeing the story hundreds of times just confirms the obvious moral and intellectual superiority” is not how stories of victimhood work. They induce feelings of compassion, care, and gradually in-group preference. This was behind BLM and even Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
As much as I despise dickens for what he did to English storytelling conventions, you really should check out the attitude he portrays the British elite holding towards their social lessers.
But Dickens was a hugely popular author! He did portray these attitudes, mostly as being from a past age, and thus created and rode a huge wave of public sympathy for the British poor.
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No 19th century Brit, no matter how much he had pride in his social class, would have preferred a Mohammedan Pakistani or a Heathen Indian (as they would have called them) to take the place of their own race in their own universities en masse. This would have been unthinkable to them. Read about how Kipling didn’t want White blood wasted trying to civilize them. Or look at Mulready’s paintings which were specifically designed to make his viewers care about their own poor instead of foreign aid. Dickens literally wrote about his desire to exterminate the Indian race while he was writing those empathy-laden stories to inculcate love for the White poor in his novels
It’s not atypical of cultures which practice in-group preference to also have a class system. Everything is relative.
By around 1900, you did get the sons of rajahs attending English public schools and universities. I'm pretty sure there was still no room for non-noble Indians though.
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The rich have always been very class conscious.
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Good stuff. Despite all of the chaos, this case seems pretty cut and dry. I'd be interested in a similar re-examination of the Garrett Foster incident.
Foster was shot and killed by Daniel Perry in Austin, TX on 7/25/2020 during a Black Lives Matter protest. Here he is in an interview LARPing as a revolutionary before he was killed that night.
A photo was circulated showing that right before Foster was shot he'd mounted his rifle into the pocket of his shoulder, likely as a show of force, but not necessarily in a way that could have been considered an imminent threat.
Before the incident, Perry had apparently "made numerous posts and direct messages on social media expressing his desire to shoot protesters."
He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison; however, Greg Abbott pardoned him in 2024.
I think both the conviction and the pardon were reasonable, or at least plausible. Perry was clearly spoiling for a confrontation. But a man approaching the window with weapon at low ready is teetering on the edge of immediate risk. Foster assumed a cop-level authority to which he was not entitled.
It doesn't seem like justice to me that even someone "spoiling for a confrontation" and who "assumed a cop-level authority" must let himself be shot due to unsympathetic readers' assumptions about his inner world.
Foster was the one assuming too much authority. Cops can have their guns out when approaching your window. Everyone else should make it crystal clear you're not going to perform a street execution.
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Fields has a history of violence throughout his youth, had multiple posts on social media about the exact topic of wanting to drive through protestors, and pleaded guilty to the charges. There's not much strong argument to contest his guilt there.
But like, why should it matter? One person full of anger and violence doing something bad shouldn't invalidate all the peaceful people at the rally who didn't drive their cars into a crowd, regardless of what their political beliefs are.
Like what exactly are the participants supposed to do there? There's no way to ensure your messaging about the rally never gets seen by a violent criminal or psychopath. There's no way for the average participant to have known who Fields is and what he would do yet alone have been able to prevent it (like what, were they supposed to jump onto a moving car and pull him out of it or something?). But like, even if someone did have ESP and read Fields mind beforehand, what could they do? If the ESP guy physically intercepted Fields beforehand, the ESP guy would be the one charged with assault!
Humans are not a hive mind species, we can not read other people's thoughts and we can not just prevent people from doing what they want without using physical force ourselves. This isn't Minority Report.
This logic of collective blame where one person does something bad so everyone tangentially related to them is insane no matter what direction it goes. The other participants at Unite the Right are not responsible for Fields, in the same way that Jimmy Kimmel is not responsible for the ballroom shooting. People are accountable for their own actions.
Arguments otherwise are meaningless as Scott has pointed out before with the Ashley Todd mugging hoax.
...the protestors were driven but mostly peaceful?
We have very rough estimates but seems like they were peaceful overall!
I asked ChatGPT for Estimates and got
And Wikipedia lists
Ok we can exclude the state troopers because accidental clash. The car ramming was a single person, so that's +1 to the violent person tally. And let's assume that each of the 14 other clashes were all different people (although that's probably unlikely, crime and violence is largely by repeat offenders and someone getting into fights might be doing several), leaving 15 total violent people. And even if we assume all of the perpetrators were Unite protestors against taking down the confederate statue (which is unlikely all injuries were one sided) and we assume that none of them were accidents or misunderstandings (like maybe someone thought they were going to be hit so they pepper sprayed preemptively) too, that's still 15/500-600.
So yeah, even with the worst possible estimate to them, the large large majority seemed to be peaceful. I guess the tally could be a little higher if we say some injuries could be done by multiple perpetrators at once or forms of violence that didn't get included but idk even if we triple it that's still not even 1/10th. Most people are not violent and do not truly like violence. Even most of the people who will say edgy stuff online will never hurt a person in real life.
This is the same reason why I constantly say that Trump's pardons of cop beaters at Jan 6th was so messed up. The majority of participants were perfectly able to control themselves and not engage in violence, there is no cost (and argubly benefit by removing them from injuring your PR in the future!) in letting the violent people be punished. The pardons turned the violent protestors from something Trump wasn't responsible for and just a small portion of shitty people doing bad stuff, to something Trump can be held responsible for because pardoning it showed approval and permission of their violent behavior.
That number seems suspicious.
From my understanding injury tallies with things like this include the knock-on effects. So if you push someone and they knock down another person who gets injured when they fall and hit their head, you're held responsible for it. Or like when Fields knocked into the other car and pushed it around, whoever the other car hit counts.
35 is a little high, but he did ram his vehicle into a crowd, knock another car at an accelerated speed, which hit some people and apparently ended up hitting a third car in front of it (that went into a crowd itself). Then reversed down the street for multiple blocks, initially hitting a few more.
