#blacklivesmatter Archives - Watcher of Weasels

Charlotttesville, Virginia is a small college city. It is the home of the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819.

Over the weekend, it became the home of a violent melee that resulted in scores of injured and one death.

The story of the run up to these events reveals a great deal. Charlottesville, like many college towns is fairly blue. And the town council decided to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee that had stood in Emancipation Park (formerly known as Lee Park) for decades.

Led by a local blogger, Jason Kessler, a number of people decided to hold a rally protesting the removal of the statue. They were given a permit to do so. Kessler called the rally ‘Unite The Right’ and made the stupid mistake of allowing white supremacists David Duke and Richard Spencer to be part of the rally, which of course allowed the entire rally to be characterized as ‘Nazis’ and ‘White Nationalists.’

This led to the recruitment of a large mob of Antifa, #Blacklivesmatter, and Black Blok ‘counter protestors’ to organize what amounted to an attack on the rally.

The city first tried to appease them by reneging on the permit, after which Kessler took the matter to court and won.

Over the weekend, the city was flooded with both Kessler’s protestors and the ‘counter protestors’, with most of both groups being from outside the area. Contrary to what some of the media would have you believe, there were few college students involved. Most classes at the University don’t start for a few weeks.

Instead, what you had was an attempt to ‘punch some nazis.’ The #blacklivesmatter, AntiFa, and the so-called Black Blok groups came there in force and armed with baseball bats, pepper spray, sticks, metal flagpoles, iron riser bars, urine bombs, knives and spray can bombs, which basically spurt fire at people at a nice distance with the aid of a handy Bic lighter.

In other words, the ‘counter protestors’ came to start something. It’s inevitable that violence was going to occur. These ‘counter protesters’ as the media religiously refers to them are the very same thugs that have been burning, shutting down free speech and bashing heads for several years.

Let me be very clear. There were obviously neo Nazis and active KKK members among the protestors, and I have nothing but contempt for such people. If I had been a Democrat member of the Senate at a certain time and place, you would never have seen me voting for former Klan Kleagle Robert Byrd as my majority leader. But even Nazis are entitled to freedom of assembly and free speech within certain clearly defined limits.

And with the exception of one cretin who drove his car into a crowd, the protestors weren’t the aggressors. If they had been the aggressors, there would have been a lot more casualties.

Here’s a factoid that bears this out. A lot of the protestors the media labeled under the catchall of ‘white nationalists’ came strapped. Yet despite being attacked by these leftist thugs, guess what? No one was shot. NO ONE. That’s a huge clue as to who came to peacefully protest and who came looking to perpetrate exactly what happened.

And what actually happened? Well, let’s see.

A number of observers on both sides have commented on the lack of police presence. As the New York Times, of all places, reported:

“There was no police presence,” Ms.Brittany Caine-Conley (a minister in training at Sojourners United Church of Christ) said. “We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park, watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other.”

Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, was watching the events from a command post on the sixth floor of a Wells Fargo bank on the downtown mall. There were sporadic fights. “I compare it to hockey,” he said. “Often in hockey there are sporadic fights, and then they separate.”

Suddenly, people were throwing water bottles, some filled with urine. Some used pepper spray; from his perch on the sixth floor, Mr. Moran saw smoke bombs being thrown. People started clubbing one another. The clergy retreated to a “safe house” — a restaurant nearby.

But according to many witnesses, the police waited to intervene. Ms. Caine-Conley called it “fascinating and appalling.”

Mr. Kessler, too, complained.

In a statement, he said the authorities had “exacerbated the violence” by failing to separate his followers from counter protesters. He said his group had “networked with law enforcement officials” months ago on a plan for maintaining safety, which he said was not followed, and he called the police “under equipped for the situation.”

What the New York Times and most of the media didn’t report was what the police did that exacerbated the violence.

Even a primary school teacher knows that when you have two kids fighting, the first thing you do is separate them. There are various ways police are trained to do exactly that. Instead, here’s what happened and I have this from people who were actually at the scene in Charlottesville.

Under orders from Charlottesville’s uber progressive Democrat mayor Mike Signer, the protestor’s permit was illegally revoked in defiance of the court order. This happened at 11 AM, after the confrontations had already been going on for some time. At that point, the demonstrators, who were vastly outnumbered by the ‘counter protestors’ were in the park with crowds of ‘counter protestors’ on three sides.

Then the mayor ordered Charlotteville’s police chief, Al Thomas to have the police form a shield wall on the one side of the park that was still open and tell the demonstrators (who still had a legal permit to be there reaffirmed by a federal judge) that they were an unlawful assembly. And that if they didn’t disperse immediately they’d be arrested.

