The Charlottesville Operation

It was May of 1970 and my wife and I, both graduate students at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, had joined hundreds of other people, most of whom were students, in an enormous march around Chapel Hill in protest of the shooting of demonstrators at Kent State University and incursion into Cambodia, expanding the Vietnam War. As we were marching toward Franklin Street, the main drag in the town, someone near the front began the chant, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win.”*

As deep as my anger was toward the government that I had finished serving on active duty in the Army a scant two years before, the chant made me very uncomfortable. It struck me as pro-Communist, which its originators probably intended it to be, but virtually the entire crowd—very few of which I would think really had any Communist sympathies—joined in the chant. It had a nice cadence, like the ones I had shouted with my platoon at Fort Bragg, but at the same time it managed to taint the march, giving opponents something easy to seize upon and denounce.

Flash forward to September of 2005. Once again I’m in a march against a major American war. This time it’s the war in Iraq and I’m part of a truly massive demonstration in Washington, DC. It was probably the high water mark in the United States of resistance to the criminal Middle East wars so far in the 21^st century. But even more than the earlier march in Chapel Hill, people who I am certain were ringers and plants tainted the demonstration. The largest and noisiest such group flew socialist banners, dressed similarly, and all seemed to be no older than thirty. Where on earth did they come from, I wondered. A friend accompanying me spotted one obvious ringer sporting a sign directing obscenities toward President Bush, positioning himself between the television cameras and the speakers’ platform on the Ellipse near the White House. I have no guilt feeling over joining my friend in forcibly taking down the man’s sign after he refused to do so voluntarily, and tearing it up.

From this little bit of experience I can say that political demonstrations give a great opportunity for the practice of what in the Nixon era was called “dirty tricks” for propagandistic purposes. I can also recognize the grain of truth in the “controversial” observation of President Trump that there were “very fine people on both sides” in the recent violent event in Charlottesville, Virginia.

But in contrast to the two demonstrations that I experienced, which were filled with genuine people with the best of intentions from all walks of life and of all ages, the percentage of such people in the melee at Charlottesville had to have been very low. To be sure there are lots of people of good will who still revere the great Confederate General Robert E. Lee and are dismayed at the plans of the city of Charlottesville to remove a statue honoring him, but only the most deluded among them would participate in a rally led by a self-proclaimed “white nationalist” and peopled by assorted “neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists.” Even without the violence, such support from such a quarter is clearly harmful to the cause of honoring General Lee, perpetuating, as it can’t help but do, the very simplistic notion that the War between the States was all about ending the racist oppression of black people by white people.

On the other side there might have been some well-meaning but weak-minded people among them who have succumbed to the steady diet of propaganda that has come almost monolithically from the national opinion-molding community, from the universities, the press, and from Hollywood on the subject of racism in the United States in general and the South in particular, and would be moved to go out and protest against it. Perhaps there are more folks than I would like to believe who responded honestly to the clarion call of the Marxist Socialist Worker web site with its reasoning like the following: **

Here's another obvious point about people who organize protests in defense of the Confederacy: They are hate-fueled racists whose actions quickly reveal that the only freedom they're interested in protecting is their own freedom to oppress and intimidate others.

---

To halt this growing menace will require people coming together in large numbers to directly confront the hate-mongers before they can grow into a truly threatening force.

Still, if they are motivated enough to go out and protest—some of them traveling a long distance to do so—one would think that they would also have heard about a group called Antifa, a very violence-prone outfit that claims to be on a mission against “fascism.” Since white nationalism from their perspective is fascism incarnate, one could well expect that theirs would be a heavy presence among the “protestors” of the white nationalists’ rally in Charlottesville, and so it was. Would well-meaning “fine people” really want to be associated with mobs that throw containers of urine and feces on people and club them, set fires to cars, and bash out the windows of buildings as a form of expression? I suppose it is possible that the counter-protest crowd had some few among it who could claim ignorance by dint of the fact that they got all their news from, say, MSNBC or CNN and had never heard of Antifa, but it is difficult to believe that there were very many such people.

