Long-time readers of this blog know that Charlottesville is the Big City for us — the closest town of any meaningful size to Schloss Bodissey. Today’s events in the city preoccupied me all afternoon, which is why I haven’t been posting. The places shown in the videos and the photos are so familiar. In fact, Lee Park — now renamed “Emancipation Park” — is where I learned about “Visualizing Industrial Collapse” back in September 2005.
“Unite the Right” met up with Antifa and Black Lives Matter today on those same streets. The Nazis were out in full regalia, and so were the Communists — in addition to the Antifa flags in the photos, you can see a red flag with a golden hammer and sickle, left over from the glory days of the Soviet Union.
As the time for the rally in Lee Park approached, there was violence between the demonstrators and the counter-demonstrators on the nearby streets. There’s no way to tell based on the videos and photos, but I’d be willing to bet that the first blows came from Antifa, because that’s usually what happens. In any case, the police failed to keep the two groups apart, and the city decided to revoke the permit from the alt-right organizers, due to the threat of more violence. The Communists and the BLM didn’t need no stinkin’ permit, so they kept up with their marching and chanting. And some of the alt-rights hung around to fight with them.
Early this afternoon a man from Ohio named James Fields drove a car at high speed down 4th Street across the Downtown Mall and into a crowd of counter-protesters, ramming into the rear end of another car just before the intersection with Water Street. He then reversed back up 4th, turned into Market Street, and drove away, but was stopped by police and arrested.
One woman was killed and nineteen people were wounded during Mr. Fields’ vehicular rampage. He has been charged with 2nd degree murder, malicious wounding, leaving the scene, and several other crimes. He’s being held without bail in the Charlottesville jail until his arraignment in court on Monday.
All through the afternoon there was a lot of smoke and fumes from the fever swamps about today’s events, with at least one false ID of the perp and a frenzy of speculation. The smoke has cleared a bit now, given that the man who was arrested has been officially ID’d.
But there’s still a lot we don’t know. James Alex Fields Jr. could be Charlottesville’s Breivik. Or he could be something else entirely. It’s too early to tell.
To be continued…
News Sources:
- WINA, local radio station
- The Daily Progress (The local paper, lots of photos here — but be warned, some of them are graphic and disturbing)
- Richmond TV
- Local Fox TV
- The Washington Post
Gosh, my old working grounds. Used to eat lunch sometimes in Lee Park. Watch the old guys play chess and the pigeons poop on the General and his horse. I chose that venue because it was right next to the library, a fine edifice converted from the former post office. Back when they knew how to build public places. Its replacement, down the Rt 29 corridor, is a Soviet-looking hole.
When the B mentions the Mall, it’s C’ville’s pedestrian mall. Only two drive thru streets. It’s hoked up with cutesy, over-priced shops.
The Republic of Charlottesville (aka “Berkeley East” – it really does try) is a blue hole where old federal government workers retire and drive up the real estate market so that teachers and other minions can no longer afford to live there if their families don’t have old houses to pass on to them.
Those fed workers love it there what with their generous gummint pensions. And it’s only several hours from their old work haunts in the D.C. environs, so they can still visit old workmates in the deep bureaucracy.
It is also the town where my daughter, Shelagh, is buried. She told me once, very sincerely and vehemently, that if anything happened to her, she didn’t want to be buried in the country. “It’s sooo boring here, Mom…”
is there any Islam in Charlottesville today?
and BTW who was that “Charlotte”. I bet she was white.
so maybe city itself will be renamed after poor whoman killed yesterday?
frankly I’m speechless.
sa far as I can judge, BLM are incipient popular thugocracy based upon black urban nihilism, tribal barbarity and crime.
it is still hard to comprehend who are the “left” there, maybe some mentally challenged urban rainbow trash, creation of welfare, drugs, and relativist, “utopian egalitarian” indoctrination.
also, there is reality of about 30 years of so of disproportionate black on white violence, featured by intentional spectacular barbarity, and normalized by MSM silence and establishment cover ups.
also, the monument to the pro-slavery Confederate general in the centre of the city (in my view) isn’t good idea.
this is like Stalin or Hitler permanently standing on your head.
neither the idea to remove it completely. maybe one can leave bare pedestal and move that bombastic waycist decorum to history museum? not sure.
and then these Nazi people.
holding toy shields and real rifles.
seriously reckoning that one must be white to be good.
and then Trump, the straw of white people, el salvador – strange case of morally degraded, manipulated and manipulating, chaotic common sense truth teller.
this is mess.