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Several of the rally organizers were successfully sued for civil conspiracy.
Anyways, most of those guys have fallen off the face of the earth. Richard Spencer has renounced white nationalism. It's hard to imagine a Unite the Right style rally being held in 2026. On the other hand you have Trump posting Obama's face on monkeys on social media, so who knows what the future holds.
Trump posted a recording of a social media meme, which at the end briefly autoplayed the next video (the infamous Lion King meme) before being cut off. Trump made the rare apology and deleted the post altogether.
This is going to be "fine people"d for years, isn't it?
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If they as individuals were guilty with what they were charged with and the law they were charged with was constitutional then there's no issue here. And generally I assume so, the criminal justice system is intentionally stacked towards letting people off per the founding fathers own philosophy regarding abusive government. It doesn't make lawfare impossible, but odds are heavily heavily towards you being guilty if you're found liable of a crime, yet alone if you can't get an appeal.
The US system is not perfect, but it's still one of the best in the world. Heck I'd rather have the most unfair and biased American prosecutor and judge against me than the most impartial Russian or North Korean ones. Because I know the American ones can get thrown away by the jury or at appeal. Meanwhile the North Korean one just does what Kim Jong Un says, he wants me dead then I'm dead regardless of guilt or what the general population believes of my innocence.
Emphasis added. This was a civil lawsuit and doesn't require the same burdens of proof as a criminal charge.
Oh yeah whoops guess I misread it because I was thinking in criminal terms. Personally I think a lot of civil lawsuits are more likely to be BS due to the lower evidentiary standard but also the consequences are a lot less serious so it does balance out somewhat at least. And at least civil lawsuits are normally between two private sides hashing out a personal dispute instead of government (backed with the monopoly of violence). It's not a coincidence though that lawfare and SLAPP suits is almost always in civil courts though.
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2016: We should Unite the Right!
2024: We have United the Right, sweeping all before us! Look at all these guys with us!
2026: ….yay?
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As someone who has attended a decent number of high risk demonstrations in Europe my take is that the unite the right rally was a failure of planning. First don't announce demonstrations far in advance. This gives time for antifa to mobilize. Antifa require a numerical advantage and their mobilization is slow. Demonstrations should only be announced when absolutely required.
Posting times and places is a major mistake. We used to apply for permits to demonstrate in one place and then go to another place and hold our rally there. We would be done before antifa had found our new spot.
The biggest mistake is assembling at the demonstration and then dispersing afterwards. Participants should never ever meet up on location but need to meetup somewhere far away and travel there in a group. Participants don't even need to know where they are going after assembling. Once the participants arrive on location the demonstration has to be efficient. Hanging around in the park while waiting for people was incompetent. Once people arrive on site the demonstration has to start within a minute.
The police tried to disperse the crowd forcing James Fields into the crowd of antifa by himself. At no point should he have done this. If the police push you towards antifa sit down and refuse to move. They can't physically force a thousand people to spread out one and one. The exit needs to be coordinated, and you can make deals with the police to leave as a group. Even with police dispersal leaving alone doesn't make sense. They should at least have left in small groups. The event is not over until hours later when everyone has safely returned. We often went home in groups making sure we would be a team of people at each house as antifa would ambush people as they came home.
The organizers of unite the right lacked the experience of groups like casa pound or generation identity and made beginner mistakes. They needed to learn by doing small scale street activism and building an activist culture. Instead they went straight for a mass event with predictable results.
The police love instigating fights and then arresting people for them. Antifa can throw things at a demonstration and then demonstrators get arrested for throwing things back. The police are not the demonstrators friend and they often have dirty tricks like forcing demonstrations into bad terrain, pushing demonstrations into tight spaces, holding people for long periods in bad weather and letting antifa get really close.
As for James Fields people react differently under riot like situations. A riot is surreal and the closest thing you can experience to a medieval battle. Especially inexperienced people need to have others around them to take care of them. He also needed a reliable lawyer available for advice from day one. This should have been provided by the organizers. Demonstrators need to be properly coached on what they can and can't do and how to handle arrests.
I'll repeat another point I made here earlier.
Nobody ever brings up the Pikeville rally, which happened a few months earlier, with pretty much the same political groups present on both sides. Which is understandable, because nobody remembers it. Down the memory hole it went, because there were no deaths, no altercations, no incidents at all. You know why? Because the riot police was deployed, and was actually ordered to do the one job they should have, which is separating groups of violent protesters from one another. Which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the political reality of the Charlottesville rally. I think the main takeaway is that such protests are preferably to be organized at locations where the local political leadership is non-RINO Republican, because only they can be counted on to treat the protestors and antifa equally.
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You are basically saying anyone antifa dislikes only gets limited free speech. Changing locations at the last minute means less of your people show up and organize. Etc etc. This ends up making you look like Patriot Front and it makes you look cringe. The point of public protest is to recruit new members thru speech. You can’t do that under the operations you describe.
This is also obviously why ICE wears masks. Anyone whose a target needs to take extra operational security.
The way to do this is to send grannies to a public rally to peacefully protest as Antifa does Antifa things while the secret rally shows up like the cavalry defending the abused grannies. Get it right and Antifa looks like impotent bullies.
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To be fair patriot front hasn't had the same issues with violence. They are able to do street activism without mayhem. Their uniforms are cringe and they should change their outfits but other than that they seem to be better organized than previous groups.
I do think demonstrations still can work. They can get a lot of attention, they still attract newcomers and plenty of people who were activists on the street 15 years ago are now podcasters, internet activists and donors to political parties.
With that said it would of course be easier without repression.
Patriot front are feds, they've been caught getting personal escorts protection from local PDs. They are not only cringe, they glow.
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