Thread: Charlottesville and Its Aftermath: What if It Was a Setup?

August 18, 2017


Charlottesville and Its Aftermath: What if It Was a Setup?

By Patricia McCarthy


The ridiculous campaign by virtually every media outlet, every Democrat and far too many squishy Republicans to label Trump some kind of racist and Nazi sympathizer is beginning to have the stink of an orchestrated smear. The conflagration in Charlottesville is beginning to feel like a set-up, perhaps weeks or months in the planning. Planned by whom? Time may tell. We know that Michael Signer, the mayor of Charlottesville, declared his city to be the "capital of the resistance" just after Trump's inauguration. We know that Gov. Terry McAuliffe is a corruptocrat, joined at the hip to the Clintons. He pardoned sixty-thousand felons in order to ensure he delivered his state to the presidential election of Hillary Clinton. We know he would like to run for president himself.

We know that Obama and his inner circle have set up a war room in his D.C. home to plan and execute resistance to the Trump administration and his legislative agenda. None of these people care about the American people, or the fact that Trump won the election because millions of people voted for him. They suggest those deranged persons who gathered in Charlottesville as members of one of several fringe groups, Unite The Right, neo-Nazi or KKK, are Trump's base -- as if there are more than a few hundred or thousand of them throughout the country. There are not enough of them to affect anything or elect anyone. Those who are actual members of these small groups are most likely mentally ill to one degree or another. Trump has disavowed them all, over and over and over again. Liz Crokin, an entertainment reporter and no fan of Trump, wrote in 2016 that she had covered Trump for over a decade and in all that time, no one had ever suggested he was racist, homophobic, or sympathetic to white supremacists. That all began after he announced his campaign. It is as fake a narrative as the "Russia collusion" meme. The left set out to defame Trump from moment one. When he won the election, their shock, dismay and intolerance for every opinion that differs from their own shifted into hysterical overdrive. They mounted their crusade to destroy his presidency on Nov. 9, 2016.

What if Signer and McAuliffe, in conjunction with Antifa and other Soros-funded groups like Black Lives Matter, planned and orchestrated what happened in Charlottesville and meant for events to unfold roughly as they did? If they did, it was icing on their sick, immoral cake. If this was all part of a plan, one would hope those behind it suffer for their part in and responsibility for the tragic death of a young woman, Heather Heyer. The "founder" of Unite The Right, Jason Kessler, was an activist with Occupy Wall Street and Obama supporter.

Jason Kessler at Charlottesville City Hall, August 13, 2017

He sees himself as a professional provocateur. What if he was a ringer, a phony who revels in riling up some crazy people for some political purpose? We know the left is skilled in all manner of dirty tricks. That sort of thing was Robert Creamer's job for the Hillary campaign, hiring thugs to incite violence that could then be blamed on Trump supporters. Think of Ferguson, Baltimore, Berkeley, etc. Antifa and BLM are every bit as fascist as any of the supremacist groups; they are more violent and there are more of them. Why is the left so afraid to admit this fact? Even Peter Beinart did in the Atlantic, written before last Saturday.

Since that day, the call to remove the statues on display that honor any members of the Confederacy has become shrill and frenzied. Erasing American history benefits no one and only condemns us to repeat past mistakes. The supremacist groups had a permit; they had applied months earlier. The Antifa and Black Lives Matter groups did not have a permit. The local police at some point, on whose order we do not know, turned the pro-statue groups toward the Antifa and BLM groups, many of whom were armed with lethal weapons - soda cans filled with cement, bottles filled with urine, baseball bats and boards with screws protruding to do maximum harm, and improvised flamethrowers. These are the people who initiated the violence. How was this not a planned melee? Pit groups of demented racists -- all of them on both sides are certainly that -- against each other and violence is sure to occur. (Certainly, there were decent people among the protestors and counter-protesters who had no affiliation with the supremacist groups or Antifa or BLM. Heather Heyer was among them.)

