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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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