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What Happened in Charlottesville This Weekend
This is a preview from Monday’s Daily Shot newsletter. Subscribe here free of charge.
By now you’ve probably heard that something happened over the weekend in Charlottesville. We want to fill you in on the details. First, to clear up a common misunderstanding, this happened in Charlottesville, VA, not Charlotte, NC. While they’re both named after the same lady, they’re very different places. Charlottesville is near Monticello and it’s home to the University of Virginia.
So what happened? Some time ago, acting on a petition by a resident, the city council voted to change the name of a local park, then named after Robert E. Lee, to Emancipation Park, and to remove an enormous statue of Lee from that park.
This sparked a reaction from, among others, white nationalists. In May, Richard Spencer led a torch-light protest in the park. In July, the Ku Klux Klan protested the removal of the statue. Each time these groups were met with counter protesters. Police had to use tear gas to break up the July protest.
This weekend’s event was the third such rally. Billed as “Unite the Right,” it was planned to be the largest gathering of white supremacists in decades. It drew in Klansman, white nationalists, militia groups, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and so forth. The list of groups involved was a who’s who of white nationalists. And it also drew counter protesters, including Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
On Friday night, a group of white nationalists (numbering dozens up to a hundred, depending on who you ask) carrying tiki torches marched through the University of Virginia campus chanting things like “White lives matter,” “Blood and soil,” and “Jews will not replace us.” At the Rotunda, next to a statue of Thomas Jefferson, they were met by counter protesters, and fighting ensued.
Saturday morning, protesters and counter protesters gathered at Emancipation Park for the planned event at noon, but the city pulled the plug at 11 am and declared a state of emergency; the governor followed suit an hour later. There were an estimated 500 protesters and a thousand counter protesters and “street brawls” broke out. By 11:40, the Virginia State Police were trying to clear the scene with riot police.
Crowds were still around at 12:30 when a car intentionally plowed into a crowd of counter protesters. A local woman, 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and 19 others injured. The driver of the car, James Alex Fields of Ohio, was arrested for, among other things, second-degree murder.
That would be terrible enough, but that afternoon there were more deaths when a Virginia State Police Bell 407 helicopter on its way to the rally, crashed, killing two state troopers, H. Jay Cullen and Berke M.M. Bates.
On Saturday, President Trump addressed the situation. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.” (Emphasis added.) You can watch the video for yourself here.
Trump’s statement caused an uproar of its own. Not only the “on many sides” bit, but for refusing to call the car plowing into a crowd a terror attack. It’s not just Democrats attacking Trump for this. Several Republicans including Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Marco Rubio, and Cory Gardner have loudly criticized him.
On Sunday, the White House put out a clarification: “The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry and hatred. Of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, neo-Nazi and all extremist groups. He called for national unity and bringing all Americans together.”
So on top of the the fallout from Charlottesville itself, now the President has to deal with the fallout from his own statement.
This is a preview from Monday’s Daily Shot newsletter. Subscribe here free of charge.
Published in General
We let the Left off the hook for Jeremy Christian and even James Hodgkinson.
Hodgkinson was John Wilkes Booth. He tried to decapitate our elected government.
But mention him now , as I’ve done a few times since the Charlottesville incident, and you get blank stares.
Did anybody call that attack domestic terrorism? I’m asking, but I don’t think so.
Not blaming the Left has earned us on the Right a full frontal assault. Trump was driving that car! And we all bought the gas!
We shoulda played our cards when we were holding a good hand.
Remember the show War Horse on Broadway, how the horse puppets had black-clad human operators? The audience wasn’t supposed to see them, and we didn’t. That is the Antifa. They’re pulling all the strings, but we’re not supposed to see them, so we don’t.
I saw that this car ramming incident is now labeled an act of terror by DOJ.
If those were Soros funded, paid counter protesters wouldn’t this be like Ft Hood?
WORKPLACE VIOLENCE????
The Sunday statement from the White House should have read, “Hey, dummies, ‘on many sides’ includes the white supremacists.”
The outrage of Trump’s statement is fake. There is nothing he could have said that would have satisfied his critics. They are using a woman’s death for their own political convenience. I think it’s disgusting.
You would have thought better would come from the management of a “center-right” website. Sad.
The best thing for Trump and for us to say is “Ramming a car into protesters is a cowardly act of violence. We should ascertain all the facts and prosecute the perpetrators to the full extent of the law.”
Drawing parallels, equivocating (intentionally or not), and pointing out the hypocrisy of political opponents isn’t appropriate or productive right now.
We should show the country how we handle murderous brutes, foreign and domestic.
Looks like Elon Musk was right.
Remember the days when white supremacists would wear masks, and were found to be reprehensible and disgusting by everyone? Those were the days…
I agree. By the way, when are we scheduling the rally to destroy all memorials for Grand Kleagle Byrd?
I’m not sure using photoshopped images helps. Byrd was a member as a younger man, not in his later, Chancellor Palpatine years.
I was using the Dan Rather school of journalism rules … fake, but accurate. Chancellor Byrd, with the great assistance of the Washington Post, whitewashed his Klan days in his later, Palpatine years.