Heather Heyer, 32 year old, was murdered while protesting against hate. [1] She is a Greene County native and Graduated from William Monroe High School. Her mother (whom I will not name until she is ready) said “She died doing what was right. My heart is broken, but I am forever proud of her.”

She will truly be missed.

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 4 hours of anarchy in Charlottesville, through the eyes of 1 protester

Ross Mittiga is a Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia who researches the politics and ethics of climate change.

On Saturday, he watched as a car slammed into and killed a protester a few yards away from him in what appears to have been an act of white supremacist terrorism.

Mittiga’s wife was trying to take a photo of him when it happened.

“What happened this afternoon was an incredible tragedy that happened right in front of my eyes. I still can’t believe what I saw,” said Mittiga, who joined the protests against white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, Virginia, as a member of Charlottesville’s Democratic Socialists of America. “It was an act of domestic terrorism.”

On Friday night, hundreds of neo-Nazis amassed outside a church in Charlottesville carrying torches and, later, threatened and threw tear gas at student protesters protecting a campus monument of Thomas Jefferson. By Saturday, the neo-Nazis clashed and brawled with counter-protesters in feuds throughout Charlottesville’s typically quaint and quiet streets. (Vox’s Dara Lind and Libby Nelson have a broad overview of events here.)

Mittiga witnessed much of the action firsthand — from the neo-Nazis assembled outside the church, to scores of “Nazis dressed like Italian fascists” fighting with protesters, to the fatal crash itself. Below is a lightly edited transcript of his account of the last 24 hours.

A dramatic confrontation the night before

Since the KKK rally in June, a lot of people here have been busy organizing. Everybody knew August 12 was coming and that the white supremacists were going to have a rally much bigger than the July one. Our town racist, [white supremacist organizer] Jason Kessler, has been organizing this and then he got help from Richard Spencer; it’s been obvious that it was going to be huge. They’re both UVA grads, by the way.

So we knew this was happening. Yesterday, there was a big sermon at St. Paul’s church in preparation. I got there 20 minutes early and it was already standing room only, and there were a number of speakers from different faith groups, and the keynote speakers were Rev. Traci Blackmon and Cornel West. Her sermon focused on the David versus Goliath story, and she stressed that David takes the head off of Goliath — making the point we can’t settle for piecemeal success; we have to realize white supremacy isn’t isolated but is embedded in a larger ideology of imperialism and oppression. The overwhelming thrust of everything was that it was time for solidarity among the left.

Around 9:15pm, the church gathering started to break up. But then hundreds of white supremacists marched right outside the church. Everybody in the church was asked to remain inside. The Nazis came and made people essentially hostages in the church until they eventually marched away.

What they then did was go down UVA’s main lawn toward the Thomas Jefferson statute; student protesters headed them off, and they surrounded Thomas Jefferson’s statute to prevent the neo-Nazis from reaching it. The students wanted to say, “This is our space.” There are very moving pictures of these students being surrounded by neo-Nazis, and deeply unsettling video of them being physically attacked.

It sickens me they were attacked on their campus.

White supremacists, turned away from park, attack protesters in waves

This morning, at 5:30am, I went to join everyone at the First Baptist Church — an historically black church that has been around for over 150 years — and I went to the sunrise sermon. Cornell West’s speech was about courage and solidarity, and the need to confront the problem of white supremacy honestly. He even said at one point something like, “We’ll go out of here and risk our bodies, risk arrest, and risk getting shot.” We knew that armed militias were coming today. And that these risks might be borne out.

After the sermon, faith leaders, including Dr. West, led a march to Emancipation Park about one mile away from the church. Emancipation Park — which was named Robert E. Lee Park until about a month and a half ago — has a gigantic 20-30 foot statute of Robert E. Lee on a horse. That’s what kicked this whole thing off — the city council voting to remove that statute.

The clergy marched down there and set up a human link to try to keep racists out. But that’s where the white supremacists planned on going. They had planned to go to Emancipation Park, and when they arrived they found the human link. The clergy sang “let it shine” over the neo-Nazi shouts of “blood and soil.”

