Some of the most dramatic scenes from last weekend’s neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville — images of white extremists beating a black man in a parking lot — were captured by photographer Zach Roberts who talked with Dennis J Bernstein.
White supremacists beating an African American man in Charlottesville, VA. August 12, 2017. (Copyright Zach Roberts/GregPalast.com — reproduced with permission)
Dennis J Bernstein
While many images of neo-Nazi violence from last Saturday’s riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, have gone viral around the world, the photographs taken by Zach Roberts, a fellow at GregPalast.com, are particularly shocking in their documentation of the brutal beating of a young black special-education teacher in a parking garage about 50 feet from where police park their patrol cars.
At one point during the beating, one of the neo-Nazis pulled out what appeared to be a Glock 9 and brandished it, threatening Roberts and others who came rushing on the scene to rescue their friend from being beaten to death.
Dennis Bernstein: Thanks for joining us, Zach Roberts. Where were you Saturday as the white supremacists began to expand out over the city? You took some photography that might mean a lot to law enforcement if they planned to file charges in this case.
Zach Roberts: After the breakdown of the rally in Emancipation Park, formerly known as Lee Park, the marchers started to take to the streets around 11:30. I ended up following them as they marched down Market Street. There were people on the sidewalks with signs saying “You’re not welcome here,” “Charlottesville is against white supremacy,” and so on.
A white supremacist brandishes a gun at a group of African-Americans who arrived to help their friend after he was beaten by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. (Copyright Zach Roberts/GregPalast.com – reproduced with permission)
The white supremacists were yelling back racial slurs. Some of them were geared up with one-inch thick wooden dowels, with Confederate and Nazi-esque flags, helmets on, gas masks around their necks.
They were tooled up for violence. So when you hear people saying that this wasn’t supposed to be a violent rally, I’m sorry, but you don’t show up for a peaceful rally wearing combat gear. They were expecting violence and they got it, because they caused it.
A friend of mine, a female photographer named Stephanie Keith, was deeply affected by the sexist comments directed at her. She covered Standing Rock and other difficult assignments but I have never seen her affected that way.
DB: Tell us in detail about the beating that you witnessed.
ZR: We were marching down a commercial/residential street, small businesses along the way, almost everything closed down because they expected bad things to happen. I was walking alongside one of the more combat-ready groups of marchers.
As we got closer to the parking garage, all I saw was a young black man running and about a dozen white supremacists chasing after him with long poles and clubs. Someone with a shield pushed him into a parking arm. That broke and the young black man fell to the ground and was unconscious. They started beating him with their clubs, they picked up the parking arm
and started hitting him with that.
This went on for about thirty seconds. They scattered when some of the African American man’s friends showed up. His friends picked him up and helped him walk to the garage staircase. He was bleeding profusely from the head and knees and an elbow where he fell. As I was walking to the staircase, I saw that one of the supremacists was pointing a gun at us.
White supremacists beating an African-American man in Charlottesville, Virginia. August 12, 2017. (Copyright Zach Roberts/GregPalast.com – reproduced with permission)
A single African-American police officer finally showed up. This is thirty feet away from the police station. The police actually keep a lot of their cars in this same parking garage. Five minutes later, an ambulance still hadn’t shown up. When more officers showed up about ten minutes later, all they did was stop journalists from taking photographs of the beaten man.
An ambulance finally did appear and took the man to a hospital. He had multiple stitches and a broken wrist. I’m sure people online are trying to come up with justifications for why this man was beaten. By the way, he is an assistant special education teacher in the local school system.
DB: It seems to me that the people who attacked him need some special education. Or maybe they have already been specially educated.
ZR: Yes, by people like Richard Spencer and other white supremacists.
DB: In various instances, the police seemed to turn a blind eye. There were plenty of cops around, except when violence broke out and then they seemed to disappear. The same thing happened when the car ran into the crowd. There was plenty of room for this car to come out of this blind alley and then even drive away before he was finally stopped. It really does seem that the police were somehow complicit in what was going on.
ZR: My understanding is that the police were basically issued a stand-down order to allow the protest to happen. Don’t arrest people unless they are doing something that is endangering lives. Keep everyone safe but don’t try to confront.
