Police Stories 4: Unite the Right

Part 11 of Welcome to Charlottesville, a weekly visit to a town, a failed art project, and the future of America.

Sep 18, 2024

August Is Coming

When the Klan fled town in July of 2017, no one was happy. Not the Klan certainly— except perhaps for relief in getting out alive. Not the local counter-protestors who felt harassed and maligned by their own police and government merely for defending their community against America’s archetypal ‘hate group.’ Not the police who felt harassed and maligned by their own citizens merely for doing what they saw was their professional duty to defend the Constitution. Not the rest of us townies who had gone to various public events encouraged by our government to show how much the Klan wouldn’t get to us, no way, we’re not even thinking about the Klan.

And looming on the horizon was the return of the Alt-Right, led by the fascist “Nationalist Front” who had come in May, and now had a permit to come back in August. In the light of the huge Klan event, many who didn’t pay much attention to the May rally were paying attention now.1

There was something about it all that was deeply unsettling. Is it really true that according to the political understanding of our times, anyone from anywhere in the country because of their right to free speech can come to our town and protest our plans and policies—plans and policies that do not affect them directly in any way—and our government has to issue them a permit (whatever that is), turn over our public spaces to their use, and provide them police protection at our expense? How can it be that a city in order to take down a statue from one of its parks has to provide a forum for anyone in the United States to come question the matter? And can opponents and critics come back over and over? The August event was going to be the fourth far-right rally in four months—What would prevent fascist protestors from coming every month or every week or every day until our streets were emptied, our businesses failed, and our local government bankrupt?

But none of us could seem to even articulate these questions, much less answer them. I couldn’t. Nor it seemed could anyone in public life: not our Police Chief Al Thomas, City Manager Maurice Jones, Mayor Mike Signer or other City Councilors, or City Attorneys. Nor any of the local civil liberties groups—the ACLU, Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, or Rutherford Institute—and no blogger, analyst, or public intellectual either. (At least not that I read.)

Even the activists who opposed the Alt-Right and Klan (who would soon be dubbed antifascists2) never seemed to make a case for the Alt-Right and Klan gatherings being illegal. Fascists simply had to be fought in the streets with all means—even unlawful means if necessary—or they might win as they had in Europe. Pensive centrists shook their heads at the unfairness of it all and traditionalist civil libertarians humble-bragged about it: Democracies, to be true to their own values, simply had to give the enemies of democracy a public forum to try and overthrow democracy. What else could be done?

As I said, many of us in Charlottesville were starting to sense there was something wrong with this, but who could say what it was?

One Permit

The Alt-Right was sure they knew what was wrong. Democracy was garbage. It just didn’t recognize the need for an explicit, enduring social order. The state needed a core identity, and the people owning that identity rightfully should own the state (Especially if it had been stolen). While most of the Alt-Right dreamed exclusively of a White Ethnostate, many would gladly settle for a state merely dominated by Whites (like the Confederacy or the Jim Crow South). A few favored an identity based more abstractly on Western Civilization, or a cultural version of Christianity. But all these people agreed that young men swapping frog memes and KEK jokes in the obscure corners of the internet would never create real fascism.3 Fascism had to be about blood and soil expressed through real violence: Actually people claiming a place by violently crushing their enemies in glorious public triumph.

National media-darling and figurehead of the Alt-Right label, Richard Spencer, hoped to make himself the leader of this new fascist movement. Local far-right-now-fascist blogger Jason Kessler just wanted revenge on a town that didn’t appreciate him. Spencer could bring an army and Kessler would be the Ephialtes of Trachis showing the way in. At the end of May Kessler had applied for a “Special Event Application Request” for…

an event he dubbed “Unite The Right” on social media. His permit described the event as a “free speech rally in support of the Lee Monument” and estimated that 400 participants would attend.4

Meanwhile… Me

Meanwhile I had interviews with local law enforcement conducted by Melissa Wender that were supposed to be used to make a play, but after the unpopular police actions surrounding the KKK rally, my fundraising efforts were absolutely dead, and I couldn’t figure out how to write the play now anyway. Reading an interview with a police officer all I could think was, Were you at the Klan rally? What did you do? How did you feel about how things went down?

In the storytelling classes I teach, we talk about perspective—having the distance from the material to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end. A play about the police in July couldn’t have that perspective because the public awareness of the Klan rally would make inclusion of that event necessary. We would almost have to conduct all the interviews again from scratch, and even then we wouldn’t have perspective till the current arc of history bent wherever it was going to bend.

