Free Republic

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A federal judge sentenced an Arizona woman on Thursday to six years in prison for using a cutting torch to damage the Dakota Access pipeline in Iowa and setting fire to pipeline equipment in three counties in 2016 and 2017. The judge also ordered Ruby Katherine Montoya, 32, to pay nearly $3.2 million in restitution together with Jessica Reznicek, a woman who helped her. Montoya pleaded guilty to conspiracy to damage an energy facility. She admitted to helping Reznicek and others damage the pipeline in several locations in Iowa. “The sentence imposed today demonstrates that...

A Lewis and Clark statue featuring Sacagawea (also spelled Sacajawea), a famous Native American woman, was taken down in Charlottesville, Virginia, making it the third statue to be taken down in the city. The statue is of two White men – Meriwether Lewis and William Clark – and Sacagawea, who was depicted tracking, according to historians. Those against the statue have said Sacagawea appears to be cowering, according to The Daily Progress newspaper. “It was a very offensive statue, and not only did it delineate me as a Native American, it delineated our women and their role in society,” said...

Mark Pincus, a tech billionaire who supported Biden in 2020, told "The All-In Podcast" this week that learning Donald Trump was taken out of context regarding the "very fine" people in Charlottesville was a "red-pill moment" for him. "It wasn't just the media or politicians spinning it. That speech was one of the pillars of why you were supposed to hate Trump. You see Biden say that's why he had to run a second time, and you see Obama say it, and Biden brings it up again at the DNC." "It is one of their pillars and they clearly know...

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Police in Richmond, Virginia, said Wednesday that they thwarted a planned July 4 mass shooting after receiving a tip that led to the arrest of two men and the seizure of multiple guns — an announcement that came just two days after a deadly mass shooting on the holiday in a Chicago suburb. … Police initiated an investigation, along with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FBI, which led to the arrests of two men on charges of being a non-U.S. citizen in possession of a firearm. Additional charges are possible, Smith said. Officers seized...

Former President Barack Obama resorted to the debunked “very fine people” hoax as he delivered a closing argument on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Trump did not “sit down for pleasantries with Holocaust deniers”; he invited Kanye West to Mar-a-Lago before West had fully outed himself as a raving antisemite. West then brought Nick Fuentes along, whom Trump did not know. But that was not the worst falsehood Obama told. The “white supremacist rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia, to which Obama referred was actually a rally for — and against — the preservation of a Confederate statute...

One of the United States’ foremost white supremacists is urging his followers to support Vice President Harris in the presidential election next week. Richard Spencer, an avowed racist, antisemite and admirer of Nazism who coined the term “alt-right” and was a featured speaker when he took part in the deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Va., called Harris the “best manager of the American empire.” Spencer — who also gained international recognition after yelling “Hail Trump! Hail our people!” and being greeted with Nazi salutes during a white nationalist event in November 2016 — also condemned former President Trump’s strong support...

BY THE OREGONIAN/OREGONLIVE (Compiled from news accounts, court records, public notices) Last week's arrest of a long-sought accused eco-saboteur pushed the spotlight back on a tight-knit cell of radical environmentalists responsible for a $48 million run of firebombings and other crimes across the West in the 1990s and early 2000s. Six men and five women prosecuted in Oregon received sentences ranging from three years to 13 years. They were arrested starting in 2005 in what the FBI called "Operation Backfire," a task force that tracked down the suspects with the help of an informant deep within the underground group....

Media outlet Headline USA has produced a report that indicates FBI involvement in neo-Nazi marches and rallies across the country for the past twenty years. Additional bureau involvement stretches back to the 1970s. Much of the more recent activity took place under the watch of former FBI Director Robert Mueller. The allegations are not only serious, but potentially history-altering, as one of the events with alleged FBI involvement, the deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, VA, was Joe Biden's claimed impetus to run for president in the 2020 election. Based on the testimony of operatives David Gletty and Bill...

Trump's remarks about the deadly Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally in 2017 remain controversial. Claim: On Aug. 15, 2017, then-President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, "very fine people." Rating: False Context In a news conference after the rally protesting the planned removal of a Confederate statue, Trump did say there were "very fine people on both sides," referring to the protesters and the counterprotesters. He said in the same statement he wasn't talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be "condemned totally."

