A few things you should know about the Charlottesville attack…

by The Right Scoop

I was out and about this weekend so I wasn’t paying attention to the events that unfolded this weekend with a keen eye. I mostly just read headlines and missed out on some of the particulars. In case there are some of you like me still, I thought I’d post something I read late last night before going to bed from Ben Shapiro.

First, the violence that occurred was between the Antifa group, alt-right White Supremacists and other counter protesters. Here’s a brief overview of what happened:

Supporters gathered in Emancipation Park Saturday morning in anticipation of a noon rally held by “Unite the Right.” The aim of the rally was to protest the removal of a statue honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The park was formerly known as Lee Park.

This followed a protests and clashes that occurred the night before:

The rally followed a night of torch-wielding white supremacists clashing with counter-protesters at the University of Virginia. Chants of “You will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil!” were met with shouts of “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!”

Reuters and a number of local reports put the number of protesters Friday in the hundreds. The Washington Post reported that the march lasted between 15 and 20 minutes.

Back to Saturday…

The CPD estimated between 2,000 and 6,000 people were expected to attend the “Unite the Right” rally, according to local paper The Daily Progress. The controversial event was seeking to unify the far-right wing and “affirm the right of Southerners and white people to organize for their interests,” according to its Facebook page.

The rally had been declared an unlawful assembly:

State police and members of the Virginia National Guard surrounded the park after McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and the city of Charlottesville declared the alt-right protest an unlawful assembly — effectively cancelling the demonstration before its planned start time.

Of course, violence broke out. The man that drove his dodge challenger into a crowd of Antifa and other counter protesters, as you all likely know by now, is alleged to be a white supremacist:

Here’s what he’s being charged with:

Police officials said Fields would be charged with one count of second degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and one count of hit and run. In addition, the FBI announced Saturday night it would open a civil rights investigation into the circumstances of the death.

All in all, 35 people were injured in the clashes and one protester died.

As I said above, I read a great article by Ben Shapiro and wanted to post a few things from it regarding the violence in Charlottesville and all the ‘hot takes’, as he calls them.

1. The Alt-Right Is Not Conservative. One of the hottest takes from the Left is that the alt-right represents the entire right — that what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia represented conservatives broadly. That’s factually incorrect, and intellectually dishonest. The alt-right is not just conservatives who like memes or who dislike Paul Ryan. The alt-right is a philosophy of white supremacy and white nationalism espoused by the likes of Vox Day, Richard Spencer, and Jared Taylor.

They openly acknowledge their antipathy for the Constitution and conservatism; they believe that strong centralized government is necessary to preserve “white civilization.” They label all their enemies “cucks” — men in favor of “race-mixing.”

2. The Alt-Right Has Successfully Created The Impression There Are Lots Of Them. There Aren’t. Thanks to the hard work of alt-right apologists like Milo Yiannopoulos, the widespread perception has been created that the alt-right is a movement on the rise, with a fast-increasing number of devotees. The media have glommed onto the alt-right in order to smear the entire conservative movement with it. The alt-right is quite active online — according to the Anti-Defamation League, I was their top journalistic target in 2016, and I received nearly 8,000 anti-Semitic tweets during the election cycle — but they aren’t particularly large. They fill up comments sections at sites like Breitbart, and they email spam, and they prank call people, and they live on 4chan boards, but the vast majority of alt-right anti-Semitic tweets came from just 1,600 accounts.

3. The Alt-Right Has Been Tut-Tutted By President Trump And His Advisors For Over A Year. Yesterday Was Nothing New. President Trump’s initial response to the attack in Charlottesville made no mention of the alt-right or white supremacy or even of racism. He simply stated, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides. It has been going on for a long time in our country — not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. It has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America.” Trump, who has been fully willing to call out radical Islam, had nothing to say about the alt-right. Some Trump defenders point out that Barack Obama never condemned Black Lives Matter in the wake of riots and shootings of police officers, either. But Obama was wrong, and his wrongness is not an excuse for Trump to sit by and do nothing.

On Sunday morning, the White House used an unnamed spokesperson to release a statement:

Why didn’t Trump just come out himself and say the same? Because he tut-tutted the alt-right throughout his presidential campaign. He refused point-blank to condemn the KKK during an infamous exchange with CNN’s Jake Tapper in March 2016. He refused to condemn the alt-right targeting Jewish journalists like Julia Ioffe in May. His chief campaign strategist, Steve Bannon, was head of Breitbart when Yiannopoulos wrote his screed, and openly stated that the site had become “the platform for the alt-right.” Sadly, Trump has shown willingness to accept support from any source, no matter how despicable.

6. The Left’s Malfeasance And Support For Violent Groups Like Antifa Grow The Alt-Right. Antifa was violent in Charlottesville. That’s not according to me; that’s according to Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times, who tweeted thusly:

She was forced to backtrack and suggest that the Antifa thugs weren’t “hate-filled” after online blowback. But Antifa has trafficked in hate and violence for over a year now — we all remember how they’ve been assaulting people asserting their free speech rights in Berkeley, and how they have been engaged in street fights with alt-righters in places like Sacramento.

This isn’t “whataboutism.” Nothing justifies the alt-right’s racist perspective or murderous violence by an alt-righter. But it would be factually incorrect to ignore Antifa’s continuing role in the violent incidents that have now spread across the country. Because the Marxists in Antifa try to shut down free speech, they drive foolish people into the morally incorrect binary decision of supporting the alt-right, rather than loudly rejecting the ideology and violence of both sides.

That’s only 4 out of seven. Please go read the rest.

I should note that Sessions said this morning that Trump may have more to say on the Charlottesville attack today:

Hopefully he will come out strongly against both the alt-right white supremacists as well as the Antifa groups. But he really needs to disavow these White Supremacists so that they know it, because right now they don’t.


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