Second Permit

In July a UVA professor Walt Heinecke filed a special events permit request to the City for a counter-protest.

The request described the event as an effort “to allow citizens of Charlottesville the ability to lawfully assemble and engage in free speech about unity and love and justice.” He… estimated that seventy-five to 100 participants would attend.

This permit was also approved.

Charlottesville has a city-manager form of government, meaning the elected City Council hires a city manager and police chief and these actually govern the city. In this case Maurice Jones and Chief Al Thomas were putting together plans for the coming event, and it’s noteworthy that after complaints about his handling of the Klan event Chief Thomas seemed considerably less friendly and open. As I said above neither they, nor anyone else that I heard, even considered that the event itself could be illegal (Free speech meant Kessler and the Alt-Right were entitled to hold an event in the park.) but Thomas and Jones stopped divulging their plans.

Meanwhile some of the City Councillors had an idea. Activists monitoring far-right message boards shared with the city that the Alt-Right was hoping for more than a thousand attendees—far more than the 400 on the permit—and with the expected hundreds of counter-protestors—based on the Klan counter-protest—the event might be much too large for a small city park. Moreover, the message boards also revealed the Alt-Right had absolutely no interest in statues or Robert E Lee or the Civil War (at least not the 19th century Civil War). None of that was discussed. There were no pamphlets or seminars.

Sure, they hoped that regular conservatives and Confederacy enthusiasts might come to beef up numbers, but the organizers were aiming to move fascist and far-right enthusiasts off the internet and build a huge, politically influential White Supremacist or White Separatist movement. Discussions were mostly how to bring weapons that would meet legal loopholes—like flags on poles whose maximum diameter was set to pass as flagpoles but be useful as clubs—for the hoped-for street battles.

Since many more people were coming than the permit claimed, since the statues were obviously not the point, and since violence was expected, Mike Signer and the other Councilors started looking into a legal means of moving the event to the much larger McIntyre Park, where protestors and counter-protestors could be kept at a safe distance. They told Kessler the event was to be moved and he sued with the help of the ACLU and other civil libertarian groups. Chief Thomas, whether he thought it was too late to change plans or whether her believed the downtown location would work better for his purposes, did not share all the intel in the legal process, and so the courts ruled the city didn’t have enough “credible evidence of a specific threat” to move the event. (Maybe they would have ruled that way anyway.)

Whether it was distractions from this, fatigue, or some other reason, unlike the July event, the city shared very little with the community. There was little outreach to local businesses, little messaging to the public at large, little explanation of what the city planned to do, or what they wanted us to do.

Three Catastrophes

UVA Police Failure

The night before the expected rally, the night of August 11th, hundreds of torch-carrying fascists marched in columns across the UVA campus chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” They converged on the statue of Thomas Jefferson in front of the Rotunda where a couple dozen counter-protestors had quickly gathered. The fascists surrounded the counter-protestors and escalated into pepper-spraying, swinging torches, and blows. Fortunately, the oil from the torches didn’t cause major burns, but several of the counter-protestors were injured. Despite being nearby the whole time, only after events were almost over did the University Police intercede.

UVA police had been informed about the march from many sources but Chief Mike Gibson did not alert the UVA community, didn’t ask for help from Charlottesville Police Department, did not intercede to protect the counter-protestors, and did not block or arrest the marchers for using lit torches despite it being explicitly against University rules.5

So the Alt-Right celebrated their greatest success. It was an improved version of the nighttime May 13th protest and they knew millions would see the images. Yes, 90% would be horrified at angry men inciting terror, but 10% would think inciting terror looked a lot cooler than hanging out on 4chan, and just as the May events had boosted their supporters by hundreds to thousands, they knew this could take them to tens of thousands.

Tomorrow the main event might even add that sixth zero. The world would see fascists with a new media-savvy label gathering in broad daylight, not skinheads or toothless hillbilly Klansman, but proud, fierce, and dominating a cowed liberal town.

But the Alt-Right made a fatal mistake. Maybe because of their antisemitism they really thought Jewish Mike Signer was in charge. Maybe because of their racism they assumed the black police chief and black city manager weren’t smart enough to break the rules. But they were in for a surprise.