Eventually, hundreds and hundreds of white supremacists came walking or running or jumping down the streets, in successive waves. Sometimes they were dressed like Italian fascists; sometimes dressed like Donald Trump at a golf course, with white polo shirts and khaki pants and red “Make America Great Again” hats; some Nazis were saying, “Sieg Heil!;” and some were saying, “Heil Trump!” It was Nazis of all stripes — proud boys Nazis, and Nazis in camouflage fatigues, and then your normal KKK nazis. You’d see one group of Nazis, then another group of Nazis, and then another and another, and another.

There was the street and the sidewalk and the white supremacists basically had the street and the counter-protesters had the sidewalks. So the white supremacists would walk by, and as they did so they’d jeer or throw smoke bombs or take swings at people. Their numbers were unfathomable. You know how in Scooby Doo they’re chasing the perpetrator but they’re going in and out of different doors and reappearing? It had that surreal effect, because they’d face the street, go by and head right — and then there’d be different waves of them — and then an earlier wave would come back. It was completely bewildering.

There were couple times when there were real scares — when they’d throw a bunch of smoke-bombs and people would start choking, or when reports emerged that the nazis were throwing bottles full of urine at people. Eventually, we fell back to McGuffy Park and tried to figure out what to do.

The car crash

Then we heard that the white supremacists had decided to go to public housing to antagonize black residents in Friendship Court, a housing project here. We gathered together all the people in Justice Park, 300 plus people, and began marching down to Friendship Court.

Arriving at Friendship Court, there was a real feeling the Nazis had gone. We felt triumphant. But as we walked back toward the park we started thinking, “Where the hell are the police?” We kept saying that, “Isn’t it weird we’re walking down live streets and there are no cops — no cops whatsoever.”

This is where shit got really surreal. We saw another procession of Black Lives Matters protesters coming from the other direction and we joined it coming down Waters Street. We were in that march for a block and a half.

I had just taken a picture — I took a picture of my wife and the crowd. She took one of me. And then the other one she took just had everyone looking up because of what had happened.

And it sickens me to even say, but it was just a “Whoosh!” and then sirens and bodies flying and people screaming. There was chaos and then a woman vomited right in front of us.

A friend, fellow DSA-er in town, and progressive organizer, Michael Payne was right next to me the whole time. All of a sudden he wasn’t. The DSA marshals were screaming, “DSA get off the road! Get off the road! Get off the road!” There was this moment of fear — of “What did I just see? Is this going to happen again? Is there someone coming from behind us? Is someone coming from another car?”

What happened this afternoon was an incredible tragedy that happened right in front of my eyes; it was a horrible tragedy and I still can’t believe what I saw. It was an act of domestic terrorism. Dr. West cautioned everyone last night of the risks we faced going out to make a radical act of love and compassion, but we have to realize we’re dealing with people who are deeply sick and deeply disturbed. Everyone knew they were risking themselves in a risk of solidarity.

The real heroes of the last 24 hours were the students last night on the lawn, the clergy who linked themselves together against the fascists at Emancipation park, and the citizens of Charlottesville and from around the country who gave aid to those harmed in the terrorist attack before emergency services professionals arrived. I’m proud of our city, and all those who stood with us in solidarity today.

* Updated by Jeff Stein Aug 12, 2017, 9:30pm EDT:
https://www.vox.com/2017/8/12/16139328/charlottesville-protesters-riot-violence

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 Unite the Right, the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, explained

The alt-right rally was a coming-out party for resurgent white nationalism in America.

Hundreds of protesters descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday for a “Unite the Right” rally: a belated coming-out party for an emboldened white nationalist movement in the United States.

The rally was dispersed by police minutes after its scheduled start at noon, after clashes between rallygoers and counter-protesters, and after a torchlit pre-rally march Friday night descended into violence. But activity is ongoing, with some rallygoers engaging in a march instead.

It was perhaps a predictable culmination to the event — which has been a prime example of the difficulty of disentangling defenses of “free speech” from efforts to prevent violence, and the fine line between the self-described alt-right movement and more widely recognized forms of white nationalism.

Self-described “pro-white” activist Jason Kessler organized the rally to protest the planned removal of a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville. Kessler is affiliated with the alt-right movement that uses internet trolling tactics to argue against diversity and “identity politics” — part of a broader cultural backlash that helped elect Donald Trump.

But the rally quickly attracted other more traditional groups of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan.