President Trump also said in his initial statement, rightly though imprecisely and inarticulately, that there were “bad people” on both sides—both sides—who were responsible for the violence. To be more accurate, what he should have said was that there were ringers and plants on both sides who were most likely primarily responsible for the violence. In fact, if truth be told, what happened at Charlottesville might best be described as one big propagandistic dirty trick, from a beginning that stretches a few years back to a very bad end that we are only beginning to see.

Divisive Mischief

We didn’t realize it at the time, but race relations in the United States probably were at their historical best with the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008. To be sure he had the same weak candidate to run against in the Democratic primary that Donald Trump faced in the general election last year and the Republicans put up very poor candidates against him both in 2008 and 2012, but it is undeniable that a very great number of white people voted for Obama for who they perceived that he was, not for who he wasn’t. Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind society in which people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin seemed to be well on its way to being realized.

Around the beginning of Obama’s second term, though, race relations in the country began to worsen. Looking at some of the key events of the period we can’t help but notice a certain contrived character to that worsening. It probably started with the Trayvon Martin case in the spring of 2012. One can get a good appreciation of the role the media played in fanning the flames of racial discord with my article, “Washington Post Distorts Trayvon Martin News.” Here is a key passage:

As The Post tells it, it was the Martin parents’ outrage over the lack of a criminal charge that led them to the lawyers and thence to this amazingly effective PR guy.  But was it really the family’s public relations campaign that has vaulted this story into the national news, or has something more sinister been at work?  You can read this Style section article as thoroughly and carefully as possible, and nowhere will you find any mention of the malicious role played by NBC and its editing of the tape of the 911 call that Zimmerman made, which makes Zimmerman out to be a racist.

From there we had the events in Ferguson, Missouri, and in Baltimore, accompanied by the rise of an organization called Black Lives Matter, whose very name suggests that we have returned to an era in which black people are considered to be of less consequence than white people are.

Over the same period, Hollywood made its contribution to worsened race relations with some very incendiary movies that might very well be described as Uncle Tom’s Cabin on steroids. While the Martin-Zimmerman case was in the news, Quentin Tarantino’s hyper-violent Django Unchained was in the movies, giving black people a historical excuse to hate white people in general and Southern white people in particular. That was followed up by the perhaps even more pernicious 12 Years a Slave in 2013, whose negative contribution to race relations in the country are well summed up by this article in World Net Daily by Scott Greer. This quote from author Colin Flaherty captures the essence of the article:

“Hollywood has a relentless and very singular view on racial relations. Their point of view is that racism is everywhere and it is permanent, and this is a point of view that is repeated in every major Hollywood movie about race. ‘Django Unchained’ and ‘The Butler’ are just the latest examples of this mindset,” Flaherty said.

Oh, The Butler. That one came out in 2013. It is not about the slavery period. Rather, it is based on the true story of Eugene Allen as written up by reporter Will Haygood in an article in The Washington Post. The movie gives Allen the name of “Cecil Gaines.” Here the left wing online publication Daily Beast rationalizes the liberty that the movie took with the truth in the latter’s outrageous, gratuitous smear of Southern white people:

The Butler, with its Forrest Gump-like ambition to touch on every significant moment and movement in the country’s 20th century racial history, begins by showing Cecil Gaines on a Georgia plantation picking cotton with his father (David Banner). After his mother (Mariah Carey, in a wordless performance) becomes catatonic after being raped by the plantation owner (Alex Pettyfer) and his father is subsequently murdered, Cecil is essentially orphaned. The woman in charge of the plantation (Vanessa Redgrave) takes pity on him and makes him a houseboy, the beginning of his life-long career as a domestic.

Allen, however, was born in Virginia, and, according to Haygood, never spoke bitterly about his upbringing or hinted at the monstrosities depicted in the film. He was a plantation houseboy in Virginia and did, as Cecil does in the film, leave in the pursuit of better employment.

How’s that for fanning the flames of racial and regional discord?