Surprise

Saturday, August 12th, the former Lee Park with its massive Confederate general namesake was surrounded on three sides by barriers. Outside these stood police—Charlottesville Police and Virginia State Police—mostly in regular uniforms. The counter-protestors were on Market Street on the south side of the park. A group of men arrived in camouflage and carrying rifles. They called themselves the Pennsylvania Lightfoot Militia and formed a line along the Market Street sidewalk between the street and the park facing the street. These guys were photographed a lot and were often identified as part of the rally, but they thought of themselves as a neutral body there to assist with security. They had even contacted the CPD ahead of time to offer assistance. They were explicitly asked not to come, but came anyway.6

Other than those couple dozen militia there would be no barrier between the Alt-Right in the park and the counter-protestors on Market Street. Which meant, unlike the Klan rally in July, there was no way for fascist groups to enter the park without at least brushing up against their enemies.

Chief Thomas and presumably Jones planned simply to not separate the groups. They knew—civil-libertarian fantasies aside—the Alt-Right was coming to fight not speak, and they knew in July the counter-protestors had wanted to fight too, so if the police didn’t separate them fights would break out, and everything could be shut down as a public safety problem. I don’t know whether they decided on this from the beginning or whether it was a response to the Alt-Right’s surprise UVA march (not their jurisdiction but still they hadn’t been informed), but I’d guess it was planned all along which is why Thomas didn’t want the rally moved.

The plan worked like a charm. Fascist group after fascist group—Identity Evropa, League of the South, the Traditionalist Worker Party, Vanguard America, the Ku Klux Klan—marched up Market Street from the east and west and slammed into the counter-protestors at the corners of the park and couldn’t resist fighting as a point of pride.

The police watched all this and did absolutely nothing until the park was filled and the rally about to reach its start time. Then they were summoned to the north of the park to finally put on riot gear.

Then on cue the state declared an ‘Unlawful Assembly’ because of the violence, and the police formed a cordon and marched southward pushing the fascists—and the unfortunate dupes who had come to the rally thinking it really was going to be about Confederate statues—straight south into the counter-protestors. This lead to the worst fights and melees of the day, gunshots, the improvised flame thrower, and endless clouds of pepper spray, all of which the police still did nothing about.

The real question is why Thomas still didn’t protect Charlottesville citizens once his plan for shutting down the rally succeeded? Why did he order the Alt-Right pushed directly into the non-Alt-Right? Incompetence? Miscommunication? A pox-on-both-their-houses revenge for being criticized in July? It seems very much that American police often view left-wing counter-protestors as more troublesome than right-wing protestors, and my guess is—and it’s only a guess—that he disliked his own fellow citizens as much as these scum from out of town. He’d told his people to stay home and let the police handle things but they’d refused. Well, all right, see how you like not being protected. But again that’s just a guess.

Heather Heyer

Small groups of protestors and counter-protestors were drifting off in all directions, starting fights and giving chase. The militia was heading south across the mall when counter-protestors began to follow, moved by a rumor that the militia was intending to threaten Friendship Court (a public housing project which has a large African American population). When that didn’t happen the counter-protestors turned back again, meeting up with other counter-protestors on Water Street.

The mall has two traffic crossings, both of which had simple sawhorse barriers (probably so emergency and police vehicles could cross). The one officer posted at the 4th St crossing had already gotten spooked and left. And someone moved the sawhorse enough to let cars cross the mall on 4th Street. A van and a car had done that but had stopped at the Water Street intersection as the mass of counter-protestors passed.

At that point Alex Fields from Ohio, who had marched with Vanguard America, turned his Dodge onto 4th street, accelerated, and plunged into the vehicle in front of him and the crowd surrounding. There were screams and sounds of metal smashing and humans thrown in the air. Then Fields jammed his car in reverse and squealed off backwards to Market Street his front bumper dragging on the brick street with enraged victims and bystanders chasing him. He was eventually arrested in Belmont.

Heather Heyer, one of the counter-protestors, was dead immediately.

In the only compassionate and competent government response of the day, Fire Department Chief Andrew Baxter had worked out an actual plan for violence of this kind. With the help of medic volunteers7 Charlottesville rescue units triaged, treated, and transported twenty patients from the scene in under thirty minutes. Several of them could have died without an effective response.

All this was caught on cellphone cameras whose images would be the end of the Alt-Right.

Three Reactions

Me

My wife was out of town with a friend on the 12th, so I was on childcare duty watching with my six-year old. Or pretending to, with a fake parent smile to hide my concerns, while I secretly monitored videos of what was happening, checked social media, and read Alt-Right websites. My kid knew something was going on outside and I was trying to figure out what to tell her that would give her understanding of the problems of the world without undermining the sense of security she would need to navigate them. I’d step outside and look up and down the road wanting to head downtown, but what would I even do—Drink? Gawk? Take cellphone photos?

