Nolte better articulates what I’ve been saying here: the violence from the left is given a “by” and a wink and a nod. It’s OK for violence from the Alt-Left because of the evil from the Alt-Right. That’s crazy talk.
My opinion is not the popular one but what I saw in Charlottesville Saturday is what President Trump saw — hate, violence and bigotry from “many sides.” And when you are the President of the United States attempting to do the most important thing, which is to restore law and order, what you cannot do is be seen as taking sides, even if doing so will appease the MSM and those in the GOP who foolishly seek to appease the MSM.
Trump singling out or in any way calling special attention to the white supremacists would only embolden the left-wing supremacists in the Antifa movement, the group that might have been responsible for the outbreak of violence Saturday.
No, what I saw Saturday was the equivalent of the Bolsheviks vs. the Mensheviks, the National Socialists (Nazis) vs. the Communists, naked evil vs. naked evil. A pox on both.
What a lot of other people also saw on Saturday, though, and this includes members of the national media, is police officers standing idly by as violence within their line of sight went unchallenged. From Pro Publica:
There was nothing haphazard about the violence that erupted today in this bucolic town in Virginia’s heartland. At about 10 a.m. today, at one of countless such confrontations, an angry mob of white supremacists formed a battle line across from a group of counter-protesters, many of them older and gray-haired, who had gathered near a church parking lot. On command from their leader, the young men charged and pummeled their ideological foes with abandon. One woman was hurled to the pavement, and the blood from her bruised head was instantly visible.
Standing nearby, an assortment of Virginia State Police troopers and Charlottesville police wearing protective gear watched silently from behind an array of metal barricades — and did nothing.
I’m not in the habit of second-guessing the police before all the facts are known, and we should also keep in mind that police officers follow orders from politicians and that some kind of “stand down” order might have been at work here. Nevertheless, there are a number of witnesses who claim to have seen this and this is not the first time Antifa has been able to start or at least provoke and/or participate in mob violence, this is not the first time Antifa has won what is called the “hecklers veto“:
In the free speech context, a heckler’s veto comprises either of two situations in which a person who disagrees with a speaker’s message is able to unilaterally trigger events that result in the speaker being silenced.
Actually, a better description of what Antifa keeps winning is a “rioters veto,” or physical access to free speech events that allows them to shut them down using riot tactics: personal violence, property damage, chaos and confusion.