The Charleston Incident, Jared Taylor, and Richard Spencer

I was frankly shocked at the degree of anti-Southern animus that I encountered in online discussions in the wake of the pointless fatal shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, in June of 2015 of nine black churchgoers. Considering the general historical ignorance of the American public though, and the extent to which their views are molded by popular culture, I suppose I should not have been surprised.

Then, in the wake of the Charleston shootings, came an urbane, Yale-educated man by the name of Jared Taylor who fashions himself as a “racialist” as opposed to a racist to explain in learned-sounding terms why the shooting by a young white man named Dylann Roof had not really been as pointless as it might seem. His involvement in the matter probably did more than anything to persuade me that the whole thing had been a very sinister intelligence operation with the young white alleged shooter a convenient fall guy cut out of the mold of Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and Timothy McVeigh, to name just a few of such historical characters. My interpretation of the Charleston event is in my essay, “Dylann Roof and Jared Taylor,” which begins like this:

From the beginning, there seemed to be a very contrived, orchestrated quality to the reported killing by a young white man of nine black Bible studiers at a famous old A.M.E. church in Charleston, South Carolina.  Who could miss it, what with all the carefully posed photographs that came to light with the alleged perpetrator, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, holding a Confederate battle flag, wearing white African colonialist patches on his jacket, holding a gun, burning an American flag, visiting a slave plantation, etc.?  No one has been identified as the person who took any of the photographs.  Who was it?

Roof, from a broken home, had dropped out of school after repeating the ninth grade and was only fitfully employed.  His main activities seem to have been playing video games, taking recreational drugs, and chilling out with his friends, several of whom are black.

If the orchestration had a purpose, as a CIA operation of some sort, it seems to have been to cement in the public mind the idea that traditional white Southern society, the Confederacy, and the Confederate battle flag that Roof flaunted in the photos represent racism, pure and simple, and that the Civil War was all about ending the South’s oppression of black people.  That was certainly the message that the media—almost as one—carried to the public, as did the politicians who took their cue from the media.  Playing his role in projecting that message, and more, that concern over rampant immigration is also based upon racism, has been a very unlikely character by the name of Jared Taylor.

More recently the much younger Richard Spencer has supplanted Taylor as the press’s favorite “white supremacist” bogeyman. Like Taylor, Spencer is a highly educated, articulate unlikely racist. Like Taylor, he gives interviews to unfriendly news organs that he can be certain will use what he says to make him, his purported cause, and anyone or anything with which they can associate him, to look absolutely as bad as possible. It is very hard to escape the conclusion that that is the purpose in giving the interview.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who draws much of his support, like Donald Trump, from people concerned over the effect on his country of massive immigration, clearly felt that Taylor and Spencer were up to no good and were, in fact, political poison, when they traveled to his country in 2014 to hold a political conference. Orbán banned the conference and slapped Spencer in jail for three days for defying the ban by holding an impromptu meeting with a number of the would-be attendees.

Taylor and Spencer are peas in a pod when it comes to justifying their white nationalism. Both cite Israel as an exemplar. Here’s Taylor:

Not long before he was assassinated, Yitzhak Rabin told U.S. News and World Report that as Prime Minister of Israel he had worked to achieve many things, but what he cared about most was that Israel remain at least 90 percent Jewish. He recognized that the character of Israel would change in fundamental-and to him unacceptable-ways if the non-Jewish population increased beyond a small minority. Equally obviously, the character of the United States is changing as non-whites arrive in large numbers.

Now here’s Spencer speaking to an interviewer on Israeli television after the Charlottesville incident:

As an Israeli citizen, someone who understands your identity, you have a sense of nationhood and peoplehood and the history and experience of the Jewish people. You should respect someone like me who has analogous feelings about whites. I mean, you could say that I am a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people. I want us to have a secure homeland that’s for us and ourselves just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.