Trump spoke out on Saturday and his statement was perfectly fine given the known facts at the time. But the media reacted as though he had defended the supremacist groups. He did not; not even close. It was as though no matter what Trump said, they were going to attack his remarks as being insufficient. When he reiterated his horror of the brawl the next day and named the groups present, they again reacted as if he had defended the supremacist groups because he said there was mayhem committed by both sides. He correctly stated that there was violence perpetrated by members of all the groups present. The media was apoplectic even though they surely knew what he said was true. Reporters on the scene saw the police stand down. Only one of them reported that truth. One has to wonder if talking points were distributed before the event took place and before Trump said a word about it.

The Democratic Party is no longer liberal, it is leftist. It is not progressive, it is regressive and repressive. It seeks to overturn the First Amendment. It means to indoctrinate, and has, successive generations via public and private education. It is becoming ever more fascist by the day. Along with groups like Antifa, BLM, and the host of anti-democratic groups George Soros funds to protest all around the nation, the media and the Democrats in Congress seek to overthrow an elected president in order to impose their vision of some sort of socialist utopia which of course will never exist. What will result if they get their way is a Venezuela-style two-tiered class system, the ultra rich and the very poor who are kept in their place by economic and social control. The millions of people who see the left for what it has become see this. It is why they voted for Trump.

It is disheartening to see so many American elites, privileged in wealth and position within the media and/or government be so completely of one, unthinking mind. They all have braces on their brains (Auntie Mame). So afraid to buck the rigid mindset of their peers, they have become mouthpieces for their own group identity. Do they believe the nonsense they spew? Who knows? Those in Congress, all the Democrats and the anti-Trump Republicans essentially care about one thing and one thing only: getting re-elected. They cannot afford to offend their donors or the lobbyists whose largesse fills their coffers. So they trip over each other getting to the nearest camera to align themselves with whatever opinion they think will put them on the right side of the money people. They are wrong so often.

Finally, Trump's press conference on Tuesday made the left's heads explode. Why? Because everything he said was absolutely true. He does not play by their tyrannical PC rules. He said what was true and that room full of puerile reporters shouting insults at him could not handle the truth. They want what they want tobe true but it just is not.

This entire episode, the behavior of all those protesters in Charlottesville and the bizarre behavior of the media will likely drive future voters to Trump, not away from him. Millions more than those who voted for him are as likely to be sick to death of the self-righteous preening of the talking heads: Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper, Don Lemon, Shep Smith, etc. There must be a contest to see who can appear to be the most egregiously triggered by what Trump did or did not say.

So were the events of Saturday the result of a despicable plan to further undermine Trump? There was plenty of time and Charlottesville is the "capital of resistance." If it was, it was evil and deadly and the people involved need to be prosecuted. Or is this a wild conspiracy theory? Perhaps. But the pieces fit. Will the DOJ and the FBI actually investigate the many mysteries that surround the events of that day? Not likely. The left in this country has long been and seems to remain above the law. But someday, maybe someone will come forward and tell the truth. What is certain is that the violence could easily have been prevented with the common sense strategies civilized cities put in place. America deserves much better from its media and its elected officials. The only person remembering why he is there is Donald Trump.

http://www.americanthinker.com/artic...s_a_setup.html

Gohmert Calls for Investigation of VA Gov McAuliffe for ‘Facilitating’ Charlottesville Violence

by PAM KEY
21 Aug 2017



Sunday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) called for a Department of Justice investigation of Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) and Charlottesville, VA Mayor Michael Signer for possibly facilitating the violence that took place in Charlottesville earlier this month.

Gohmert said, “The way forward’s not gonna be easy. And I think the Justice Department needs a full investigation of the governor, of the mayor. They said in court there would be violence at Charlottesville, and then the witnesses and the photographs show they herded these groups to create violence so they could brag. We need a Justice Department investigation into Kessler. You don’t just go all of a sudden from having multiracial roommates and a Jewish girlfriend to all of a sudden being a white supremacist that wants to join the Republican party. There’s something very, very wrong in all of this.”

He added, “Like they were the violence at Trump events, they may have been behind this violence getting started. They facilitated it, anyway.”