But in this case the police seemed to refuse to do anything at all. They seemed to consciously put themselves in places where nothing was happening. A colleague of mine fell and had a gash in her head. I waited beside her for ten minutes and none of the police officers called an ambulance.
White supremacists beating an African-American man in Charlottesville, Virginia. August 12, 2017. (Copyright Zach Roberts/GregPalast.com – reproduced with permission)
DB: I saw on one of the cable stations a white guy pushing a cop in SWAT gear and nothing happened to him. Can you imagine somebody from Black Lives Matter shoving into a group of cops in riot gear and not being taken down?
ZR: When I cover protests, I purposely wear a polo shirt and khakis and try to look like the whitest guy in the room so I don’t get harassed by the police in any way. In this case it was easier to blend in with the white supremacists and they were comfortable talking to me. Some of them were complaining about the police, saying “Look, they let Black Lives Matter march down the middle of the street.” Well, if members of Black Lives Matter had AR-15’s and were marching with full combat gear, something tells me it would be a different scene.
DB: We saw that in the Sixties with the Panthers when they decided to exercise their Second Amendment rights. They were slaughtered.
Dennis J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom. You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net.
Did you get any footage of the 3 blacks who recently invaded a 74 yr old white guy’s home and killed him and his 23 year old nephew because he had a confederate flag on his house?
Maybe you should do an article on that.
This is so robbed of context (yes, there was context which means explanatory not necessarily exculpatory) as to be dishonest.
The black man had, with a large group of others, chased the white supremacists after police had dispersed their little pow wow. Chased, with weapons, intending violence.
Not because the white nationalists threatened them, indeed they were trying to get to their cars, but because they, and this author, seem to think aggressive violence to punish CrimeThink is okay.
Richard Spencer and white nationalists just want what Israel already has. An ethnostate of racial supremacy. Your government (left and right) send billions of your tax dollars to country who’s military has a policy of “shoot to cripple” (that is to shoot Palestinians in the dicks).
No one’s taking to the streets to protest that.
As it is sad to see even alternative media outlets starting to spread Fake-News like CNN & Co, i’d like to clarify a couple of things:
1) Mr. Deandre Harris was no victim, because there is footage out there, which clearly shows Mr. Harris and his friends following the right-wing protesters, carrying sticks and clubs, trying to provoke a fight for at least five minutes. As this didn’t succeed, one of Mr. Harris friends started to hit one of the right-wingers and a fight broke loose. But being beaten in a fight doesn’t necessarily make you a victim, because the important question is, who was looking for the fight and which group did strike first? And in this case, it simply wasn’t the right-wingers.
https://youtu.be/_TWCEV5U09c?t=237 (Mr. Harris is the young man with the blue backpack, carrying a black club)
2) Of course, it is necessary to gear up, when you know that your rally will be attacked with clubs and even iron sticks by Antifa, BLM and similar groups and we have seen this happening over and over again. And the same people, who justified and used violence against the right-wing and neonazi-protesters in Charlottesville (like it or not: even these people have constitutionals rights!), were the same people that attacked families with their children attending Trump-Rallies in 2016 just for wearing MAGA-hats!
3) The people carrying AR-15 rifles where no right-wingers at all, but a private militia-group that stated in numerous interviews that they did attend the rally as “neutral observers” and not because they identify with and support the political ideology of white supremacists and neo-nazis and labeled both protesters and counter-protesters e.g. “jackasses” and the right-wingers even “arsonists”. And as this group even had two black members with them and their statutes forbid any discrimination because of race, gender or religion, just think for yourself: how ‘racist’ can a militia be, that allows people of color to join?
https://qz.com/1053604/who-were-the-armed-camouflaged-men-in-charlottesville-who-have-nothing-to-do-with-the-military/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/15/charlottesville-militia-free-speech-violence
Great post, thank you. From the moment (a week ago) when I saw the photo [of Harris] I wondered what preceded that.