Around the time my wife came home I did walk to the mall through debris and strange drifting people. Then we learned one of Ellie’s preschool teachers was one of injured on Water Street. Her legs were crushed. (Eventually she recovered.)

Then for weeks Charlottesville was all over the national news and entertainment channels, presented in a way that was sympathetic but often unrecognizable.8 It moved me that there were vigils around the world for us. It moved me that when a conservative friend in North Carolina posted a preacher’s statement about the problems in Charlottesville being caused by God punishing liberalism, and I wrote him privately to ask him to take it, he apologized and did so immediately.

And I was moved by this: I’d planned to cancel a new storytelling class slated to start the day after the rally, but one of the students was part of the clergy who had been in the counter-protest and she wanted the class, so I ran it, and everyone came. We sat around a table in my second floor studio overlooking the debris-littered park with barricades out the windows and General Lee looking more morose than ever and my students shared true stories as they would if it hadn’t been the day after a woman was killed.

It was strange to read conspiracy claims that universally ignored the actual conspiracy: Chief Thomas and Maurice Jones simply let the Alt-Right and their opponents have at one another without police interceding and used the resulting violence to declare an ‘Unlawful Assembly.’ It was that easy to upend the postwar civil liberties consensus.

Trump

Unite the Right was the end of Donald Trump’s presidency as a productive enterprise. He couldn’t give a simple speech expressing condolences and it cost him his credibility among those who were not predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt. It wasn’t just the awkwardness of his famous “fine people on both sides” framing, which neglected to acknowledge that the death was entirely on one of those sides, but day after day he just kept digging:

You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent. . . . You had a lot of people in that [white nationalist] group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know — I don’t know if you know — they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit.
— President Trump, Aug. 15, 2017

Are these deliberate lies or delusions? I have no idea. But even when he tried to condemn White Supremacy he couldn’t give coherent reasons for that condemnation.

Biden

Joe Biden claims he decided to run for president after watching the events in Charlottesville on TV and seeing Donald Trump’s response to it. But strangely he was also not able to explain the problem other than “This is not who we are.” I believe Biden was genuinely disturbed but I got the sense he just doesn’t like an America where these kinds of awful spectacles happen (even though they have before), but cannot fathom why they happen or what to do about them other than get rid of Trump.

Which he and his campaign (with a lot of help) proceeded to do.

At least for a few years.

The Aftermath

Three weeks from now in the final chapter of Police Stories I’ll talk about the impact of Unite the Right on the police department and Charlottesville’s politics, and more importantly we’ll look into those questions of free speech, freedom of association, freedom of the press, protests, and permits—and begin to find some answers.

But before leaving Welcome to Charlottesville this week, I want to share a few impacts Unite the Right had on the wider world, and finish with a conclusion of sorts.

After UTR Confederate statues fell like dominoes. No city wanted Alt-Right and KKK protestors, so it was better just to take them down quickly and be done. I doubt Spencer cared but it’s ironic that Kessler’s event had such a negative impact on a cause that I think mattered to him.
Internet sleuths studied the video footage and did what Charlottesville and Virginia State Police didn’t do and began to dox the Alt-Right participants.
The internet and tech powers stripped the Alt-Right of their servers, message boards, tech platforms, funding mechanisms and everything else that they could touch. Their websites disappeared. For all practical purposes the Alt-Right incarnation of fascism ceased to exist. Only the Proud Boys, who had opted out of Unite the Right, lived on. But whatever hopes the far right powers-that-be had for angry men marching around they redirected toward other methods.

What makes me saddest about the Unite the Right protest is that so many of the good people who opposed it don’t seem to realize that they succeeded. It’s rare for political actions to matter, it’s rare for suffering or death to change anything, but the counter-protestors on August 12th brought down a savvy movement that was well-funded, well-organized, and rising in popularity and influence. The Alt-Right were mainstreaming a level of bigotry and violence that hasn’t been accomplished in a hundred years. Effectively eliminating the Alt-Right doesn’t end hate, bigotry, and violence forever, but it set fascism back on its heels, and as we’ll see in a few weeks, I believe these events open the door for a better way to understand our laws and freedoms.

Next week: Charlottesville history from the early 20th century up to the early 60s.

Thanks for reading Blame Cannon! This has been Part 8 of Welcome to Charlottesville. Here are the sections in order: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10. Here’s an index if you’re looking for a place to get started. New chapters come out every Tuesday.

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Blame Cannon