The involvement of hate groups and the threat of violence led the city of Charlottesville to attempt to marginalize the rally for “hate speech,” but the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defended the demonstrators’ rights. The combination of rallygoers spoiling for a fight, and counter-protestors determined to convey that the rallygoers’ ideology was not welcome in America, allowed the violence to overshadow the speech — and eventually prevent the rally from going forward as planned.

Plans to remove a Confederate statue have made Charlottesville a hot spot for right-wing activism

Charlottesville, like many cities in the South, still has public spaces and monuments celebrating heroes of the Confederacy — many of which weren’t erected until the 20^th century, as the civil rights movement began to pick up steam and Jim Crow laws started to come under attack.

In the wake of the 2015 massacre of several worshipers at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston by a white supremacist, there’s been a renewed push to remove some of these Confederate monuments and rename streets and squares honoring the Confederacy. But where those campaigns have succeeded, there’s often been a backlash from conservatives concerned about attempts to erase history, Southerners who consider the Confederacy part of their “heritage,” and outright white nationalists.

In Charlottesville, advocates targeted a statue of Robert E. Lee in a park called Lee Square — City Council members pointed out that Lee had no connection to Charlottesville, implying that commemorating him was just an indirect way to celebrate the Confederacy, while a high-school student collected 600 signatures on a Change.org petition to rename the statue. (A counter-petition collected 2,000 signatures.)

In February, the city council voted to sell the statue and rename the park Emancipation Park. (The statue is still in place.)

The decision made the city a target for right-wing activism and shows of strength — and for activists keen to stand up to them and demonstrate that such ideas weren’t welcome. The Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Charlottesville in July, which was dwarfed by a massive counter-protest.

Meanwhile, Charlottesville resident Jason Kessler — a pro-white activist and a member of the Proud Boys, a loose collective of pro-Trump alt-rightists — put together the Unite the Right rally for Saturday, to be held at what event posters still call Lee Park. Speakers include some of the alt-right personalities who have flirted most openly with white nationalism, including Baked Alaska, an internet provocateur who was once the tour manager for fellow internet provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as self-identified white nationalists like Richard Spencer.

Political researcher Spencer Sunshine of the firm Political Research Associates told the Guardian’s Jason Wilson that while the rally was originally intended to attract a broad coalition of right-wing groups, it had become “increasingly Nazified” — with some primarily anti-government “patriot” groups refusing to sign on, and explicitly fascist groups like the National Socialist Movement getting on board instead.

And many supporters and attendees of the rally certainly had no problem using Nazi tropes to promote it, as this “fan art” poster shows:

According to the Charlottesville police affidavit put out before the rally, planned attendees included the Klan; the militia movement (a right-wing movement that gained traction in the 1990s, whose members include the activists who took over a federal nature reserve in early 2016); the “3%”, a right-wing anti-government movement; the Alt-Knights, an alt-right “fight club”; and others.

The Nazification of the alt-right

The arc of the Unite the Right rally — from an ostensible attempt to bring a broad coalition of conservative groups together to protest the controversial removal of a statue, to a “Nazified” rally for “the pro-white movement in America” — mirrors what’s been happening to the alt-right as a whole. The movement’s leaders have become increasingly willing to dabble in white-nationalist rhetoric and tropes, while attempting to avoid direct accusations of being themselves white nationalists.

The rise of the alt-right is one face of a broader backlash against “identity politics” and “political correctness,” which have left some white Americans feeling that they’re losing ground to nonwhites — or that America is losing its identity — and that political, economic, and media elites are either uninterested in defending their heritage or actively trying to eradicate it.

Among some younger, more internet-savvy people, hatred of “political correctness” has paired neatly with online troll culture, in which pushing boundaries and offending people is seen as harmless at worst and a show of cleverness at best.

In 2015 and 2016, the alt-right was an inescapable online presence, with some of its members crediting the movement’s “meme magic” with the unexpected popularity of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary and, later, the general election. With Trump’s election, some of its leaders have become more seriously engaged in politics, via pro-Trump organizations like the Proud Boys and the Alt-Knights.

Like Trump himself, alt-right leaders didn’t start out by explicitly aligning themselves with the sort of right-wing groups and movements that almost everyone in 2017 America is willing to agree are racist — like the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. But racist rhetoric has become a hallmark of the movement, from the use of “cuck” to deride anti-alt-right conservatives to Twitter harassment of Jewish journalists by photoshopping them into images of Nazi gas chambers.