Could one better make the case against Trump and his supporters, who are concerned about what unbridled immigration from the Third World is doing to the country, than do Taylor and Spencer? “Trumpism equals racism,” one might as well say. The only people who really count in the Taylor-Spencer philosophy are the dominant majority group, which, at least for now, continues to be white. Everyone else is, in effect, a Palestinian. It is a perfect recipe for social disharmony, and it is in direct conflict the principles upon which this country—as opposed to the “Jewish state of Israel”—was founded.

But what did Taylor and Spencer have to do specifically with the Charlottesville incident?

“In August 2017, Spencer was given hierarchical primacy on poster advertisements for the Charlottesville, Virginia, Unite the Right rally, which devolved into a notorious and violent confrontation,” says Wikipedia, for what it is worth. As for Taylor, unless he was writing tongue-in-cheek, he confirmed on Twitter what was reported at the time on a left-wing web site, that he met in Charlottesville with the rally planners back in June while wearing a disguise.

Taylor has also weighed in in the wake of Charlottesville, once again being interviewed, as is his and Spencer’s wont, by a hostile publication:

“I certainly hope that white advocacy does not become irrevocably linked in the public’s mind with violence and confrontation,” said Jared Taylor, the founder of American Renaissance, who hosts a white-nationalist conference every year and who Spencer has credited with “red-pilling” him, or converting him to the movement. Taylor’s conference has attracted an increasing number of young alt-right attendees in the past couple years; when I went last year, there was a large contingent of MAGA-hat-wearing young men.

If Taylor really doesn’t want to be associated with violence and confrontation, do you think he would be cozying up the The Atlantic, which can be counted on, going so far as to take liberties with the truth with respect to what happened at Charlottesville, to make precisely that association?

And if you want to see how phony Spencer is—and, indeed, how phony the Spencer vs. Antifa conflict is—take a careful look at this video of Spencer being “assaulted” by a black-clad ostensible Antifa member while giving an interview during Trump’s Inaugural weekend. Notice first that silly haircut that Spencer is sporting. It virtually screams “neo-Nazi” and Spencer acts oblivious to it when someone in the audience hurls that charge at him. He might as well be the yuppie-coiffed “Progressive Liberal” professional wrestler Daniel Richards working the mountain circuit of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. In Washington, D.C., Spencer is playing the quite intentional red flag waver to a bull, but as it turns out, the forthcoming violent reaction is clearly anything but natural and spontaneous. Like the pre-match bluster, the “punch” thrown by the “Antifa” guy is taken right from Daniel Richards’ trade. It’s not a punch at all but a forearm with all the steam taken out of it, all show and no blow, if you will. It served its purpose, though, focusing national attention upon Spencer as the symbol of everything people are supposed to hate about Trump, while at the same time solidifying in the minds of Trump supporters what they hate about the Left and liberals. Talk about divisive mischief!

Now recall the celebrated “sucker punch” thrown by supposed Trump supporter John McGraw against the face of young black “protestor,” Rakeem Jones, as he was being led out an arena in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at a rally during the campaign. That little episode probably did more than anything else to fix in the public mind the idea that Trump supporters were racists. And even the little provocative interview that McGraw gave at the end of the rally, after inexplicably having been permitted to go back to his seat after he engaged in his “assault,” comes across as every bit as phony as Spencer’s prior to his being “assaulted.” (To see my full take on the Fayetteville “sucker punch” episode, read my series of articles on the subject, starting with the most recent one and working back.)

Jason Kessler

The actual nominal organizer and leader of the Charlottesville rally was not Taylor or Spencer but a real latecomer to the white nationalism philosophy by the name of Jason Kessler. Kessler, like Spencer a graduate of the highly selective University of Virginia, with his recent background as an Obama supporter and even as an Occupy Wall Street activist, makes Taylor and Evans look almost genuine by comparison. “I can’t think of any occupation that I admire more than the professional provocateur, who has the courage & self-determination to court controversy despite all slings & arrows of the world,” is a statement that he has made in writing.