When there is no police , or police are there but tolerate violence this is what happens. I was at a rock concert in the mountains near Vancouver in 1969. Everything was fine until a motorcycle gang showed up , and would beat up a few people randomly in the crowd. A few of them went on stage and disrupted the Byrds performance. No police. It could have really gone bad.
Charlottesville the authorities and police really screwed up. You have to arrest anyone alt-left, alt-right if they commit a crime and especially if they turn violent.
I
mike k, NOT meaning to detract from the seriousness of what we are discussing here but…
Okay, it sounds funny! I ran a fiberglass repair/surf shop in the 70s & 80s in OB & MB San Diego called ‘Seal’s Ding Repair’ before I closed and went back to school in my 30s. I’m Seal, and a group of us local surfers were the Seal Team which was a word play on the killer swabbies that has a base inside San Diego Bay on Pt. Loma.
We all did excellent impressions of barking seals unlike those guys…I still do.
Since I closed the surf shop, moved & lived in three different mountain ranges in three different states with snowboards under my arm since then, and having been located here in the Selkirk Range between Canada and Spokane for the last 13 years with my home-based shop (not fiberglassing but sewing snowboard gear), it seemed like an appropriate moniker for a web name.
Zachary Smith: I do understand your sentiments on avoiding insane people. The one thing I learned to do at police-fomented riots was to duck and dodge and they were every bit as mob-action-dangerous as what happened at Charlottesville. Getting mobbed by a group bent on your destruction is no fun at all be they official or civilian.
But you have to fight back or they will keep coming after you.
At UKF the learning about mob attacks by cops changed to realizing that there is a point where turning the other cheek got you knifed in the gut in a street fight. People that are that mentally and emotionally damaged (as I think these white nutjobs are) aren’t going to stop with just breaking your bones for fun. They’re going to kill people, or as we have seen run into them with cars. Realize it is a lifestyle.
We’ve got the same mentality up here, Confederate flags on houses no less, and a lot of these types are hiding in compounds up dirt roads and yes I do hear automatic weapons fire now and then in these mountains. Much target practicing goes on year round, even in winter snows. The Idaho Panhandle is a hop & a skip to the east and that area is the same. This is Reagan country, W Bush stickers still on cars, and Trump was a shoe-in.
Both my grandpas fought Fascism in WWII. Can I do less? It’s just how the hell we do it without becoming victims ourselves (or being arrested by those racist LEOs) is the bothersome point.
If cornered I’d attempt to “fight back”. But the goons are well armed, and maybe hopped up on alcohol and drugs. They’ve prepared themselves while most bystanders haven’t. I don’t have a handgun, and would be extremely reluctant to carry one if I did. How can I possibly tell who is the “good guy with a gun” and the “bad guy with a gun”? One of them may have already killed 8 people and the other is trying to stop him. How can I possibly tell which one is which?
“Not being there” is my preferred way of handling KKK riots. Or George Soros Hired Gun riots. Or Police Riots. If I must fight, I fight, but ardently desire ground of my own choosing. And weapons of my own choosing.
City planning needs to confront the new urban realities. Rather closely-spaced 4-foot-high steel posts need to be planted on the edges of sidewalks to prevent terrorists/suiciders/texters from killing pedestrians. Some towns around here have annual festivals where a main street has some flimsy barricades put up and the center of town becomes a crowded flea market. If my steel posts aren’t practical there, then fill some dump trucks with gravel to replace those barricade sticks.
Good thinking. There isn’t enough money to tempt me to get anywhere near one of these events if I have any choice at all. If I learned Trump or Pence were coming anywhere near my area, I’d take off on a shopping trip to some city far away in the opposite direction. Ditto for the KKK and American Nazi goon squads.
Note: Most of these statues were put up in recent times, during the 50s & 60s when Americans with more melanin in their skin were finally pushing back against the racists f**ks who have always operated with impunity in this country.
Including those LEOs who do such a wonderful job of committing violence on Constitutionally-guaranteed peaceful protest.
Anybody else here that’s been beaten by cops for existing? My stepmom was a Peace & Freedom Party anti-war activist in the 60s in San Diego and I was with her at a young teen, Been there had that done to me and witnessed a whole lot more being done numerous times including police riots started by cops and agent provocateurs, It was extremely common.