I think the reason is ignorance and mediocrity in children education.
people, – send your kids to study physics, maths, chemistry, biomed and classics.
you won’t go out of this mess while being indifferent hamster, or evil hamster or shuttling between the two.
get out of animal kingdom…
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” the monument to the pro-slavery Confederate general in the centre of the city (in my view) isn’t good idea.this is like Stalin or Hitler permanently standing on your head.”
I disagree about getting rid of the statues. A war was fought. 600,000+ lost their lives. When a peace is finally managed, you do not get instant agreement from the losing side. They have a right to revere their heros. People like Lee are part of Southern heritage and not primarily figures known for their pro-slavery positions. Stalin and Hitler were monsters heading their own totalitarian movements. Lee was a General fighting for his people. He was caught up in an emblematic conflict of his times — he was not the cause of the conflict.
The Civil War was fought more than 150 years ago. No one today supports slavery of any kind. Moreover, no one living today was part of the slave society. The consequences of getting rid of these historical monuments, however simply revives resentments related to other race-related issues. What is to be gained by getting rid of Lee’s statue? Nothing — you won’t change history. What are the risks? The risks are creating an angry backlash that will do nothing but perpetuate racial antagonisms.
Remembering that a war was fought to get rid of slavery is important for both races. Wars have two sides and sometimes good men serve in the interests of a bad cause (bad in retrospect, but not seen as bad at the time.) I do think it is a big mistake to judge historical events by contemporary measures (especially since it increasingly looks like we don’t really know what we are doing either).
it is my feeling as well, that Civil war related monuments aren’t relevant today, except that they remind about racial hostility context.
then they shouldn’t dominate public space.
this is like endless Lenin monuments in former Soviet controlled states. In Eastern Europe they were all destroyed or placed in remote museum spaces.
despite also “history”, not 150, just 70-80 years old but anyway.
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Those ex-communist statues were put in place by occupying forces in Eastern Europe, they weren’t monuments to local men of substance or local heroes, they were monuments to foreign ideologues.
Countries like Poland are slowly getting rid of monuments to foreign communist soldiers and Russia complains but no Pole cares because they never wanted a monument to the people who enforced communism on them for half a century.
The secession of the Southern States was regional in nature, it’s motives not dissimilar to the founding fathers wanting to break with Britain. The only difference between the Civil War and the Revolutionary War is that the rebels won the Revolutionary War and they really only did so after the French got involved.
Well said. Revisionist history is always a mistake. And the iconoclasm won’t end with Lee – or with Jackson Park, a few blocks away. I’m sure it’s next on the hit list. Eventually, Washington will have to be excised, along with *his* monument.
Slave owners must be eradicated. A vast renaming of so many place names: towns, schools, etc. But only where the ignorant are regnant. In some school districts, history curricula have already cut out learning about the Declaration of Independence and its context…”not enough time. We have the Harriet Tubman stories to replace the dead white men”. Used to be that graduation requirements insisted on having an understanding of how our government works. Except it doesn’t work that way anymore. Between Executive Orders and judicial activism, there has been a huge change. Not to mention the legislative love of regulations, too many to count.
How about considering that these monuments are not to one dimensional slave owners, but are monuments to educated men who promoted Southern identity and who were the leaders of that generation, many of them risking their lives in war.
Much of the backlash against these monuments is recent, often because of a shift in the population. The same people complaining about the monuments though and what they represent are the same people who regard the police as fascist thugs and don’t have much time for the feelings of others outside their cloistered marxist circles.
Wasn’t there a helicopter covering the riot that went down 2 hours after the homicide?
No. It was a state police copter, carrying police to the demo. I’m fairly sure it went down before the car rampage.
Most of the media blamed the deaths on the rally though. The headlines were almost all the same, ‘two dead as a result of white nationalist rally’ or words to that effect.
Fox went as far to claim that the white nationalist rally resulted in three deaths as though the rally participants had gone on a rampage.
Zero coverage of the large number of antifa with helmets and baseball bats.
A few days before this, I was contemplating the effectiveness of street protests, whether from the Left or from the Right. I’ve concluded that those who conduct street protests are not out to change minds but are done because those protesting feel that their goals and values are under threat. Street protests can also backfire on the protestors, especially when the protestors become obnoxious or, worse, violent.
