Posted on 08/15/2017 4:52:30 AM PDT by csvset
As an attendee of the Unite The Right rally and scheduled speaker, I have serious questions about the actions of Virginia police on Saturday. It appears that police created a dangerous situation which was entirely avoidable. I will explain in detail the facts of what happened
One does not need to support any of the positions of the alt-right to be concerned about what this means about the state of free speech in America.
This is Lee Park in Charlottesville, as it was laid out for Saturday’s rally. The red lines indicate the position of metal barriers. The rally had a legally issued permit, revoked by the city a week before but reinstated by a Federal judge the day before the rally. The barricade layout was as police described to organizers it would be, and speakers received a briefing on this the day before. Virginia State Police commandeered the north side of the park. No one was allowed in that half of the park except a few rally people handling the audio equipment. Police also controlled the streets around the park on three sides: Jefferson St. to the north, 1st St. to the west, and 2nd St. to the east.
Market St. to the south was an uncontrolled chaos full of antifa. The south end of the park is a small hill. Exits 1 & 2 were both short concrete stairways. Speaker and rally attendees arrived via Market St. from the east, protected by police.
When I arrived I was funneled into Exit 1 and up into Pen 1. Shortly after I was able to get around the State Police dividing the pens to the south and made my way into Pen 2, which contained the audio setup for those planned to speak at the rally.
Both exit stairs were defended by rally attendees with shields, and antifa skirmished with them at each stairway. Contact between the two sides was isolated to those positions and relatively under control from my vantage point. Within Pen 2 people felt relatively relaxed and we chatted and socialized while waiting for noon for the rally proper to start.
Shortly after all rally attendees were present in the park, word began to spread that a State of Emergency had been declared, presumably by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe. At my position in Pen 2, people were confused by this. It seemed unnecessary and preemptive since the rally seemed fairly well under control at this point. It was about 11:30 a.m., and the rally was not scheduled to start until noon.
After some minutes of confusion and rumors, Virginia State Police got on a loudspeaker and announced that we had been declared an unlawful assembly. We were instructed to leave the park, and told that anyone refusing to do so would be arrested.
Attendees began attempting to leave via exits 1 & 2 and were set upon by antifa as they attempted to do so. After a quick consultation, a small group of rally headliners and attendees decided to engage in civil disobedience and get ourselves arrested, myself included.
We told our security teams to leave the park to avoid arrest, while Virginia State Police began forming a shield wall at the north end of the park. The pens were nearly empty at this point, except for those planning to be arrested and a few people still attempting to run the antifa gauntlet at the stairs to escape from the park
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The VSP shield wall began advancing south, and we linked arms and held our ground. We told police we refused to leave and planned to engage in civil disobedience. We were respectful and informed them we would not resist arrest but we refused to leave the park willingly.
The shield wall advanced on us and began to shove our line. We stood firm and held our ground for a few minutes. Police on the line did not say a word and refused to arrest us while shoving with their shields and swinging them at us.
After a few minutes of shoving, our line was pepper-sprayed from a cop behind the police shield wall, and our resistance crumbled. Being near the end of the line, I was not sprayed directly. The spray drifted in the wind onto my arms and face but my eyes remained clear.
We retreated through the western barricade but police on 1st St. would not let us onto the street forced us to retreat south. We’re pushed through the barricade at the south end of 1st St. and onto Market St., which was lined on both sides with mobs of screaming antifa with no police presence whatsoever.
We ran west on Market St, running a gauntlet of antifa throwing bottles, sticks, and rocks. Two people I believe were nearly blinded by pepper spray. I followed them closely but then dropped back as the crowd hurled everything they had at another protest headliner, luckily missing with most of it.
After running a few blocks west, we reached the intersection of Market and Preston, where a shield wall had been set up by rally attendees on a grass strip alongside Market St. Casualties were being tended there, including multiple heavily bleeding scalp wounds and pepper spray injuries. Luckily all the injuries seemed superficial except one man with a very bad head injury who seems to be going in and out of consciousness.
From there the bulk of the rally attendees were able to march north and eventually reached the relative safety of MacIntyre Park, about two miles away, but many had been scattered throughout the city by the chaos of the dispersal.
At that point the police had completely lost control of the city. The State of Emergency order meant that any public gathering was de facto illegal, but antifa were still allowed to roam freely bearing weapons and attacking people. This chaos ultimately led directly to the vehicular incident that killed a woman and badly injured more than a dozen others.
My conclusions are that police wanted this to happen. It’s clear that VSP had specific orders to drive us out of the park to the south, into the teeth of violent armed antifa counter-protesters.
Police could have easily separated the barricades and removed all rally participants to the north, away from antifa and into empty streets fully controlled by law enforcement. We were driven into a hostile situation intentionally. It’s impossible not to believe that the authorities issuing these orders knew exactly what would happen and that they wanted rally attendees to be harmed and possibly killed.
There was an assumption that police would allow a retreat to the north in the event of a rally cancellation, no one imagined the police would choose to facilitate a clearly violent situation and force the two sides into uncontrolled contact. This looks like it was done with the intent to deny civil rights of a legal protest, in direct defiance of a federal court order. We were set up and trapped, then pushed into a kill zone full of hostile armed enemies. Every injury at this event was due to to the nonsensical withdrawal order of the police.
