Charlottesville

This Vice News piece has some really shocking footage.  We still don't know the full story, and perhaps the full story is actually unknowable. Another thing worth noting about Trump's press conference hissy-fit yesterday was that he made it clear he doesn't have any information the media doesn't have. That's either a lie and betrays a cover-up of what he does know, or it's frightening. 

That's a tangent, though. This video and all the evidence I've seen so far clearly does show at least two sides engaging in violence. Who "started" it? Was the violence of at least one side justified? I don't know. Another thing I can be fairly certain of is the alt-reich is ruled by fear (and anger but for me, anger is generally an expression of fear). As for the alt-reich nutbags complaining about being ruled an unlawful protest because of the actions of a handful of instigators, all I can say is wah-wah, you poor broflakes—I've been in a permitted protest ruled unlawful because of a few instigators. It happens. Get over it. 

And speaking of tangents, well, that's exactly what happened to us at the DNC free speech zone in 2000. My beef was not with the anarchists who refused to get down off the fence—I wouldn't have done it, but I didn't begrudge them their own protest. The police were right to call us all an unlawful protest, though. I was disappointed when they unplugged Ozomatli, glad to see them doing what they always do and "taking their message to the streets" (their words). My beef was the LAPD as we dispersed. And even more offense was the media praising them for averting a riot. The only riot that was threatening to start there was theirs. They broke up a genuinely non-violent protest. They told us to disperse and to use one particular exit from the zone. When we were "attempting to comply with their order," mounted police officers armed with tear gas and beanbag bullets chased us back in the exit they had told us to use. Fortunately I and my friends made it out of the other exit they had told us not to use and we managed to avoid any serious exposure to tear gas and any "non-lethal" bullets flying through the crowd. Did anyone fire "non-lethal" bullets at the Alt-Right broflakes in Charlottesville? I haven't heard any reports of it. Would they have fired back with lethal bullets? They certainly brag as though they would have. 

I do acknowledge that there are at least two sides to any fight except a few rare exceptions. (Most notable are Bull Connor vs. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Vietnamese government vs. the Buddhist monks.) This video clearly shows this is not one of those cases. Don't get me wrong, I'm still vehemently anti-confederacy and anti-Nazi. I still condemn Trump's message of "many sides" to this story, applaud his scripted comments on Monday, and condemn the organizers of this protest—which was, in their own words, "not a non-violent protest." (Well, maybe I'm paraphrasing, I don't especially want to watch the video again just to confirm that statement.) I also condemn anyone who *instigated* violence no matter what their justification for doing it. I haven't seen enough to know who instigated what, and I'm not especially interested in discussing opinions on that point. I invite my Republican friends to simply condemn that violence and white nationalism without trying to blame anyone else for it.