As everyone who cares now knows, the “Unite the Right” rally in
Charlottesville, Virginia that was held this past Saturday “turned violent.”
It “turned
violent” just as did so many of Donald Trump’s campaign rallies, the “free speech” rallies that have been held over
the last seven or so months, and Trump’s inauguration.
Of course,
it is only within the fantasyland of the Fake News media that any of these
rightist (or pseudo-rightist) events “turned violent.” The latter is one of the
many stock phrases that Fake Media trots out whenever it is leftist
“counter-demonstrators”—another of its terms of choice—crash the events in
question with every intention of stopping them by
whichever means necessary.
The
happenings that unfolded in Charlottesville on Saturday fall all too neatly
into a pattern stretching back for the better part of two years, a pattern that has become nearly an
ironclad law.
Listening
to the coverage of Charlottesville, one could be forgiven for thinking that
those in Big Media, whether “liberal” or “conservative,” were oblivious to the
existence of this phenomenon. Commentators struck the unprejudiced
observer as either scandalously ignorant or just as scandalously (but
predictably) dishonest. Particularly disappointing were
“conservative” commentators and showboating
politicians who appeared every bit as immersed in the Big Media
bubble that they accuse their “liberal” counterparts of inhabiting.
First,
while there were indeed some self-styled neo-Nazis that were present among the
rally’s attendees, they were, by all appearances, a tiny minority. And
they constituted a far smaller fraction of the totality of the group than, say,
that which on multiple occasions comprised the totality of Black Lives Matter
demonstrators that marched through busy city streets shouting such murderous
slogans as, “What do we want? Dead
cops! When do we want it? Now!” and “Pigs in a blanket, fry
them like bacon!”
Second,
the Charlottesville demonstrators organized their rally months in advance of
its occurrence. Their application for a permit to march was initially denied.
To its eternal credit, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a
left-leaning organization, came to the organizers’ defense and helped them to
appeal this decision. A federal judge eventually ruled that it was
illegal for the city of Charlottesville and the state of Virginia to prevent
people from exercising their Constitutional right to peacefully assemble.
And this is a crucial point: Those in attendance at
the “United the Right” rally did peacefully
assemble. They had speakers lined up to speak at Emancipation Park (formerly
known as Lee Park).
Hordes of “Anti-fascist” (Antifa) and “Black Lives Matter” agitators assembled to “bash
the fash.” As always, it is they who initiated the violence.
Even the Washington Post admits that it was the fear of leftist violence that provoked Governor Terry
McCauliffe’s State of Emergency. Yet it was this move legitimizing the “Heckler’s Veto” that rendered a lawful event
unlawful.
That’s when all hell broke loose.
Third, but
even then, it wasn’t the rally attendees whose rally was being sabotaged who
unleashed the violence. According to reports of those who were on the ground,
police turned violent upon some of those who, evidently
shocked upon hearing that before things even began they were ended, didn’t
leave the area as quickly as the officers—and their superiors—would have
preferred. The boys in blue sprayed mace at rally-goers and kicked them.
Then, the police, upon breaking up the group,
redirected them out of the park through the sea of Antifa and BLM terrorists
who proceeded to besiege them with an arsenal of weaponry, from bricks and
bottles filled with cement to baseball bats, bows and arrows, urine, feces,
bear mace, and—this is no lie—a “makeshift flame thrower from a spray can.”
A flamethrower.
Fourth, a life was indeed lost on Saturday. A
counter-demonstrator was killed when someone who was allegedly one of the
demonstrators plowed his car into a mob that had filled the street. The
suspect has since been identified as James Alex Fields, a 20 year-old white man
from Ohio. About 19 or so others were also injured.
This is the one event of the day on which the media have
fixated. No doubt, it was the most serious of events, given that a person
was killed. But insofar as it is abstracted and isolated from the context
of violence that, to repeat, the Antifa and BLMers had been unleashing long
before it happened, it is Fake News in the extreme, a tactic by which the day’s
violence can be dropped exclusively upon the shoulders of those who
exhaustively pursued legal measures to express themselves.
Confessedly,
when I initially heard that “counter-demonstrators” had been struck, I
immediately assumed that the motorist’s car was surrounded and his life
imminently imperiled. This was the most reasonable assumption given that
Antifa and BLM regularlyblock thoroughfares and subject to violence those who they regard as
“fascist” and “racist.”
If the
driver is guilty of malice, then, being the proponent of capital punishment
that I am, I submit that Fields will deserve nothing less than death for his
crime. Yet there is evidence that my initial suspicion is correct.
Although he is being blasted as a homicidal neo-Nazi, what we do know for sure
of Fields is that he was an active duty service member of the United
States Army. Until Saturday, he worked in law enforcement as a security
officer, and he has no history of violence.
And,
according to a writer for The Hill, those
Charlottesville police officers who she spoke with think that Fields may have
not acted with malice, but from fear for his life. Video seems to show a
pedestrian hitting Fields’ car with a bat.
The point, though, is that no one knows for sure, at this point,
all that happened.
Yet none of the moral exhibitionists who unleashed the tsunami
of denunciations of the “white supremacists” (there were some unsavory
characters in attendance, to be sure, but many present, and certainly the
event’s organizers, explicitly disavow this moniker), uttered a peep concerning
the brutality of those who started the violence.
Mike
Cernovich, a Jew who reportedly declined an invitation to speak at the
Charlottesville rally, reminded his
followers this weekend of when he attended a White House press briefing some
months back and called out leftist journalists for
refusing to disavow Antifa. They still refuse to do so.
Nor do they dare to wax indignant over the violence of BLM.
To those who object to any of my assertions, I challenge you to
present the video footage of “white supremacists” initiating violence against
the thousands of masked agitators who came to greet them with weapons. In
this day and age, when everyone has a camera, it shouldn’t be hard to find—if
it exists.
That there are plenty of reasons for objecting to both this
rally and the ideology that is associated with it is grist for another
mill. The purpose here is to establish that the consensus among the
“respectable” folks that “white supremacists” are responsible for the bloodshed
in Charlottesville while the “counter-demonstrators” are victims or bystanders
is a Gargantuan Lie that every lover of truth, decency, and, yes,
Constitutional liberty must expose for what it is.
Jack Kerwick
[send him mail]
received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple University. His area of
specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He is a professor of
philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com:
At the Intersection of Faith & Culture.
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