National Guard (or possibly feds? It’s unclear) had a viewing post atop the funeral home at the corner of 1st and Market, equipped with several cameras. That video will corroborate my story if released
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I got out relatively unscathed, my relatively mild (but still very painful) pepper spraying was my only injury. I was lucky, but many others were not so lucky. Serious questions need to be asked about who gave this order and why the rally participants were not extracted to the north, away from antifa. The opposing sides could have been kept apart very easily, but police chose not to keep the sides apart.
Governor Terry McAuliffe and the Virginia State Police have blood on their hands, and they must be held to account for that.
National Guard (or possibly feds? It’s unclear) had a viewing post atop the funeral home at the corner of 1st and Market, equipped with several cameras. That video will corroborate my story if released.
Those videos will probably never be seen by mere citizens. Who would you address to see them under the FOIA? That pertains to federal agencies. FBI ? Those videos would be helpful in prosecuting the Communists. Lol, that that would happen.
If Trump’s DOJ is serious about taking a thorough look at what happened at Charlottesville, the DOJ needs all the comms records of the parties involved, including LE, the city and state pols.
Excellent post!
And why is the helo crash being kept under a cone of silence?
Okay. Just for the record (to be sure I understand it correctly) the “Unite the Right” group had a legal permit that had been issued, then revoked a week before the event, then restored (presumably via some legal action) the day before the rally?
Why did the Virginia State Police declare it an unlawful assembly?
I understand that there is a possibility they may have decided that it was unsafe and mandated an end to the event, but to declare it an unlawful assembly?
Was it a misunderstanding by the Virginia State Police who may not have realized the permit was restored, and were operating on dated information?
Or were their actions due to liberal pressure from above?
Can anyone shed light on this for me?
If I understand the diagram correctly, the police were stationed in such a way that rather than separating the two demonstrations, the demonstrators were contained in such a way as to maximize contact. Declaring that those who had made it to the relative safety of the fenced in area needed to disperse through the exits where the counter-demnostrators were massed by design at a time shortly before the rally began seems to me the way to best maximize friction between the two groups. Human idiocy is great, but I have a hard time believing that idiocy alone can explain the layout and the timing.
I don’t watch television or read the papers, simply because I know any narrative generated is going to be favorable to the left on this.
I also don’t much trust search engines any more to deliver unbiased results (most specifically, not Google) so I haven’t even bothered to search on this.
Can someone summarize for me what the “Unite The Right” rally was for? (I am not going to wade through search page after search page saying it was a neo-Nazi rally to find a nugget of truth.
Of course, the truth may well be that it was a neo-Nazi rally, but I have learned it is a fruitless endeavor to discern the motives of anyone to the right of the radical leftists that rule the media and Democrat party by watching news or even using Google.
I wouldn’t mind hearing a Freeper summary as a starting point, rather than everyone was a skinhead.
So were the helicopter crash deaths attributed to the driver in initial reports? The media was reporting that 3 people had died from the conflict (and 19 or so hospitalized).
I’ve read that Punk McAuliffe declared the state of emergency at app. 10:30AM. If this is true, how is the one hour delay explained (the local PD notified the attendees in the park of the order at app. 11:30) Also why was Antifa allowed to riot - demonstrations become riots once violence begins - long after the SOE was declared?
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I am curious as to WHY they declared it an unlawful assembly.
Can someone show me the party affiliation and primary voting records of these “alt-right” figures?
I’ve been told that Democrat politician and friend of Al Gore Junior, Fred Phelps, was an extreme right-wing bigot along with his “church” Westboro Baptist Cult and Lawyer Family. He was merely an agent provocateur who’s actions defamed Christians and their opposition to same sex marriage. He still got his digs in against the Iraq war by protesting at the funerals of dead soldiers.
Here's a link to his press conference .
Charlottesville Police full news conference on weekend violence
The chief blatantly lies when states "We can't control what side someone uses to enter the park" @ the 6:20 mark.
First of all, will someone please explain to me what the hell the “Alt Right” is? It seems to me that the term Alt Right is entirely a concoction of the left to paint some of us with a pejorative label and, for some reason, even conservative commentators have adopted the term. I suspect that if you asked 100 people what Alt Right means, you’d get more than 100 substantially different answers.
As to how the police dealt with the protest, have we seen even one instance in which the police dealt with ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter, or any other “Resist Movement” protest in a similar manner - no matter the level of violence?
The chopper crash occurred shortly after the car crash. The chopper crash was attributed to the riot, but it is not connected to the protest.
How I despise those Westboro Baptists.
I counter-protested against them outside Arlington National Cemetery a few years back. I simply could not believe some of their signs.
That said, as despicable as they are, if they had a legal permit to protest, I cannot silence them.
The issue is, that right to Freedom of Assembly and Freedom of Speech is not reciprocated by the left, ever.
Ever.
Also, I am sick of this “alt-right” crap (as I assume you are by the quotes you used). This is just another attempt to corral all non-liberals into a common pen (throwing Tea Partyers and other conservatives into the same box with Nazis, even though Nazis are ideologically more in line with the Left and things like radical Islam)
I am tired of letting them control the language, but given they are 90+% liberal in the media, this is fully expected.
See my post at #16. “As I stated, “alt-right” is a liberal construct designed to group all non-liberals together.
Terry "The Punk" McAuliffe.
Westburo is one extended family of lawyers who seek attention and financial payback when they are “wronged”.
Daddy Phelps ran for office as a Democrat several times and was photographed at least once with Al and Tipper.
It’s street theater. Did he believe the crap he spouted? Don’t know. Did the press use it to taint all opposition to homofascism in the church and classroom? Yes indeed.
And the press didn’t do much to educate audiences just what political party Fred Phelps was a part of.
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