And check out this quote from another web site:

According to a woman (who wished to remain anonymous) who was part of the Occupy movement camp in what was then called Lee Park, Kessler was present there for several weeks in late 2011. She said Kessler ultimately removed himself from the camp after activists there started to make it known that his presence was not welcomed.

“He was just so disagreeable that he’d start fights between other people. He was very manipulative and very aggressive,” the woman said.

“He wanted people to be more violent and aggressive. He wanted to be the leader of things. ... Even if his politics had been good, I don’t think people would have liked him,” she said.

To me, that sounds exactly like the working style of someone practicing the occupation that Kessler has said he admires the most. “Unite the Right” he called his collection of lightning rods for national opprobrium supposedly gathered to protest the removal of the statue of General from an honored place in his native city. He might better have called it “Embarrass the Right,” “Discredit the Right,” or if he was determined to make it rhyme, “Indict the Right.”

Dovetailing with this information about Kessler, we have this, with anonymous sources but with the ring of truth, from the web site True Pundit:

The FBI has Intel assets implanted in several white supremacy sects, as well as the radical ANTIFA group, according to federal law enforcement sources who spoke to True Pundit.

The FBI sources said it is unlikely an asset would be charged for stoking violence in Virginia if for instance that asset had or was providing valuable information on another domestic terrorism case.

“We wouldn’t do a solid informant for this,” one FBI insider said.

The word “do” here pertains to indict.

The FBI, as we have seen in countless previous instances, has a very broad definition for what it calls “informants.” They might well be, as hinted at here with the term, “stoking violence,” as the leading perpetrators, themselves. If so, Kessler would be high on the list. There could be a number of other, more sinister individuals as well, including the possible orchestrators of the fatal car crash.

Purposeful Crisis Mismanagement?

Kessler appears to be on solid ground when he blames the police and their superiors for their role in failing to prevent the violence that took place in Charlottesville. The record appears to be clear that Kessler’s group had a proper permit to hold its rally in Emancipation (formerly Lee) Park where Lee’s statue is located beginning at 12:00 noon. At 11:30, though, the police informed them that theirs was an unlawful assembly, forcibly flushed them out of the park and its environs, and, in effect, drove them into the arms of violent protestors. Mayhem ensued while the police made no effort to keep the groups apart.

This is a dereliction of their responsibility of the highest order upon the part of the city and state authorities. They acted as though their intent was to promote and encourage violence rather than to prevent it, and their actions have led to a spate of finger-pointing, particularly from Mayor Mike Signer toward City Manager Maurice Jones. We in the public might well point a finger at Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe who gave the peremptory order to declare the rally an unlawful assembly just before it was to begin, opening the gates for the chaos and disorder that followed.

Rather than making any attempt to unravel the events at Charlottesville and present them in a factual and dispassionate manner, the mainstream press has chosen to turn the whole affair into a morality play in which the only “bad guys” are the bigoted “white supremacists.” Anyone opposing them, or just pretending to oppose them, almost by definition can do no wrong. The Washington Post has even gone so far as to use the event as an occasion to tout the Clinton acolyte McAullife as a good Democratic candidate for president in 2020, making one wonder if building up the infinitely malleable McAulliffe might have been one of the objectives of the Charlottesville operation from the beginning.

When it comes to assigning ultimate blame for the Charlottesville violence, we turn to a quote from an unlikely source, The New York Times, written on August 11: “The fight over the Lee statue — in a downtown park that was called Lee Park until it was recently renamed Emancipation Park — has opened up old wounds and brought simmering tensions over race to the fore.”

What a fine idea that was to open old wounds and fan the flames of those simmering tensions that we have shown to be artificially ginned up by the media in the first place! The Times, in its article that depicts the expected counter-protestors as so many angelic choir boys arrayed against the forces of racist evil and never once scribbles the dreaded “Antifa” word, informs us that the opening of the old wounds began in the form of a petition begun by an African-American high school student to have Lee’s statue removed.

Has Charlottesvillie succumbed to its own version of the Red Guard? Where were the responsible adults? Really, what would you expect of high school students steeped in today’s popular culture and with only a puerile grasp of General Lee’s historical significance?