The provocateurs are still going strong, too. Occupy had many caught out as has the unarmed murder by cop protests all over the country. I’m surprised that the cops haven’t figured out to not wear their official cop shoes. Blows their cover every time.
And woe be the person who was carrying a stick, a cane, an umbrella, or walking with a crutch during those protests. You got blitzed by vicious thugs in badges for felony ‘carrying a weapon.’
But the Fascists in Charlottesville could carry clubs and gas masks and shields? Really? And the counter anti-Fascist protesters started to fight back (most of them NOT being armed) and those LEOs just watched…and I’ll bet a whole lot of them were laughing just like they did back in the 60s & early 70s at the hippy and longhairs and commies as they beat the shit out of us…oh wait that was my era…oh wait the same crap over and over for-seeming-ever in this country.
Unfortunately the reality is that this country was founded on genocide and slavery and that has warped the collective brain to such an extent I’m not sure it can ever be cured of its insanity. It just simmers under the surface.
I spent years in the 80s under the tutelage of Rey Leal at the United Karate Federation of OB, a black owned and operated Kenpo studio (I’m actually in some of the pictures on his website). I learned as much as a long-hair white surfer could understand about what black Americans have always faced in this country.
It has never been pretty. It continues to not be pretty. Nothing has really changed in my whole life. That’s the scariest part.
As to Trump’s reactions, I’ve been noticing that (to me) he is starting to sound and act very much like Reagan the Racist our Alzheimer’s President as Reagan’s brain broke down. It’s been rather frightening seeing the similarities because Reagan was a real piece of s**t in about every category one can list both foreign and domestic policies.
Yesterday an article by a Dr. on Counterpunch came up with the reasoning that matched what I’ve been thinking. As links here seem to make your post disappear, the article is named:
The State of Trump’s Brain
Thanks Sealin the Selkirks. BTW what the hell does your web name mean? My pc wouldn’t even print it as one word.
OK I just looked up selkirks, And I now take it this is a play on a fish out of water, since you are a surfer? Anyway I dig your post.
Unfortunately the few pictures do not show the whole scene. One Video at youtube (#BLM Vs #AltRight Parking Garage Battle (BRUTAL!) #Charlottesville #UniteTheRight) shows a little more from what had happened and its quite clear that its wrong to depict anti-Nazi protesters as innocent victims. The video shows how aggressions heat up and it seems that the later victim attacked some of the alt-right shortly before. The main fault was made by authorities who let it happen that both groups could come in physical contact at all. Even the gruesome car attack surely wasnt planned but a result of escalating violence that should have been prevented right from the start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TWCEV5U09c
President Trump would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Hello mike k. You didn’t bother to watch the video linked by DOK, did you? Watch the linked video and compare what you SEE to what Zach Roberts claims happened.
These events were allowed to happen by the authorities. Both sides, which never should have been allowed to demonstrate in the same city on the same day about a principle of dubious importance (removal of confederate war monuments 150 years after the Civil War–why NOW the urgency, unless someone’s looking for a focus of conflict?) were carrying clubs or bats. The footage of the car that ran down multiple demonstrators reportedly shows it being struck by bats before any collision. The defense is claiming and the police are opining that the driver feared for his life and panicked. Nobody yet KNOWS that truth. But I would recapitulate important elements from a response I made to another article in today’s blog:
If you think the conflict between the Antifa and KKK demonstrators in Charlottesville was just an unfortunate coincidence, you should read about the classified ads placed by a business called “Crowds on Demand” in order to recruit “Actors and Photographers” before the Charlottesville event. Cited from the ad: “Crowds on demand, a Los Angeles-based public relations firm specializing in innovative events, is looking for enthusiastic actors and photographers in the Charlotte, NC area to participate in our events. Our events include everything from rallies to protests to corporate PR stunts to celebrity scenes. The biggest qualification is enthusiasm, a “can-do” spirit. Pay will vary by event but typically is $25+ per hour plus reimbursements for gas/parking/Uber/public transit. For more information about us please visit dubya,dubya, dubya crowsondemand dot com.
