Charlottesville violence: white supremacist Unite the Right rally leads to state of emergency in Virginia

Weeks after the man who drove a car into a group of people protesting the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 was sentenced to life in prison by a federal court, he was sentenced to a second life sentence in Virginia.

On July 15, nearly two years after his actions killed one woman, Heather Heyer, and injured more than two dozen others, 22-year-old James A. Fields Jr. was sentenced to life in prison plus 419 years by a Virginia court. Fields has also been ordered to pay $480,000 in fines.

More than a year after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, four attendees have been arrested and charged with conspiracy for traveling to Virginia with the intent of promoting and committing violent acts in “furtherance of a riot,” federal officials in the state announced Tuesday.

The arrestees were Cole Evan White, Benjamin Drake Daley, Michael Paul Miselis, and Thomas Walter Gillen, all from Southern California. According to the charging documents, the four were members of the “Rise Above Movement,” an alt-right “fight club” of sorts, and had taken part in violent attacks on counterprotesters at Charlottesville. The government asserts that the four traveled from California to Virginia “with intent to incite a riot.”

I remember the first time I saw the strange, ominous Confederate flag waving from my neighbor’s door. I had moved to Matoaca, Virginia, from Illinois. I was seven years old.

From my bedroom window or front yard, I could look up to see the flag waving proudly from its post beside the door of the neighbors’ house across the street.

At last year’s Unite the Right rally, hundreds of members of the alt-right and white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, purportedly to defend a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, as it faced removal approved by the City Council. The event was supposed to be the alt-right’s zenith, coming into its own as a real political force with real political power — and, tangentially, grabbing the ear of the president.

The event began with a torchlit rally where attendees shouted, “You will not replace us!” (some replacing “you” with “Jews”). The next day, the event attracted a counterprotest, during which a self-avowed Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd, killing a young woman. Afterward, President Donald Trump famously remarked that there were “very fine people on both sides.” The events weren’t the high point of the alt-right but the beginning of the end of the alt-right’s real or imagined political effectiveness.

In the hours following the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in August of 2017, a short propaganda film called Don’t Be a Sucker, first produced in 1943 by the US Department of Defense and then re-released in 1947, went viral on the internet. And in the months since, it’s been repeatedly invoked on Twitter as a prescient harbinger of our current reality, 75 years after its creation.

Created as a warning against creeping fascism and racism in the United States, the movie illustrates the divide-and-conquer method employed by German Nazis. When the film was produced, the US had entered the ongoing war in Europe only two years earlier. Originally 20 minutes long, it was created by the Army Signal Corps to raise soldier morale, but an edited version was produced after the war and shown widely for educational purposes — including in cinemas.

The man charged with the murder of a young woman at last year’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been indicted on federal hate crime charges.

James A. Fields Jr., 21, drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors on August 12, 2017, at the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring more than a dozen others. The rally, organized by alt-right and white nationalist groups, was allegedly planned to protest the city’s plan to tear down Confederate monuments, including a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The event attracted white supremacists and alt-right activists from as far away as Washington State.

When Foreign Service officer Brennan Gilmore learned that there was going to be an alt-right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, he decided to attend as a counterprotester. What he didn’t realize is that his now-infamous video of a car driving into the crowd of counterprotesters would capture an American tragedy — and set him up as a target for death threats, hate mail, and doxxing.

“I am the center of these conspiracy theories that I’m behind the attacks in Charlottesville,” Gilmore told Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram. “The general outline of the conspiracy theory is there is a deep state that is trying to overthrow Donald Trump and I am an operative of it. Alex Jones and his conspiracy theory says I was paid $320,000 by George Soros to come to Charlottesville to orchestrate the event, and then to get on mainstream media and lie about what happened — which would undermine Trump’s administration.”

Last August, a far-right rally called “Unite the Right” took over the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, for two days. By the time police managed to clear the streets of protesters and the state of emergency had been lifted, 19 people had been injured (some seriously) and one woman, Heather Heyer, had been killed by a white supremacist who drove into a crowd of counterprotesters.

Now a group of Charlottesville residents are fighting back against the white nationalists who took over their city. And they’re going to court with money from a new nonprofit group and with the lawyer who argued — and won — a landmark marriage equality case before the Supreme Court.

