Three people lost their lives because of the violence in Charlottesville, VA; Heather Heyer and troopers Jay Cullen and Berke Bates. Heyer died from injuries received when she was struck by a vehilce allegedly driven by James Alex Fields. Cullen and Bates died in a helicopter crash while participating in event assessment.
None of this had to happen. It was allowed to happen. Someone wanted this to happen.
White Supremacist Jason Kessler of the group “Unite the Right” was the organizer of the rally. He had been granted a permit to hold the rally in Emancipation Park near the statue of Robert E. Lee. The city of Charlottesville canceled the permit and tried to move the event to another park allegedly for safety reasons. The ACLU sued the city and won an injunction staying the move on the basis that the city was moving the rally based on Kessler’s racist ideas.
The injunction was filed early Friday by civil rights organizations American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and the Albemarle County-based Rutherford Institute.
“Based on the current record, the court concludes that Kessler has shown that he will likely prove that the decision to revoke his permit was based on the content of his speech,” Conrad wrote. “Kessler’s assertion in this regard is supported by the fact that the city solely revoked his permit but left in place the permits issued to counter-protestors.”
Conrad said information presented at the hearing indicated the city’s decision was “based on the content of his speech” rather than public safety factors.
“This conclusion is bolstered by other evidence, including communications on social media indicating that members of City Council oppose Kessler’s political viewpoint,” Conrad wrote. “At this stage of the proceedings, the evidence cited by Kessler supports the conclusion that the city’s decision constitutes a content-based restriction of speech.”
This clearly pissed off the Mayor- and the Governor. They were so pissed off that they were going to prove that violence was going to flare up. How does one virtually guarantee violence?
Order your police to stand down- and that’s exactly what happened.
There was nothing haphazard about the violence that erupted today in this bucolic town in Virginia’s heartland. At about 10 a.m. today, at one of countless such confrontations, an angry mob of white supremacists formed a battle line across from a group of counter-protesters, many of them older and gray-haired, who had gathered near a church parking lot. On command from their leader, the young men charged and pummeled their ideological foes with abandon. One woman was hurled to the pavement, and the blood from her bruised head was instantly visible.
Standing nearby, an assortment of Virginia State Police troopers and Charlottesville police wearing protective gear watched silently from behind an array of metal barricades — and did nothing.
It was a scene that played out over and over in Charlottesville as law enforcement confronted the largest public gathering of white supremacists in decades. We walked the streets beginning in the early morning hours and repeatedly witnessed instances in which authorities took a largely laissez faire approach, allowing white supremacists and counter-protesters to physically battle.
Never mind that city officials promised to maintain control of the situation.
Violence breaking out was predictable to probably everyone on Earth as these groups of idiots were allowed to taunt and converge each other. So either the Mayor Michael Signer and Governor Terry McAuliffe (yeah that Terry McAuliffe) are either stupid beyond imagination or they got what they wanted. To wit, the words of City Attorney S. Craig Brown before the rally:
The key to preventing violence is to keep the sides apart and it is easier to keep the sides separate at McIntire because it is bigger.
They knew. They knew what was going to happen and they knew how to prevent it. It gets worse.
Almost at first contact, Charlottesville mayor Michael Signer and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and cancelled the demonstrators’ permits, whereupon police began funneling the alt-right protestors away from the designated demonstration site—and, some reports have it, toward the counter-protestors. The carnage followed in short order. Whether the breakdown in police protection was purposeful—that is, intended to quash a constitutionally protected demonstration and provoke a violent confrontation—is a question unlikely to be pursued in Virginia’s present political environment. As partisan eye-gougers go, Governor McAuliffe, a Democrat, is near the top of the list; Mayor Signer, also a Democrat, seems to be cut from the same cloth. (emphasis mine)
Yes they knew and they were determined not to stop the violence:
Indeed, the Virginia ACLU reported that police were refusing to intervene unless specifically ordered to do so.
“There was no police presence,” Brittany Caine-Conley, a minister-in-training at Charlottesville’s Sojourners United Church of Christ, told the New York Times. “We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park, watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other.”
Terry McAuliffe was all full of outrage after the violence began:
“Go home,” the Democrat told right-wing groups in the city. “You are not wanted in this great commonwealth. Shame on you.”
He told the right wing groups to leave but was fine with the violence from the antifa. They were welcome to stay. The antifa apparently fall under the aegis of the DNC as the Governor refuses to condemn their violence.
Former LA Federal Prosecutor Miriam Krinsky was three thousand miles away and knew what to do to prevent this:
Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who has worked on police reform efforts in Los Angeles, said it was too early to assess the law enforcement response in Charlottesville.
But she said a strategy of disengagement generally works to embolden unruly crowds.
“If things start to escalate and there’s no response, it can very quickly get out of control,” she said. “Individuals can and will get hurt.”
But an overly forceful response, she said, can also make the situation worse. Krinsky said attempts to seize weapons might have led to more clashes between police and protesters. “Trying to take things away from people is unlikely to be a calming influence,” she told ProPublica.
A good strategy, she said, is to make clashes less likely by separating the two sides physically, with officers forming a barrier between them. “Create a human barrier so the flash points are reduced as quickly as possible,” she said.
Everyone and anyone with half a brain knew what needed to be done, but it wasn’t done. And that makes it sound very much like what happened was the plan. Listen to the moronic Mayor of Charlottesville try to put the blame on Donald Trump:
“You said you placed blame for these terrifying events, ‘right at the doorstep of the White House and the people around the president,’” Tapper said. “That’s a very strong charge to level. Why do you think the president himself bears responsibility?”
“Well, look at the campaign he ran,” Signer responded.
Signer pointed to Trump’s “courting” of “white supremacists, white nationalists and anti-Semitic groups” as well as “his repeated failure to step up, condemn, denounce, silence and put to bed all of those different efforts just like what we saw yesterday.”
And the clincher:
“The country is going to move ahead,” Signer told Tapper. “This is going to be a turning point for our country to overcome this stuff, just like we’ve overcome these challenges in our past.”
This is going to be a turning point. It was all part of the plan. The Mayor and the Governor let the violence play out to score political points against Trump. The DOJ has rightly launched a civil rights investigation into the Charlottesville violence. Hopefully part of that will be investigating why the police and National Guard were not allowed to prevent the worst of it.
And who ordered them to stand down.
James Alex Fields deserves all the punishment that can be brought down upon him, but he’s not the only one who should be punished.
Why did the city of Charlottesville, and the state of Virginia, suspend the First Amendment for Saturday’s calamitous “Unite the Right” rally? And would the outcome have been different—one protester dead in a deliberate car-ramming, two state troopers killed in a demonstration-related helicopter accident, and a nation’s confidence in its institutions severely shaken once again—had the authorities vigorously defended all parties’ constitutional right to free expression?
It has been said that “democracy dies in darkness.” So does the Constitution.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.