If the purpose was not to cause public turmoil, why the urgency NOW, 150 after the Civil War to stage rallies for the removal of confederate statues from public venues (which most white Southerners sincerely and vehemently consider an expression of their regional “culture” rather than an endorsement of slavery or racism–so, yes, they are touchy whether “racist” or not–why poke the war eagle?)? Why were the two factions allowed to gather on the same day, to mix on the same scene, and why were the law enforcement agencies withdrawn from the scene rather than empowered to take control? If both factions were granted permits to march, that is suspicious. If one was and the other not, the police failed to act in accordance with the law–also suspicious. The whole thing stinks to high heaven, and was a perfect trap to lay for Trump, knowing he would say something so simplistic, incoherent, or ambiguous that it could be represented as “racist.” In that context, he is guaranteed to offend someone, whether he actually did or not. If he says nothing, he will be demonized as callous… as he was for not immediately condemning the KKK, which does not logically imply that he supports the KKK. In the 1960’s the demonstrations were genuine. Today it’s all paid theatrics, funded by oligarchs like George Soros.
The politicking and mudslinging never stop just because the ballots have all been counted. The presentation of one’s “side” in America entails not just a recapitulation of verifiable facts, but creations of entirely new realities, as first bragged on by Karl Rove. They are not in anyone’s actual memories, but they sure end up in the official documents and rags like our illustrious self-proclaimed “newspaper of record.” These new realities can include not only genuine spontaneous “happenings,” but entirely orchestrated theatrics as the Charlottesville debacle may well have been.
That’s disgusting. Thanks for publishing those photos.
I just want to thank so many of you on here that provide context and information that I otherwise wouldn’t have. Peace…
My error, Perriello ran for VA Lt Gov, not Governor, and lost.
Great post, historicvs.
As a veteran of the antiwar movement of the Sixties, I’d like to know how many provocateurs were at Charlottesville. There were plenty of them at our demonstrations back in the day. Some guys no one had ever seen before would show up and start throwing rocks at the cops, and a peaceful protest became a bloody debacle.
It is well known that the FBI has thoroughly infiltrated extremist fringe groups, including neo-nazi and Klan chapters. It is inconceivable that they have not penetrated left-leaning groups also. The FBI’s COINTELPRO domestic counterinsurgency program was extremely effective in destabilizing the civil rights and antiwar movements; there’s no reason to suppose it died with J. Edgar Hoover. And the media has been silent on the sophisticated surveillance methods that were used that day to identify every participant and log the data forever in their personal government database.
Remember that none of us is actually seeing what’s happening across America today. While we react as though the storm troopers are banging on our own front doors, we receive no reports of the racist violence that was not engaged in by the other three hundred and fifty million of us last weekend. We see the items that the local or national corporations have decided are “news”. We see these items presented with the slant that is agreed upon at producers’ meetings. We see them “reported” breathlessly by young semi-literates hoping to advance to anchor jobs. Everything is put on the context of a modern morality play, with “good” actors for us to cheer, and “evil” actors for us to hiss, a la 1984. And, of course, underneath it all, it’s all Donald Trump’s fault!
We see only a small slice of what’s there and like all human beings we interpret what we see through our own personal filters of experience and prejudice. And beyond that there is this to consider, which I quote from Bernays’ 1925 book “Propaganda”, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
Thanks for your perspective. I see that claim on alt right sights and don’t know what to make of it. I find it entirely plausible, but really have no idea what happened.
Nigerian yellow cake anyone?
Not all the new arrivals here are disruptive trolls.
Great post.
curri, I don’t get the point about Maglites being used by LEOs. What are LEOs?
ADL, i don’t think CN is so much a supporter of Trump as critic of the attempts to take down Trump through the Russia election meddling fabricated story. We certainly don’t want war with Russia. This last election was a pathetic mess, full of fraud and lies.
I feel the country has been muddling toward this tipping point for years, since the middle class has been shredded economically. The educational system has been steadily dumbed down, intentionally, the better to control people. There are a lot of ignorant people in the US, and there are a lot of angry people.