A video shows a black man surrounded by white men donning racist symbols. The men hit him with weapons, and he falls to the ground. He is kicked. He stands up and attempts to flee, collapsing. But he finally gets away.

Yet while many of his attackers remain uncharged, he now has an arrest warrant in his name as a result of the clash, according to the Washington Post.

Less than two months after their “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, descended into racist violence that left one anti-racist protester dead, white nationalists and alt-right activists once again arrived in the city for a torch-lit, 10-minute demonstration at 7:30 pm on Saturday.

The protest at Emancipation Park — previously “Lee Park,” which contains a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that the city wants to remove but can’t pending legal action — included about 40 to 50 demonstrators, led by Richard Spencer, the white supremacist activist who takes credit for coining the term “alt-right.”

America’s latest conflict about race began with a mass shooting, a flag, and some statues.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist protesters descended onto the city earlier in August to protest the city’s plan to take down Confederate monuments, particularly the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The city responded to the protests on Wednesday by covering the monuments with a black tarp.

In response to recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, and their aftermath, the Alamo Drafthouse in Charlottesville — one of 22 American cities in which the chain has theaters — announced this week that it will be programming a film series called “Intolerable: Reflections of Bigotry and Hatred in Cinema.”

The series begins on September 5 in Charlottesville with a screening of the 1972 film Cabaret and will expand to Alamo theaters in Austin, Dallas, Denver, Ashburn, and San Francisco over the following weeks. Some screenings will be followed by (presumably moderated) discussions and have voter registration available on site, and the proceeds from their ticket sales will be donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups and extremists in the US.

More than a dozen charities have pulled their events from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in a continued backlash to how Trump responded to the fatal violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week.

Trump initially cast blame for the violence at a white supremacist rally on “many sides,” before he walked back his statement and condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis. But he subsequently doubled down on his first remarks, saying there were “very fine people on both sides.” Trump’s comments were so controversial that CEOs began to abandon his business councils, causing Trump to disband them, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle rushed to denounce his comments and issue their own rebukes of racism and other types of discrimination.

There is something strangely self-referential about President Donald Trump standing up to defend Confederate monuments across the country. Trump himself is a monument to our political past — an elderly culture warrior who ran promising to restore America to the greatness of yore; a candidate whose coalition of older, whiter voters would have been dominant in 1980 but is a weakening political force today; a president who symbolizes a power structure he can’t quite restore.

The Confederate memorials Trump defends were not raised in the aftermath of the Civil War to memorialize the fallen or comfort the vanquished. As this chart and report from the Southern Poverty Law Center shows, the two eras that saw the bulk of memorial building were the early 1900s and the civil rights era — the statues are monuments to white backlash politics, not to the wartime dead.

BOSTON — A small-scale free speech rally one week after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, was drowned out by thousands of protesters in Boston on August 19, ending relatively peacefully despite a few arrests.

On a hot and muggy Saturday, about 100 attendees at the Boston Free Speech rally were taunted and harassed by scores for holding the rally soon after the white supremacist and Nazi march in Charlottesville. And while the First Amendment-focused event was not meant to celebrate racism or bigotry, some participants — primarily rally speaker Kyle Chapman — promote those views.

Almost one year ago, a group of neo-Nazis marched alongside other white supremacists and far-right activists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The chants and visual tools they used — from swastikas to wooden shields to “blood and soil” chants — revived rhetoric and imagery that many in America believed to be entirely eradicated; so beyond the pale of common morality that no reasonable person could possibly seek to revive it.

That belief, and the complacency it engendered, was erroneous. If anything, the sheer taboo nature of Nazi imagery — how thoroughly outside the window of acceptable discourse it is — has, to its supporters, only added to its appeal. Its very transgressive nature has made it easy for propagandists to market it as “sexy” and “forbidden.”

Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer, wants nothing to do with President Donald Trump.

Bro, whose daughter was killed in a car attack by a Nazi sympathizer in Charlottesville, Virginia, brought up her lack of interest in talking to Trump on Friday’s Good Morning America. Asked if she had spoken to the president, Bro said:

Beloved Jewish novelists and married couple Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman are taking a stand against President Donald Trump in the wake of his response to last weekend’s white supremacist march in Charlottesville.