That crosses the line into ideologies that most Americans agree are taboo. People may believe that Donald Trump supporters aren’t necessarily racists, but they are willing to agree that members of the Klan and Nazis are racists. Indeed, it’s a contrast with those groups that allows some people to draw the line between “real racism” and liberals “crying wolf” about racism. (This is true outside the alt-right as well — just look at pro-Trump commentator Jeffrey Lord, fired by CNN this week after tweeting “Sieg heil!” in what he claims was a joke.)

Many public figures and politicians on the left, center, and center-right have argued that the alt-right is defined by these actions — among many on the left, the term “alt-right” itself is an unacceptable euphemism that legitimizes an ideology that would be considered unacceptable if it were simply called white nationalism. Progressive writer Lindy West wrote in 2016 that the term “alt-right” was “an attempt to rebrand warmed-over Reconstruction-era white supremacy as a cool, new (and harmless!) internet fad.”

Instead of responding by deliberately distancing themselves from white nationalism, though, leaders of the alt-right have deliberately blurred the distinction. They’ve adopted memes and hand gestures (like the “okay” symbol) as an inside joke, because people outside the movement have mistaken them for white nationalist symbols. The attitude tends to be that if “the left” is going to see them as Nazis, they might as well encourage that conception.

But there are plenty of people whose Naziism isn’t ironic at all. And at an event like the Unite the Right rally, it’s impossible to tell the difference between someone who’s wearing a swastika pin or giving a Nazi salute “ironically” and someone who’s doing it in earnest. The people who claim they’re doing it “ironically” don’t appear to have any problem with that confusion.

The line between “protected speech” and violent street fighting is getting very blurry
As the movement behind the Unite the Right rally has become so closely intertwined with groups universally condemned as racist, the response to the rally has started to treat it as inherently illegitimate — as an attack on the rights of people of color, LGBTQ Americans, non-Christians, and immigrants to live and worship safely in the United States.

AirBnb shut down accounts of users who were seeking accommodations in Charlottesville for the rally, citing its “Community Commitment”: “those who are members of the Airbnb community accept people regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age."

And local governments have taken the initiative to shut down right-wing demonstrations before they happen — forcing them into the tricky position of deciding the line between protected free speech activity and physical violence waiting to happen.

In Portland in June, the city government attempted to revoke a permit for a pro-Trump “free speech” rally, but didn’t succeed — then dispersed the rally and a counter-protest when they descended into violence.

In Charlottesville, the city government attempted to move the Unite the Right rally out of downtown; the ACLU helped defend the rally, and a judge’s injunction Friday night allowed the original plan to remain in place. (Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, meanwhile, urged both would-be rallygoers and would-be counter-protesters to stay away from downtown Charlottesville Saturday.)

The problem is that while the law sees a clear distinction between speech and action when it comes to violence — a peaceful Nazi rally is protected by the First Amendment — many of the people attending do not.

The recent right-wing resurgence has fed a rise in an American “antifa” (short for “anti-fascist”) movement, dedicated to violent resistance of ideologies that it sees as inherently violent (or, in simpler terms, dedicated to punching Nazis). While the counter-protesters to Saturday’s Unite the Right rally planned peaceful resistance, some were prepared for self-defense; local activist Emily Gorecenski told the Guardian that she was carrying a gun because “The second amendment is one of the few civil rights I have left as a trans woman.”

And many rally participants, for their part, were more than willing to beat up counter-protesters — as was demonstrated during a related march Friday night on the campus of the University of Virginia, which devolved into a brawl when marchers assaulted counter-protesters around a statue of Thomas Jefferson.

After stepping in somewhat belatedly on Friday, police officers took an aggressive stand Saturday to prevent the rally from going forward as planned. Both the city of Charlottesville and the state of Virginia declared states of emergency Saturday, minutes before the scheduled start time of the rally (but after clashes had already begun). Shortly before noon, police assembled at the rally site and declared the assembly “unlawful” before the rally actually began, then moved immediately to disperse the crowd.

But it’s too late to keep the Unite the Right rally from becoming violent; to some, its concept was inherently violent, and few appear invested in stopping physical violence from erupting in its wake.

* Updated by Dara Linddara vox.com Aug 12, 2017, 1:05pm EDT:
https://www.vox.com/2017/8/12/16138246/charlottesville-nazi-rally-right-uva

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