The Civil Rights movement got co-opted by economics, and higher principles supported by Americans in the days of MLK were eroded. MLK’s assassination was intended to overtake the progress of the movement, and we have backtracked ever since. No leader emerged who ever took his place.
Malcolm X said it, “The chickens have come home to roost.” The world is a different place now, what with serious economic problems, wars mainly promoted by the US, and a planet showing signs of abuse by humans, everywhere, and the US has led the way in overconsumption. So, people are stressed, and we are in very troubled times. Granted, Trump is a dreadful “leader” for such a scenario, but regardless of who’s at the top here and anywhere on Planet Earth, we are in very troubled times.
I also think Charlottesville was a setup, possibly a covert op. What better way to play on the divide in the country than to provoke a scene like that? Look up Brennan Gilmore, who shot video of the attack. He worked for CIA as operative in Central African Republic in 2012 with a Muslim group, Seleka, that overthrew CAR’s Christian nationalist government. The conflict escalated into brutal war between Christians and Muslims, and the Muslims were slaughtered. We didn’t hear of this through press. It’s called “The Forgotten Conflict”. Gilmore’s superior in CAR was Tom Periello from VA, who returned to US and ran for VA governor in 2017, losing the primary to Terry McAuliffe in June. Gilmore returned to US and was DNC operative in Charlottesville, working with the mayor, Jason Signer. Now, this information is being reported by Infowars and other news called “right”, which then gets ignored or put down by so-called “left”, but to me the facts are what matters, and getting beyond labels is very important since this is such a critical time for divide-and-conquer strategies.
I doubt ADL’s moniker is a random coincidence.
We are not following the talking points.
LEO = law enforcement officers
“LEO” was a new one for me, but when it was explained the Maglites fell into place. In days past they were used by the police. Gripped on the light-bulb end, the heavy aluminum tubes full of D-cell batteries made a hell of a club for beating on people the LEO person felt needed that treatment. The new small LED flashlights are much brighter as lights, and the clubs aren’t in style because police now have Tasers. They’ve also learned that they can often get away with simply shooting the uncooperative citizen. At an auction a while back I bought a box of well-used surplus cop Mags and in the bottom found my prize – a 6C Maglite. It was in great shape because it had been too light for the clubbing work. All of them were cleaned and partially rebuilt so they now work perfectly.
Nice thread – I’ve just added another name to my ‘try to ignore’ list.
I heard the black guy had been attacking people with a Maglite-which is often used as a weapon by LEOs.
It’s really strange to me the lengths people will go to alibi the ugly thuggery of the Nazis and Klansman. They just so much want to look the other way, even when it is right in their face. Do they really seek points for being so “balanced”? That’s the game Trump tried to play.
What seems ‘strange’ is just the reality of this country. A whole lot of racism, and then a whole lot of those who dishonestly profess to not be, but wink wink nod nod, are just fine with discriminating against minorities and women. Our national heritage.
It is really disgusting, and amazing, to read all of the commenters on this website who do nothing but alibi, excuse, support, and promote racism and misogyny and T. Yessir – “Make America White Again”.
As 1 commenter previously replied when I brought this up – “we have more important priorities”
Ya, for 10,000 years white males have had more important priorities.
And notice that of articles on this website concerning these topics, I do not recall #1 Trump cheerleader Robert Parry ever authoring one. Once in awhile a little pooh poohing of T, and his degeneracy, but then back to what a great guy and wonderful leader we have who is just a poor victim of big bad DEEP STATE, and HILLARY, and BHO.
Words cannot express who sickening this is..
Surprising number of people here serve as apologists for Trump, and more recently neo-Nazis, the KKK, etc. For example ” first figure out what beatings are “justified beatings” and what beatings are “not-justified beatings”, “I heard the black guy had been attacking people with a Maglite”, etc.
Most of us here whom you mistake as “apologists” for Trump are not defending his many terrible ideas and policies, it’s just that we think the greater evil is those who are trying to undo a legitimate election by any means possible. Truth be told, not too many of their ideas or policies are of any great shakes either, especially in the foreign arena.
Birthers, Trump spent 5 years exploiting his media acumen and clout with the explicit intent to “undo a legitimate election by any means possible.” Let him take his own medicine and move on like a man. It’s pathetic.