In 1994, practically at the dawn of the internet, Snopes was a fun site that saw two married socialists debunk pervasive urban legends about razors in Halloween candy and hooked hands stuck to car door handles. During the Obama years, it turned into a Democrat mouthpiece that masqueraded as a fact-checking site. That Democrat fealty explains why it’s taken the site seven years to debunk the “very fine people” hoax that painted Trump as a white supremacist and that Joe Biden used to open his 2020 campaign. Snopes was fun in the beginning but decayed badly when the founding couple,...

Snopes.com, perhaps the most well-known fact-checking website, has finally confirmed — seven years later — that President Donald Trump did not refer to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in August 2017 as “very fine people.” The false claim was central to President Joe Biden’s election in 2020. He used it to launch his campaign in April 2019, claiming he had been inspired to run against President Trump because the latter called neo-Nazis “very fine people.”

Every day is a Charlottesville now, but hardly anyone notices. The small central Virginia city is a metonymy for the 2017 white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally that created national shock waves and rocked the presidency of Donald J. Trump. The antisemitic rhetoric and menacing nature of that event — in a different, left-wing form — are being replicated all over the country in openly hateful pro-Hamas protests. Outside the White House last weekend, anti-Israel protesters wore terrorist headbands; chanted for Hamas and Hezbollah to “kill another solider now” and “kill another Zionist now”; held up signs urging another “intifada,”...

Seven years after a white nationalist rally erupted in violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, a trial began Tuesday for one of about a dozen people charged with using flaming torches to intimidate counterprotesters. Prosecutors at the trial of Jacob Joseph Dix showed the jury graphic videos of 300 to 400 white nationalists marching through the campus of the University of Virginia, carrying torches, shouting Nazi slogans and surrounding a much smaller group of anti-racist counterprotesters, an event that ended in chaos and fighting between the two groups. But Dix’s lawyer, Peter Frazier, told the jury nothing Dix did the night of...

On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” host Jake Tapper reacted to 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump comparing the situation on college campuses to Charlottesville by stating that “There has been some anti-Israel sentiment and there has been some antisemitic sentiment,” but “most of them” were “peaceful, most of them in support of Palestinian rights” and “that’s not what the neo-Nazis in the Unite the Right rally were doing. That was not a peaceful march that turned into something ugly. It was ugly from the word go.”

A lot of people with their eyes open are starting to realize that the Gaza tent city set up at Columbia University is just the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville without the tiki torches. They're all united in their hatred of the Jewish people. President Joe Biden campaigned on the Charlottesville hoax, that President Donald Trump had called the neo-Nazis "very fine people." In fact, his first campaign video was about it and how it had inspired him to run for president. Anyone who watches the video or reads the transcript of Trump's remarks knows that he denounced the...

Despite the clear transcript and video evidence exonerating Trump for the hoax surrounding Charlottesville, millions of Americans still believe that the 45th President was an open, brazen racist.“Hard to Kill” is a Steven Seagal action thriller from 1990 that garnered scornful reviews, though I loved it as a then-teenager. But that phrase, hard to kill, also aptly describes the “Very Fine People” hoax surrounding Charlottesville and the lingering myth that President Trump praised bigots there.In recent days, liberal social media rabble-rouser actor Michael Rapaport stated on the Patrick Bet-David podcast that “the Charlottesville, that I ranted about, I was wrong…...

Actor Michael Rapaport has admitted that he helped spread the left’s Trump Charlottesville “very fine people” hoax, saying he was “wrong” to have promoted the lie. Michael Rapaport spoke about the hoax during a recent interview on the Patrick Bet David (“PBD”) podcast. “One thing about the Charlottesville — that I ranted about, and I was wrong,” the actor said. “When you see the full quote, that wasn’t what he said.”

SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S. SOUTH — It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too. So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.

It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too. So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze. Six years ago, groups with ties to the Confederacy had sued to stop the monument from being taken down. Torch-bearing white nationalists descended on the Virginia college town to protest its removal, and one...

President Biden showed his age at a campaign reception in Manhattan Wednesday — repeating statements about the 2017 Charlottesville riot and his decision to run for president in 2020 minutes apart and nearly word-for-word. *** “You remember those folks walking out of the fields literally carrying torches, with Nazi swastikas, holding them forward, singing the same vicious, antisemitic bile — the same exact bile — bile that was sung in — in Germany in the early ‘30s. And a young woman was killed. A young woman was killed.” ***“the former guy [then-President Donald Trump] was asked, ‘What do you think...