Since the police let few if any of the demonstrators through their line, the only ways out were through the counter protestors. It seems like the mayor decided the protestors were all ‘nazis’ who needed a lesson from the Left’s own brownshirts. And let’s not forget, the police are not to blame. Just as in Chicago, Baltimore, Berkeley and many other cities, they were ordered to stand down and let the Leftist thugs act out.

What’s astonishing that so few people were injured, with the majority of serious injuries coming from the incident where one of the protestors drove his car into the crowd. The casualties could have been far worse.

Even faced with this carnage, the police pretty much let things go. As one observer mentioned, ‘Yeah, it (the car incident) was intentional.About 40 miles an hour, hit about 15-20 people, crashed into the two cars in front of it, and then backed up and sped away while cops were standing on the side of the road and didn’t do anything.’

The driver, James Alex Fields of Maumee, Ohio fled the scene is his car, a Dodge Charger, but was arrested several blocks away, jailed without bail and charged with suspicion of malicious wounding, failure to stop for an accident involving a death, second degree homicide and hit and run. I’d guess he’s going to be in jail quite awhile and deservedly so. I’m sure many on the Left who ordinarily cringe at the thought of the death penalty for the most inhumane, vicious murderers would happily lynch Mr. Fields and burn his bare feet with lit cigarettes as he swings.

Actually, the Left owes Alex Fields big time. He gave them something they have been desperately trying to get, a bloody flag to wave and a martyr for the cause in the form of Heather Heyer, the counter protestor he killed. She was certainly no Nazi, but she will now become the Left’s Horst Wessel and put to exactly the same use Horst Wessel was.

The comparison is spot on. The ‘resistance’ have been using the same tactics Hitler’s brownshirts did for some time.

#Blacklives matter were directly responsible for the violence in Ferguson over the faux Micheal Brown Hands up don’t shoot nonsense, and for helping to burn down and loot a large chunk of Baltimore after the city’s dysfunctional mayor said they could because of some career drug dealer who was trying to injure himself so he could sue the city..

The AntiFa and Black Blok thugs have been responsible for all sorts of violence, especially in Seattle and in Berkeley where they first attacked people standing in line to buy tickets to hear Milo Yianopoulos speak, injured a number of them severely, and then proceeded to do thousands of dollars worth of damage before the police were allowed by the mayor to rein them in.That’s exactly what happened here.

Ask yourself this. Has any politicians on the Left seriously condemned these groups and their vicious behavior? Heck no.Did the media wring their collective hands and condemn this sort of thing? Nope. In fact the media took joy in fanning the flames and absolving these miscreants of any blame. So we all know the answer to that one.

And just in case you still haven’t gotten the message, a planned news conference by Jason Kessler, the organizer of what was in fact a perfectly legal rally, came to an abrupt end when a man wearing a plaid shirt punched him and a group of lefty protestors literally chased him off the podium.

You see, what happened in Charlottesville and the way the media is presenting it gives the Left the opportunity to shut up anyone who doesn’t agree with them by any means necessary.

The Left applauds violence when it’s some of their own doing it, especially if they’re members of certain protected groups. Fascism is just fine and dandy then. Thanks to the ever helpful media, they’ve gotten away with this for quite some time. All one needs to do is see the Left’s reaction to President Trump’s call for both sides to take a good look at where this sort of thing is headed:

The president’s attempt to to rein things is was unfortunately a failure, because that’s not what the Left really wants. What happened in Charlottesville was merely the opening skirmish of a whole series of planned riots in places like Richmond, Va, Nashville, Atlanta, and Baltimore. And rest assured, there will be more.

And there’s something a lot of these places have in common, with Charlottesville. They all have uber progressive Democrat mayors who can be relied on to reign in the police and allow the Left’s brownshirts to act out, attack people and riot.

Charlottesville is the Left’s excuse for open season on labeling anyone who doesn’t follow the Left’s totalitarian diktats as a ‘Nazi’, a white supremacist, a ‘hater’ or a white nationalist. And shutting them up either by denying them a platform or physically attacking them. And of course, to do their best to slime a sitting president as one of the ‘Nazis.’

They’re correct when they call for getting rid of domestic terrorism. What they don’t realize is that it will likely not be defined by their terms if this nonsense keeps up.