“Jews will not replace us,” the marchers chanted, some of them waving swastikas. They reportedly attacked counterprotesters by dousing them with pepper spray and lighter fluid and swinging lit torches at them. But Trump ultimately defended the marchers as people who were “very quietly protesting” and suggested that “many sides” were responsible for the violence. “What about the ‘alt-left’ that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?” he demanded.

Tina Fey returned to Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update desk on Thursday during the show’s latest primetime episode, this time ditching her classic anchor blazer for a University of Virginia sweatshirt to honor her alma mater and talk about how watching “evil forces” descend upon Charlottesville last weekend “broke [her] heart.”

Also, she stress-ate a whole lot of cake.

The debate over Confederate monuments has been framed by President Donald Trump — and some who share his views — as a fight between those who wish to preserve history and those who would “erase” it. But let us linger on what history we’ll be preserving as long as Confederate memorials stand.

The Confederate monuments in New Orleans; Charlottesville, Virginia; Durham, North Carolina, and elsewhere did not organically pop up like mushrooms. The installation of the 1,000-plus memorials across the US was the result of the orchestrated efforts of white Southerners and a few Northerners with clear political objectives: They tended to be erected at times when the South was fighting to resist political rights for black citizens. The preservation of these monuments has likewise reflected a clear political agenda.

After an image of Peter Cvjetanovic’s rage-filled face, illuminated by a tiki torch, was snapped at last Friday’s white nationalist march in Virginia and subsequently spread across the internet, Cvjetanovic talked to his local news station to defend himself and the cause he traveled to Charlottesville to support: the preservation of a public statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

“I came to this march for the message that white European culture has a right to be here just like every other culture,” the 20-year-old from Reno, Nevada, told Channel 2 News. “I do believe that the replacement of the statue will be the slow replacement of white heritage within the United States and the people who fought and defended and built their homeland.”

There were many horrible sights and sounds at the Charlottesville, Virginia, protests over the weekend, from Nazi and Ku Klux Klan iconography to chants of “Jews will not replace us” and the Nazi slogan “blood and soil.” But perhaps the most horrifying of all came after the protests were technically over, when a 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer sped his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. In just a few seconds, he killed a woman and injured at least 19 others.

For many Americans, the realization came as a shock. This wasn’t supposed to happen in 2017. But it’s true: America has a white supremacist problem.

Spotify is removing bands affiliated with the white power music scene from its catalog, the streaming music service announced on Wednesday. The move, first reported by Digital Music News, follows a growing trend in which tech companies — including GoDaddy, PayPal, and Apple — are publicly denying service to white supremacist and alt-right organizations, or distancing themselves from their content.

On Monday, Digital Music News writer Paul Resnikoff found 37 bands on Spotify with affiliations to neo-Nazi and white supremacist hate groups. Resnikoff looked them up on the streaming service after going back to a list originally curated by Southern Poverty Law Center in 2014, when it investigated the presence of bands on iTunes whose music featured racial supremacy–themed lyrics.

In the aftermath of the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia — and Donald Trump’s controversially tepid response — a surprising group has emerged as the self-proclaimed voice of public morality: corporations.

Members of Trump’s Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and his Strategy and Policy Forum, including the CEOs of companies like Blackstone and 3M, determined that Trump’s implicit association with white supremacists was bad for the nation — or at least, bad for business. They resigned from the advisory positions, prompting the president to eventually just shut the councils down completely.

President Donald Trump’s response to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked a tidal wave of criticism from journalists. During his August 15 press conference, Trump argued “many fine people” attended the white supremacist rally and suggested that “both sides” were equally responsible for the violence that broke out in the rally’s aftermath.

NBC’s Chuck Todd remarked that Trump’s comments “gave me the wrong kind of chills. Honestly, I’m a bit shaken from what I just heard.” CNN’s Jim Acosta suggested “we saw the president’s true colors today and I’m not sure they were red, white, and blue.” MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace called Trump a “disgrace,” arguing he’d “given safe harbor to Nazis, to white supremacists.”