The nation has really come to a fine pass when the purest horse sense on the Confederate statue controversy should come from the mouth of former NBA great Charles Barkley: “I think if you ask most black people to be honest, they ain’t thought a day in their life about those stupid statues. What we as black people need to do: we need to worry about getting our education, we need to stop killing each other, we need to try to find a way to have more economic opportunity and things like that,” and that statement gets him attacked as a “white supremacist.”

The Heather Heyer Death

Readers will notice that up to this point we have not yet gotten around to the central dominant event in the media narrative. That can be summed up by the headline, “Violent White Supremacist Rally in Charlottesville Turns Deadly.” Of course, we are talking about the “turned deadly” part of that headline, which the press has covered almost to the point of frenzy. Although they seem to want to talk about almost nothing else except the death of counter-protestor 32 year-old Heather Heyer, as a result of the ramming of a car into two cars in front of it in the midst of a crowd of protestors and then dashing speedily away in reverse, they have exhibited a curious lack of interest in the specific details of the incident. In that regard it has been so similar to the Vincent Foster death case in the first year of the Clinton administration that one can’t help but be suspicious.

From the beginning the media narrative was set and has not varied from what one hears in this MSNBC interview of the witness, Brennan Gilmore, who is never asked what he was doing at the rally, why he was where he was at the time the events he describes take place, and how he was so nimble in using his phone to film the car as it sped toward the car and crowd in front of it and then backed speedily away. We can gather from the interview at least that Gilmore is not one of those infamous crisis actors. If he were any kind of decent professional actor he wouldn’t lay on the heavy editorializing about the racists and Nazis and how such horrible deaths are the natural consequence of their philosophy of violence, in contrast to their deeply peace-loving and non-violent opponents that he observed at the rally. He seems not to realize that he would be a lot more believable if he didn’t try to usurp the Rachel Maddow role. If you didn’t even know who the guy was you’d think that this was really bad propaganda that would embarrass Pravda in the heyday of the Soviet Union…or perhaps even Pyongyang.

Within a day of the interview the following revealing headline appeared on The Gateway Pundit: “Random Man at Protests Interviewed by MSNBC, NY Times Is Deep State Shill Linked to George Soros.” Perhaps Gilmore’s background had already been revealed elsewhere, because on the same day he had a highly polemical article on Politico revealing his State Department and Democratic Party ties. The nature of that article is well captured in one paragraph:

As a result of this decades-long flirtation, we now have a president who has emboldened white supremacists. Many of the marchers I saw on Saturday wore Make America Great Again hats, and the former KKK leader David Duke forthrightly said the purpose of the rally was to “fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.” If Trump doesn’t want this kind of support, he needs to say so.

Actually, I believe Trump has said so quite a number of times. But isn’t it really a great coincidence that this key witness with government and top political connections should now be a leader of the big rhetorical pivot from “Russia, Russia, Russia” to “racist, racist, racist?”

As it turned out I was hardly the only one to think that there might be a little more than coincidence involved here, and the online disclosures an speculation of these other folks moved Gilmore to write a week later another Philippic in Politico, this time against those who had caught him out entitled “How I Became Fake News,” with the subtitle “I witnessed a terrorist attack in Charlottesville. Then the conspiracy theories began.” Imagine that.

As one might expect Gilmore makes heavy use of nos. 2 and 5 or the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression, “Wax indignant,” and “Call the skeptics names.” He also concedes that the George Soros connection in that Gateway Pundit was correct, that Soros was a heavy contributor to the unsuccessful Virginia gubernatorial candidate for whom Gilmore was chief of staff.

Contrary to Gilmore’s charges, the various people raising questions about the car collision incident can hardly be characterized, without any evidence, as Nazis or white supremacists. It is hardly off the mark, though, to suggest that they suspect a conspiracy of some sort and that we are not being told the full truth. That is hardly any excuse for Gilmore to employ the essentially meaningless pejorative, “conspiracy theorist,” though.