You could probably put all of Richard Spencer and David Duke’s followers in a 200 seat hall and have lots of seats left over. That isn’t true of AntiFa, #blacklivesmatter, BlackBlokand other assorted Leftist groups engaged in this sort of activity. Nor do the neo Nazis have th epower, organization and financing the Leftist groups do.

Who the real threat to our liberties are and who the real Nazis are is becoming more and more obvious, isn’t it? The irony is hilarious.

Rob Miller writes for Joshuapundit. His articles have appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Washington Examiner, American Thinker, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The San Francisco Chronicle, Real Clear Politics, The Times Of Israel, Breitbart.Com and other publications.

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Pravda-on-the-Hudson has an interesting article up that inadvertently showcases one of the effects of efforts to demonize police by the #blacklivesmatter movement and its media and political supporters.

Here’s the headline: “Heroin Use? Juvenile Record? For Recruits, Police forgive Past Sins.”

The article breathlessly goes on…and note what I emphasized:

But now, faced with thousands of vacancies, a shortage of applicants and a mandate to become as diverse as the communities they serve, police departments are rethinking requirements once considered untouchable.

New Orleans no longer automatically disqualifies those who have injected heroin or smoked crack. Aurora, Colo., has stopped using military-style running tests, but now checks how quickly candidates can get out of a squad car.

Pittsburgh, accused of discriminating against black applicants, recently updated its hiring criteria to include integrity, dependability and “cultural competence,” or the ability to incorporate diverse perspectives.

In other words, the current climate created by #blacklivesmatter, the media and Democrat politicians who cater to #blacklivesmatter for political reasons means that a lot of ordinarily desirable recruits who met the old standards involving background checks required to be hired as a police officer are no longer applying. Instead, because police departments are desperate for recruits, they’re opening the doors to hiring former gangbangers. With special diversity points if they’re black or Hispanic. Because of course, white police are automatically racist and can’t be expected to have the ‘cultural competence’ to treat non-whites with fairness and competence.

In St. Paul, the department has experimented with a number of ways to find the best officers, including taking some “situational judgment” questions — meant to test common sense, adherence to police hierarchy and police priorities — off the written exam.

Chief Todd Axtell said the tests might have been unintentionally biased against minorities, proving particularly difficult for those who are not native English speakers.

“We’ve got a lot of diversity in St. Paul, and we’ve struggled with recruiting in the past, so we need to be more thoughtful about these communities,” he said. {…}

For ‘minorities’ read ‘Somalis.’

The department’s new written tests now focus more on personal histories and community engagement, and interviews have been refocused to allow applicants to personally explain incidents that may have previously disqualified them.

“Some people have been caught doing bad things and other people haven’t been caught,” Chief Axtell said. “The question we have is, ‘Was ownership taken?’”

Ownership???? As in ‘yeah, I did it. I’ve gotten over it, you should too?’

As police departments grapple with complaints of excessive use of force and retrain officers to “de-escalate,” or defuse, tense encounters, Chief Axtell said he had used the interviews to identify one personality flaw that in the past might have gone overlooked.

“People who I believe have a short fuse,” he said, “will not get the opportunity in this department.”

Not that we want trigger happy police, but we’ve already seen policemen being murdered attempting to ‘de-escalate.’

Now this isn’t the first time this sort of change has happened after the media whips up an incident to a frenzy. After the Rodney King riots, old school police chief Daryl Gates was forced out and Willie Williams, Los Angeles’s first black police chief was hurriedly hired. Williams proved comically inept and had personal corruption issues to the point where the City of Los Angeles eventually bought his contract out for a hefty sum to get rid of him. But he hung around long enough to implement new hiring practiced in the LAPD that pretty much mirrored what the New York Times is talking about here, where standards for police were dramatically lowered.

The result was the Rampart Division scandal, which involved major police corruption including falsifying evidence, perjury, the targeting of specific gangs for the benefit of other sets and the theft of drugs by policemen from police property areas among other things. In the end, Ramparts negated over 100 convictions, put criminals who were actually guilty of violent crimes back on the streets because of police errors and cost the City of Los Angeles $125 million in financial settlements.

It’s a guaranteed recipe. Demonize police in big cities with fake prosecutions like Freddie Gray and Michael Brown and add a healthy dose of racialist politics. Then watch as people with impeccable backgrounds no longer find the job desirable and don’t apply, or the ones already there get fed up and leave as the job becomes unbearable.

Then, when you lower the standards simply to get more bodies on the street with diversity uber alles as a guideline, that leads to a whole different set of problems.

No police force is perfect and neither are police officers, but demonizing police as a whole for political purposes is always a bad idea.

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