Erection of Lee Monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, 1924

VDare claims the police were on ANTIFA’s side.

[T]he police did not protect demonstrators from Antifa and did little to prevent confrontations. Attendees of the demonstration, rather than walking a clear path to the park, were instead forced to walk through a line of screaming protesters. Liberal clergyman and elderly women held signs about “peace” and “love” and smiled benevolently—as violent Leftist protesters attacked from the crowd. They are as culpable as the Antifa themselves for the violence unleashed.

But that was not close to the worst. Demonstrators did not need protection from Antifa. All the police would have had to do to ensure a safe demonstration was simply go home—which is what happened in Berkeley. Patriots equipped with shields, inured to Antifa tactics of throwing bricks and spraying mace, had secured Lee Park (excuse me, “Emancipation Park”) and may indeed have outnumbered both Antifa and counter-demonstrators in terms of pure numbers. Several were armed, and the city fathers should be offering Unite The Right activists tearful tributes for the latter’s saint-like restraint in not opening fire despite more than justified provocation.

If police had done nothing, the public would have been safer. Instead, unforgivably, the police attacked (not dispersed—attacked) the legal demonstration, threatening attendees with arrest if they stayed in Lee Park.

Then activists, totally unprotected by police, were deliberately funneled into a gauntlet of attacking Communists, in a kind of Kill Zone. Injuries on both sides were predictable. (Of course, much like cuckservatives who bow and scrape to the Main Stream Media, the police were then insulted by the Communists for their trouble.

This could have been a relatively stable situation: a patriot demonstration protected by its own shield wall (and ideally, by police who actually did their job) along with a separate group of Leftist protesters, with both groups enjoying the right to free speech supposedly guaranteed them by the Constitution.

Instead, the police precipitated a running battle which engulfed all of Charlottesville. The result: Antifa running wild and chasing down isolated pockets of Unite The Right attendees as the latter defended themselves as best they could, with bystanders were caught in the melee. Police showed no interest in doing anything other than threatening patriots with arrests for “unlawful assembly.”

In contrast, of course, Leftists were free to disobey the laws and marched merrily down the streets, many chanting “Black Lives Matter!”, causing chaos as they went. As Rebel Media’s Faith Goldy reported, this was an absurd “double standard.” Anarcho-Tyranny was the order of the day in C-Ville.

I don’t look upon VDare as an unimpeachable source, but we are not going to find a lot of descriptions of yesterday’s violence sympathetic to the demonstrators trying to defend the statue. It does make sense that the police would be on counter-demonstrators’ side, they are working for the same City Council that renamed the park and that voted to remove the statue of General Lee.

RTWT