I don’t think that street protests are an effective tool in the promotion of a cause.
Personally, I would never unite in any effort with neo-nazis, the KKK nor racists. Some folks concerned with the same issues that I am, did decide to unite with them in Charlottesville. Don’t swim in dirty water, you’ll end up tainted. That said, Charlottesville is just another Demoncrat stronghold college town. Think of it as the Berkley of the Blue Ridge. Look at what the city governments and their police forces accomplished by allowing the Antifa folks to run amok in both cities. Here is a link to “Jesse James” After Action Report of the deadly day in Charlottesville. As Ol’ Remus says “Avoid crowds”. Trouble will find us all soon enough.
https://virginiafreemen.com/2017/08/12/charlottesville-aar/
Hello RM,
for the antifa your opinion does not matter.
As one antifa once told me, it does not matter if you are alt right, KKK or whatever – you are all brown, just different shades/stink of brown.
And it does not matter how often you distance yourself from the KKK – you are brown, only a different shade/stink of brown.
(And with brown the antifa means the solid endproduct that leaves the human body. Thats what we are for them.)
Alex, you just reminded me of something I read recently, but don’t remember where. It seems the gradations of blackness within the BLM is becoming more rigid. If you’re mixed race and thus have a lighter complexion, with more Indian or European or Asian (not UK’s silly “Asian”) features then you’re “privileged” and don’t belong in their group. Black is beautiful but now it’s “the blacker the better”.
New Orleans’ Creole society made these divisions many generations ago, to the detriment of blacker. And all-black colleges still do it. I’ll bet the latter are already splitting into segregated groups. It boils down to resentment and envy.
Spike Lee made an entire movie about light- vs. dark-skinned at all-black colleges.
Indeed he did, Florence. And it was very controversial. If you’ve been raised around black people, as I was, you know how important those distinctions were. And the Obamas provide an interesting case study.
He’s not actually black so much as ‘grey’- toned.
As a long-time reader of this blog I have never posted before, but I found this short article very interesting and wanted to share it. What I saw being reported in the news didn’t pass the smell test to me. Something didn’t seem right. Anyways here is one first hand account of what took place. It might provide some clarity.
https://virginiafreemen.com/2017/08/12/charlottesville-aar/
Sometimes a detail is significant, like in this report a reference to “protestors bussed in”. Bussed in from where? In how many busses? Paid for by whom? I’ll be reading the New York Time and watching MSNBC for their crack investigative reporters to get to the bottom of this.
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Charlottesville: Faith Goldy and & Stefan Molyneux
https://youtu.be/4UpF8H1Zjcw
Red Ice Websites Hacked
After the planned live stream of the events in Charlottesville, someone who REALLY hates us have targeted us in an extraordinary way.
https://youtu.be/uWF5i0qvf3Q
Independent investigative video journalist, George Webb, along with his ‘Bernie-Sanders-supporting crew’ (Jason Goodman, Trish Negron, & CrowdSourcetheTruth) are covering the Awan Brothers (Pakistani ISI) IT scandal in Congress. Now, how this relates to Charlottesville is through a remark made in the most recent video report:
Counterterrorism vs Anti-terrorism and Other Fun Word Plays (Aug 12 2017) (cued up to quote)
8:44
I have yet to locate the referenced WikiLeaks email mentioned above but will post a link when I come upon it.
Here’s where it gets interesting –
The Virginia ACLU tweeted:
FWIW, in case the tweet is deleted, here is a screen cap: image
Also…About the mayor of Charlottesville
Today’s comments from Mayor Signer CNN Video: “…blame lies at the doorstep of the White House”
*****
Via Reddit “Unite the right” is a Soros funded honeypot psy-op which employs the “Pied Piper” strategy to damage the Republican brand – this is what Creamer and Democracy partners have been up to.
I heard one on-the-spot national reporter–McElway on FNC–clearly identfy the anti-protestors as BLM and Antifa, who were armed and armored as fully as the “Nazis.” His identification and characterization went unheeded and unrepeated by the anchors throughout the day.