Realist, thanks for that. Concise and accurate.
Yes. Charlottesville is a microcosm of US foreign policy …’framing things’ to justify our thuggery.
“WMD” becomes justification to reduce the cradle of civilization to rubble. “Sarin attack on civilians,” with no proof of the protagonists, becomes justification for the deceptively simple and brutal “Assad must go!”
Signs seen on our streets: “Choose Non-Violence Always!” and “Power to the Peaceful!!!”
Your characterization of Robert Parry as a supporter and cheerleader for Trump is Bizarre. I think you may be confused by his disdain for those who are dangerously inventing the story that he is part of a Russian plot to destroy America. It is not so much that he, like myself, seeks to support Trump and all he stands for, but the Hillary Democrats inventing the lies about Russia is a threat to all of us if it provokes a nuclear war. If we are to impeach Trump – which I favor – let it be by legitimate means, which exist in abundance.
You see, Mike, I think we should oppose his terrible domestic policies tooth and nail in the congress using all the tools that the Republicans previously wielded, especially the filibuster, but trying to overthrow him via some confected conspiracy plot involving the Russians is madness, as is opposing his proposed rapprochement with Russia. The sanctions bill was functionally a declaration of war against Russia by the congress. It was based entirely on falsehoods, just as Dubya’s war on Iraq was and hence should be considered treasonous. Apparently, a president can be removed from office on a charge of treason whether true or not (as we will soon see), but unfortunately the constitution gives us no redress when the entire congress betrays the country as this one as done (save for Rand Paul, Bernie Sanders and three GOP congressmen).
That is what I just said above Realist. Probably you didn’t see it before your making your post above. That happens.
So, you don’t even want any validation, corroboration or expansion on what you say, never contradicting any part of your statement? Well, FU, Mike. I’m sick of your simplistic knee-jerk nasty replies. You’ve been acting like an offensive jackass lately.
Above what? You said you want to impeach Trump. What does impeach mean to you? What’s you list of impeachable offenses? [They’ll never use illegal bombing of Syria, BTW, because they all swooned over that.] Are you a fan of Pence? Think he’ll make America better? Jackass doesn’t begin to cover it.
These people need to be prosecuted to the fullest extant of the law. However, the piece assumes that I can’t go out on the internet and find twelve blacks beating up a white person. Now maybe the beating that I found on the internet was justified. So what we should not be doing is condemning all beatings with a broad brush, but first figure out what beatings are “justified beatings” and what beatings are “not-justified beatings”. It was a Utopian Gandhian dream to think that all types of violence should be condemned and it is hard for Americans to deprogram themselves for these idealistic and simplistic ideas. Malcolm X said it best, in the language of realpolitik: “We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary.” Ironically, this was one of the first issues that plagued the early Christians. Because Jesus was a pacifist, theologians like Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas had to come up with “Just War Theology” to absolve and unleash the Christian armies. So, two thousand years later, we still have the same problems… it is kind of sad to see the lack of human progress in this area.
Past experience shows that an easy question to answer. Just ask bobs it will be more than happy to explain to you which acts of violence are and are not justified. If you are lucky it will grace (unjustly and ignorantly) you with it’s brand of hate while posturing and beating it’s chest like it has a monopoly on the moral high ground.
Ain’t the first time racist thugs have been photographed while served as Hilfspolizei (Auxiliary Police) in provocations designed to promote “anti-terrorist” legislation.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/dog-patrol.jpg
Horrible! Hearing Zach Roberts’ first hand account is riveting. Thank you, Mr.Bernstein for sharing this.
We must find a solution, and I must say that last evening on MSM channels there were some hopeful signs. For example, CBS News interviewed two SC leaders of opposite groups who have sat down together with a set of rules for a continued discussion to try to resolve their racial issues in favor of a safer, economically fairer, community. On other channels some sane people showed they wanted to address these issues. I liked Bernstein’s suggestion that “…the people who attacked him need some special education.”
The article and all it says doesn’t preclude the possibility that this was a deep state set-up and that “the people” may already have had some special education. The police complicity seems very apparent in this account.