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/...ille-violence/

The Rise of the Violent Left

Antifa’s activists say they’re battling burgeoning authoritarianism on the American right. Are they fueling it instead?

• PETER BEINART
• SEPTEMBER 2017 ISSUE
• POLITICS

Since 1907, portland, oregon, has hosted an annual Rose Festival. Since 2007, the festival had included a parade down 82nd Avenue. Since 2013, the Republican Party of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had taken part. This April, all of that changed.

In the days leading up to the planned parade, a group called the Direct Action Alliance declared, “Fascists plan to march through the streets,” and warned, “Nazis will not march through Portland unopposed.” The alliance said it didn’t object to the Multnomah GOP itself, but to “fascists” who planned to infiltrate its ranks. Yet it also denounced marchers with “Trump flags” and “red maga hats” who could “normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice.” A second group, Oregon Students Empowered, created a Facebook page called “Shut down fascism! No nazis in Portland!”

Next, the parade’s organizers received an anonymous email warning that if “Trump supporters” and others who promote “hateful rhetoric” marched, “we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade … and drag and push those people out.” When Portland police said they lacked the resources to provide adequate security, the organizers canceled the parade. It was a sign of things to come.

For progressives, Donald Trump is not just another Republican president. Seventy-six percent of Democrats, according to a Suffolk poll from last September, consider him a racist. Last March, according to a YouGov survey, 71 percent of Democrats agreed that his campaign contained “fascist undertones.” All of which raises a question that is likely to bedevil progressives for years to come: If you believe the president of the United States is leading a racist, fascist movement that threatens the rights, if not the lives, of vulnerable minorities, how far are you willing to go to stop it?

In Washington, D.C., the response to that question centers on how members of Congress can oppose Trump’s agenda, on how Democrats can retake the House of Representatives, and on how and when to push for impeachment. But in the country at large, some militant leftists are offering a very different answer. On Inauguration Day, a masked activist punched the white-supremacist leader Richard Spencer. In February, protesters violently disrupted UC Berkeley’s plans to host a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart.com editor. In March, protesters pushed and shoved the controversial conservative political scientist Charles Murray when he spoke at Middlebury College, in Vermont.

As far-flung as these incidents were, they have something crucial in common. Like the organizations that opposed the Multnomah County Republican Party’s participation in the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade, these activists appear to be linked to a movement called “antifa,” which is short for antifascist or Anti-Fascist Action. The movement’s secrecy makes definitively cataloging its activities difficult, but this much is certain: Antifa’s power is growing. And how the rest of the activist left responds will help define its moral character in the Trump age.

Antifa traces its roots to the 1920s and ’30s, when militant leftists battled fascists in the streets of Germany, Italy, and Spain. When fascism withered after World War II, antifa did too. But in the ’70s and ’80s, neo-Nazi skinheads began to infiltrate Britain’s punk scene. After the Berlin Wall fell, neo-Nazism also gained prominence in Germany. In response, a cadre of young leftists, including many anarchists and punk fans, revived the tradition of street-level antifascism.

In the late ’80s, left-wing punk fans in the United States began following suit, though they initially called their groups Anti-Racist Action, on the theory that Americans would be more familiar with fighting racism than fascism. According to Mark Bray, the author of the forthcoming Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, these activists toured with popular alternative bands in the ’90s, trying to ensure that neo-Nazis did not recruit their fans. In 2002, they disrupted a speech by the head of the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist group in Pennsylvania; 25 people were arrested in the resulting brawl.

Antifa’s violent tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left.By the 2000s, as the internet facilitated more transatlantic dialogue, some American activists had adopted the name antifa. But even on the militant left, the movement didn’t occupy the spotlight. To most left-wing activists during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years, deregulated global capitalism seemed like a greater threat than fascism.

