What happened in Charlottesville? Here is the “drive-by” media narrative: a progressive mayor and his progressive deputy worked to remove a statue of slaveholder and traitor Robert E. Lee from a city park. A vile bunch of neo-nazis and white supremacists came from all over the country to protest and to do violence with peaceful, law-abiding counterdemonstrators. State and local authorities did their best to keep order, and two policeman lost their lives. Despite the best efforts of the police, one white supremacist, with malice aforethought, rammed his car into a harmless, nonviolent group of counterdemonstrators, killing a young woman and injuring others.
This narrative is not completely false: there were neo-nazis and white supremacists involved in the protest in Charlottesville, and many of the protesters came armed. What the mainstream media would prefer to keep off of your radar is that many of the counterdemonstrators came armed, too; that that the armed and violent counterdemonstrators greatly outnumbered the neo-nazis and white supremacists and, it appears, were principally involved in instigating the violence. Many of these armed counterdemonstrators affiliate themselves to the Orwellian-named Antifa—black clad, masked, armed, organized and trained thugs who will go anywhere at anytime to prevent people they don’t like, white supremacists, conservatives, or just plain old Oregon Republicans, from exercising their constitutional rights.
The authorities tried to separate the groups, until they decided that that was too even handed, cleared the park of the protestors, and made them run the gauntlet of the armed counter-protesters. The driver of the car that killed Heather Heyer has no previous criminal record, and some reports claim that he drove into the crowd in a panicked effort to escape counter-protesters who were attacking his car with baseball bats. On that, at least, those who actually want to know what happened will have to wait for the driver’s day in open court.
But if you want to know what really happened in Charlottesville on Saturday, you need to look at what happened in Seattle on Sunday.
In Seattle, a mainstream pro-Trump group called Patriot Prayer held a small rally downtown. Their organizer, Joey Gibson, addressed his crowd in these words, as reported by David Kroman and Lily Fowler:
“We have to find a way to come together, stop the fighting, stop the yelling,” Gibson said, denouncing the violence in Charlottesville. “There’s good and bad people on the right. There’s good and bad people on the left. We need to get the good people together.” Mr. Gibson the offered his mike to whoever wanted to speak: some echoed his message, other opposed it.
In Seattle, as in Charlottesville, the Left was no mood for Sunday school. The counterdemonstrators repeatedly clashed with police, trying to force their way through the police line in order to attack the pro-Trump demonstrators.
But unlike in Charlottesville, Seattle’s police stood their ground, and took their whacks (and silly string) from Antifa. Even though King County Executive, Dow Constantine, felt a shameful and partisan need to slander Patriot Prayer, the police in this instance did their job—recognizing, perhaps, that the group was mounting about as innocuous a political demonstration as it is possible to sponsor these days. Or, perhaps, though Seattle is a deep-blue city with a long and rich history of Leftist violence, the city authorities there still actually believe in the Constitution? Or maybe the police just wanted to do their jobs with professionalism? Whatever the explanation may be, we can be thankful that the police department in Seattle seems above the exploitative scoring of political points in which the authorities in Charlottesville and King County’s own Dow Constantine seemed all too ready to engage.
In Charlottesville, the nasty Left and the nasty Right showed up in force, and got what they came for, perhaps because the city and the state of Virginia did less than their best to keep the predictable from turning out as predicted. In Seattle, democracy—and not just violent and unhinged extremists—was in the streets. There just might be hope for America, thanks to Patriot Prayer, the Constitution, and Seattle’s liberal city government, which (praise the Lord) bet big on liberty and won.
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I give it a C + for effort.
I think perhaps b/c Seattle is so deep blue they don’t see pro-Trump demonstrators as a threat whereas in purple Virginia it is important to play politics and distort the narrative.
Cloud314s
Portland is no less Blue and they have failed on this.
Let’s face it — what happened in Seattle is sort of an outlier. The police will do their jobs but have to follow orders just like the military. When they are told to stand down, it’s either follow orders or face discipline. That is what is happening all over the country, and has for some time. Recall, after the media saturation coverage of hippies getting beat down in Chicage by Mayor Daley’s cops, Daley ended up being reelected. Nixon was reelected after the Kent State “massacre” media frenzy. Americans want law and order, not riots.
This brilliant philologist in Tel-Aviv writes about a “nothing” event in Seattle, not conducted by Seattle libs/lefties/”progressives”/Democrat fools, but somehow correctly defended by Seattle police, and contrasts it with the savagery of the Charlottsville libs/lefties/”progressives”/Democrat event? Well done, Mr Kochin. Keep up your great philology and scholarship and writing about such things. Thank you.
Small correction here: You left the impression that the Seattle police had to take their cues from the King County Exec, but not the case. Seattle’s cops are under the jurisdiction of the city’s pedophile mayor, Ed Murray. Even the county officers patrolling unincorporated area in King County report to the separately elected sheriff, and not to the county exec.
Meant to distinguish carefully between city and county.
A lot of my Seattle acquainstances are quoting Constantine, so I put him in the piece.
Charlottesville, the town that let a serial killer operate for years whilst engaging in a witch hunt to castrate immature drunken frat boys in a hoax rivaled only by the hoax of Duke Lacrosse Team ‘assaults’. With a police force like that I’m surprised there weren’t dozens of people killed.
Its hilarious how people on the right always want to try to make excuses for their side when one of them does something bad. The driver who you tried to make sound like an innocent victim was a member of a nazi hate group called Vanguard America and his teacher said he was fascinated with Hitler. but hey, i’m sure he was totally a nice guy and didn’t intentionally run over those people…. lol Hey, I bet when Anders Breivik killed 77 people, he didn’t meant do it either. I’m sure the gun just accidentally went off 77 times or maybe he felt like his life was in danger from all of those scary normal people around him. lol