Whatever the outcome, suppressing history – the removal of statues of war heroes is one – won’t end well. Even though Lee fully surrendered at Appomattox, it wasn’t until 1975 that his posthumous citizenship was restored. Gerald Ford did it:
https://fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/speeches/750473.htm
The whole thing stinks to high heaven. Soon it will be the Washington Monument and Jefferson being attacked as slave owners. History must be inoffensive to whatever is the reigning feel-good of the moment.
Washington and Jefferson have already been attacked, in the MSM and in academia, and have been for years. And probably Columbus. Muslims as slave owners? Nope. Never happened. And they discovered America! That’s what’s being taught American children now.
“Charlottesville’s Breivik”? This is an odd comparison. Breivik methodically planned an attack the Norwegian government and their communist youth camp killing close to 80 people. This James Fields guy may have made his decision on an impulse after someone threw a rock at his car. “Charlottesville’s James Hodgkinson” might be a bit closer.
the guy murdered woman (the white one, BTW) and spoiled his own life.
one can do better if one wants to defend whites.
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A dark day all around. I received my masters degree from UVA in 1993 at the ripe old age of 48. First time I stepped foot on the campus was when we made the march down the lawn or whatever they call it.
I am no white nationalist and I don’t identify with David Duke and Richard Spencer. A torch light parade on the campus by these people was too reminiscent of the KKK.
That said, let’s don’t overlook the antics of ANTIFA.
We are so overdue for a 2nd American Revolution against the Left, high and low. Charlottesville means Americans can no longer peaceably assemble to voice their support for the “wrong” things. It’s just one aspect of the squeeze the Left is applying. Flash point will be the impeachment of Trump. I hope that event will lead to the watering of the Tree of Liberty.
Monticello was built with slave labor, who were beaten daily and forced to watch their womenfolk being raped nightly. Monticello should be burned to the ground, and the “antiques” should be distributed among the poor blacks. Massa Tom’s crypt should should be opened, sanitized by fire, and then pulverized.
Then Massa Tom’s “Academical Village” should be torn down and the bricks stockpiled to throw at anyone dares refer to him as “Mr Jefferson”.
Then we should burn down Mount Vernon, dynamite the Washington Monument(What a rush that would be!), and change the name of the Nation’s Capital to Lincoln,DC. Then we should bomb the campus of James Madison University, and finally we should burn down the home of James Monroe. I confess that my wife and I were married in the home of James Monroe in 1979 when it was decorated for Christmas. It was gorgeous! But we have to break a few eggs to make an omelette now and then don’t we?
(P.S. Maybe we should move Lee’s statue to the Campus of Washington and Lee University. Or burn them all down.)
Thank you, Judenlieber. I am sure you are quite familiar with Charlottesville and environs. Look on Rob Schilling’s page for a July 22nd post – someone found a car bumper-sticker, and it doesn’t say “Charlottesville is for Lovers”. I wonder how long before his/her car is bashed.
http://www.schillingshow.com/
Look at his sidebar on left for some relevant Virginia websites, e.g., “Bearing Drift”.
I’m confused. Were the Milo protests and battles in Berkley about preserving equal rights for all people in the US, or has it always been a neo Nazi movement in disguise? If it is a neo Nazi movement, then I could give a expletive if some Nazis get hurt. People need to consider wisely what causes they are willing to support. The Nazis are no better than the Antifa types.
One could say the same about the woman killed by the car in Charlottesville. Why should we care given the company she keeps. There was an entire article here recently about the need not to wash our hands of entire groups of people (in that case women) because of the vocal actions of a few. That well applies here too.
In as far as these MAGA rallies are concerned, they have attracted all sorts since Trump began his campaign. There will have been MAGA types at this latest rally though it seems to have been mostly the cartoon variety of disfunctionals with nazi helmets and long beards – always an odd combination, at least based on biased media coverage. The torch vigil (the night before?) was nice and kudos for the organisers of that.
Torch night was way too reminiscent of Nazi rallies in the 30’s (deliberately so if you ask me). The Roman salutes and the chant of “Blood and Soil” was all from 1930’s Germany. If they want to be Nazis, that’s fine with me, I just can’t get on board with them, because any form of giving control to a government means a loss of freedom for me. I don’t mind the rally, or the chants, but I don’t support their politics and never will. The left would be far better served by ignoring them, or engaging in a rhetorical response, rather than make martyrs of them. What both the far left and the far right seek to do is polarize everyone’s politics so that nothing but Communists and Nazis are left.