Trump has changed that. For antifa, the result has been explosive growth. According to NYC Antifa, the group’s Twitter following nearly quadrupled in the first three weeks of January alone. (By summer, it exceeded 15,000.) Trump’s rise has also bred a new sympathy for antifa among some on the mainstream left. “Suddenly,” noted the antifa-aligned journal It’s Going Down, “anarchists and antifa, who have been demonized and sidelined by the wider Left have been hearing from liberals and Leftists, ‘you’ve been right all along.’ ” An article in The Nation argued that “to call Trumpism fascist” is to realize that it is “not well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason.” The radical left, it said, offers “practical and serious responses in this political moment.”

Those responses sometimes spill blood. Since antifa is heavily composed of anarchists, its activists place little faith in the state, which they consider complicit in fascism and racism. They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.

Such tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left. When the masked antifa activist was filmed assaulting Spencer on Inauguration Day, another piece in The Nation described his punch as an act of “kinetic beauty.” Slate ran an approving article about a humorous piano ballad that glorified the assault. Twitter was inundated with viral versions of the video set to different songs, prompting the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau to tweet, “I don’t care how many different songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I’ll laugh at every one.”

The violence is not directed only at avowed racists like Spencer: In June of last year, demonstrators—at least some of whom were associated with antifa—punched and threw eggs at people exiting a Trump rally in San Jose, California. An article in It’s Going Down celebrated the “righteous beatings.”

An antifascist demonstrator burns a Blue Lives Matter flag during a protest in Portland, Oregon, in June. (Scott Olson / Getty)Antifascists call such actions defensive. Hate speech against vulnerable minorities, they argue, leads to violence against vulnerable minorities. But Trump supporters and white nationalists see antifa’s attacks as an assault on their right to freely assemble, which they in turn seek to reassert. The result is a level of sustained political street warfare not seen in the U.S. since the 1960s. A few weeks after the attacks in San Jose, for instance, a white-supremacist leader announced that he would host a march in Sacramento to protest the attacks at Trump rallies. Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento called for a counterdemonstration; in the end, at least 10 people were stabbed.

A similar cycle has played out at UC Berkeley. In February, masked antifascists broke store windows and hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at police during a rally against the planned speech by Yiannopoulos. After the university canceled the speech out of what it called “concern for public safety,” white nationalists announced a “March on Berkeley” in support of “free speech.” At that rally, a 41-year-old man named Kyle Chapman, who was wearing a baseball helmet, ski goggles, shin guards, and a mask, smashed an antifa activist over the head with a wooden post. Suddenly, Trump supporters had a viral video of their own. A far-right crowdfunding site soon raised more than $80,000 for Chapman’s legal defense. (In January, the same site had offered a substantial reward for the identity of the antifascist who had punched Spencer.) A politicized fight culture is emerging, fueled by cheerleaders on both sides. As James Anderson, an editor at It’s Going Down, told Vice, “This shit is fun.”

Portland offers perhaps the clearest glimpse of where all of this can lead. The Pacific Northwest has long attracted white supremacists, who have seen it as a haven from America’s multiracial East and South. In 1857, Oregon (then a federal territory) banned African Americans from living there. By the 1920s, it boasted the highest Ku Klux Klan membership rate of any state.

In 1988, neo-Nazis in Portland killed an Ethiopian immigrant with a baseball bat. Shortly thereafter, notes Alex Reid Ross, a lecturer at Portland State University and the author of Against the Fascist Creep, anti-Nazi skinheads formed a chapter of Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice. Before long, the city also had an Anti-Racist Action group.
Now, in the Trump era, Portland has become a bastion of antifascist militancy. Masked protesters smashed store windows during multiday demonstrations following Trump’s election. In early April, antifa activists threw smoke bombs into a “Rally for Trump and Freedom” in the Portland suburb of Vancouver, Washington. A local paper said the ensuing melee resembled a mosh pit.

When antifascists forced the cancellation of the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade, Trump supporters responded with a “March for Free Speech.” Among those who attended was Jeremy Christian, a burly ex-con draped in an American flag, who uttered racial slurs and made Nazi salutes. A few weeks later, on May 25, a man believed to be Christian was filmed calling antifa “a bunch of punk bitches.”