Furthermore, nobody, to my knowledge, has maintained that Gilmore, himself, “staged the attack,” but very quickly a number of people on YouTube were pointing out anomalies. Not long after Gilmore’s MSNBC interview, a YouTube poster with the screen name of The Outer Light, speaking with what I believe is a New Zealand accent, had put up “Some odd things about the event in Charlottesville.” He noted, among other things, as have others, that the driver of the Dodge Challenger responsible for the carnage doesn’t really look like the young man who has been arrested, 20 year-old James Alex Fields of Maumee, Ohio. What he fails to note is that, although you can’t make out the driver’s face very well, you can see very clearly that he is not wearing glasses. In the one formal portrait-like photograph that the press has shown over and over Fields wears a somber expression, a black and white shirt, and no glasses, but if you do a Google images search for Fields you will see that in every shot that was taken of him at the rally that day he was wearing corrective lenses. The formal glum photo spread around by the press was the only one I was able to find, in fact, in which he was not wearing glasses. They are clearly not reading glasses; he obviously needs to use them for his outside activities. Does it make any sense at all that he would not use them while driving a car?

The Outer Light also found it strange that the driver-side air bag did not deploy in spite of the force of the collision into the car ahead of it, a search of the records for the vehicle using the Ohio license plate number revealed that the Dodge Challenger with that vehicle identification number (VIN) has a sun roof while the colliding Challenger clearly does not, and the driving skills exhibited by the person who backed the car down that street at high speed seem to surpass what one would expect from someone without any known special training at it.

Others on YouTube, which is where the real action from ostensible citizen journalists can be found on Charlottesville, have noted that the Challenger had windows that were deeply tinted, such as one might see on a limousine and that in still photos that have been published, the Challenger that Fields was supposedly driving had racing stripes while the one in the videos did not. There is also a question about the formal posed photograph of Fields. Where did it come from? If it’s not his police mug shot, where is that photograph and why has it not been made public? If it is, why is he wearing a shirt that is clearly different from the one that the driver of the collision car was wearing?

At this point a couple of weeks after the event, many of the best questions that have been raised have been in a series of videos by a baseball-cap wearing man who uses the screen name of SonofNewo. I have not yet taken the time to watch all of his videos, but I would heartily recommend his 54:55 minute opus entitled “Analyzing Charlottesville’s Zapruder Film: the Ford Fischer LiveStream.” His big discovery in that film is that the maroon colored minivan that was at the front of the three-car collision was sitting there in the crosswalk parked—and without a driver—for at least five minutes prior to the collision. In a subsequent video he shows the official police report that says the van had stopped to allow pedestrians to pass, which is clearly not true. And, oh yes, no one appeared to be in the driver’s seat at the time of the collision, either.

We have also learned that the accused driver Fields had washed out of the Army on account of the fact that he was suffering from schizophrenia. SonofNewo reminds us that the FBI was just caught setting up a 23-year-old schizophrenic by the name of Jerry Drake Varnell. Might not James Alex Fields, he asks us, be another Jerry Drake Varnell? Or might he be another Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh, or Dylann Roof?

* The NLF was the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, called Viet Cong by the Americans, short for Vietnamese Communists. At that point of the war, in fact, the NLF was pretty much a spent force, having suffered very heavy losses in the strategically successful Tet offensive of early 1968. From then on the war had come down mainly to a battle between the North and the South.

** They should not be confused with the Communist Socialist Workers Party, whose house publication online is The Militant. Interestingly, concerning the “growing menace” of racism in the country, Seth Galinsky of The Militant, in his coverage of the Charlottesville incident, made this observation:

But it’s simply not true that there is a rise in racism or anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment among the working class in the U.S.

On the contrary, there is less racism, bigotry or sexism among workers in the U.S. today than at any time in U.S. history. The historic conquests of the Black rights movement of the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s dealt a crushing blow to Jim Crow segregation, pushed back racism and changed the United States forever.

David Martin

September 1, 2017

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