After delivering the final address at the Liberty International World Conference in Puerto Rico, Friday night, I learned that there had been violent clashes between white nationalists and counter-demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A dozen people required medical treatment after being sprayed with mace.
Then, after traveling to the airport with new friends from Kazakhstan, China, and socialist-torn Venezuela, I began my eight-hour trek home. I had the subject for my weekend column, I decided: the lack of reports of even one arrest.
Last I checked, dousing folks with a chemical agent was a crime.
“Men in combat gear, some waring [sic] bicycle and motorcycle helmets and carrying clubs and sticks and makeshift shields,” the Washington Post reported as I landed for my connecting flight home, “fought each other on the downtown streets, with little police interference.”
By the time I touched down in Washington, DC, James Field had driven his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and seriously wounding many others. A searing and sobering event.
My column, mostly written in transit, focused on the police response to political violence. From Trump rallies last year to the events at UC-Berkeley that “shut down” planned speeches … to attacks on Charles Murray and others at Middlebury College … to this Saturday’s events in Charlottesville, policing has been tepid at best.
People have a right to speak, to assemble, to protest, to let out a primal political scream. Our governments must protect that right, without regard to viewpoint, by preventing and policing against acts of violence.
When violence succeeds without consequences — garnering tons of attention for its perpetrators — we are likely to see more violence.
Government is not doing job one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “Saturday’s Violence”
A report from Charlottesville: the police made a decision to let protestors and counter-protestors fight it out without interference, and one can make the case that in a general melee it can be difficult to determine who is doing what to whom. However, what the media has not reported is that prior to that general melee, the neo-Nazis set upon and beat the only unarmed, peaceful people there, a group of clergy men and women. That the cops allowed it to happen is disgraceful and leads to the nasty speculation that they were actually on the Nazis’ side.…
Speech, even hateful speech, must be protected so that it can be seen for its ugliness and civily responded to and dismissed for what it is.
If the government allows violence and allows the repression of speech by violence or its threat then you are correct, it acts to exacerbate, compound and escalate the problem. Both sides will claim the government has favored the other.
Depicting the protestors as “white nationalists” is specious. Many were there simply to protest he Charlottesville mayor’s decision to destroy symbols of Southern values, culture, and heritage.
Conversely, whenever the hate groups BLM and Antifa show up violence is assured.
It seems to me that this was done on purpose by some socialist big wigs to get back for the beat down that occurred at Berkley when the right pounded on the left big time and humiliated them. A civil war is clearly coming only it won’t be between the Union and the Confederacy. It will be between the uber leftists and the alt-right which will give those in government the excuse it needs to completely dismantle the rest of the Bill of Rights that they haven’t already destroyed.
The previous posts are nonsense, written by people who obviously are nowhere near Charlottesville. Here, on Friday night, there was a torchlit march by KKKers and neo-Nazis who chanted things like “the Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil,” a slogan of the Third Reich. Nazi regalia was also on full display on Saturday and the car murderer has been identified as a neo-Nazi sympathizer. Make no mistake, the Lee statue issue was a red herring; the real purpose of the rally was, in their own words, to “unite the right,” i.e. to unite conservatives behind an anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-black agenda, now that they believe they have a president who is on their side. Reading this any other way is simply wrong…