The next day, Christian boarded a light-rail train and began yelling that “colored people” were ruining the city. He fixed his attention on two teenage girls, one African American and the other wearing a hijab, and told them “to go back to Saudi Arabia” or “kill themselves.” As the girls retreated to the back of the train, three men interposed themselves between Christian and his targets. “Please,” one said, “get off this train.” Christian stabbed all three. One bled to death on the train. One was declared dead at a local hospital. One survived.

The cycle continued. Nine days after the attack, on June 4, Trump supporters hosted another Portland rally, this one featuring Chapman, who had gained fame with his assault on the antifascist in Berkeley. Antifa activists threw bricks until the police dispersed them with stun grenades and tear gas.

What’s eroding in Portland is the quality Max Weber considered essential to a functioning state: a monopoly on legitimate violence. As members of a largely anarchist movement, antifascists don’t want the government to stop white supremacists from gathering. They want to do so themselves, rendering the government impotent. With help from other left-wing activists, they’re already having some success at disrupting government. Demonstrators have interrupted so many city-council meetings that in February, the council met behind locked doors. In February and March, activists protesting police violence and the city’s investments in the Dakota Access Pipeline hounded Mayor Ted Wheeler so persistently at his home that he took refuge in a hotel. The fateful email to parade organizers warned, “The police cannot stop us from shutting down roads.”

All of this fuels the fears of Trump supporters, who suspect that liberal bastions are refusing to protect their right to free speech. Joey Gibson, a Trump supporter who organized the June 4 Portland rally, told me that his “biggest pet peeve is when mayors have police stand down … They don’t want conservatives to be coming together and speaking.” To provide security at the rally, Gibson brought in a far-right militia called the Oath Keepers. In late June, James Buchal, the chair of the Multnomah County Republican Party, announced that it too would use militia members for security, because “volunteers don’t feel safe on the streets of Portland.”

Antifa believes it is pursuing the opposite of authoritarianism. Many of its activists oppose the very notion of a centralized state. But in the name of protecting the vulnerable, antifascists have granted themselves the authority to decide which Americans may publicly assemble and which may not. That authority rests on no democratic foundation. Unlike the politicians they revile, the men and women of antifa cannot be voted out of office. Generally, they don’t even disclose their names.

Antifa’s perceived legitimacy is inversely correlated with the government’s. Which is why, in the Trump era, the movement is growing like never before. As the president derides and subverts liberal-democratic norms, progressives face a choice. They can recommit to the rules of fair play, and try to limit the president’s corrosive effect, though they will often fail. Or they can, in revulsion or fear or righteous rage, try to deny racists and Trump supporters their political rights. From Middlebury to Berkeley to Portland, the latter approach is on the rise, especially among young people.

Revulsion, fear, and rage are understandable. But one thing is clear. The people preventing Republicans from safely assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...t-left/534192/

Former Antifa organizer and former neo-Nazi talk protests

Fox News




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ET1ozKHRkE

I listened to an Alex Jones / Infowars interview with Jason Kessler... the organizer of the Charlottseville rally where he admitted he was a former Obama supporter and Occupy Wallstreet protester. So many suspicious things about this case.

W

It probably was a setup , it just seems like too good and too timely. How else are they going to take the spotlight of the failed 'The Russians are Coming' insanity.

They needed something else to fill the airways and this fit.

This stinks ---

My Mother worked for one of the early poverty programs in the 60's. At a seminar she attended, they asked her had she had a 'sit-in' by mothers to protest the need for milk. (This was one of the things done during that time.)

My Mother explained she lived in a small town, and if someone needed food/milk/etc., she had several options to donat it for them. The grocery stores, churches, individuals, etc. She said there was no need in the town.

The lady holding the seminar told her, "Just give us a short notice and we can bring you two busloads of women."

Our government has been doing this for a very long time - it isn't inconceivable someone in the government rounded up some tattooed men, and talked them into doing their part in the charade.

The 'other side' seems to be primed and ready all the time.

U.S. arrests four men in connection to 2017 Charlottesville rally