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I'm on mobile so I'm gonna keep this short. Please search for some articles on this so you can get more information than I'll provide here, and also fact check what I wrote.

Various statues are planned to be removed in Charlottesville. White nationalists and supremacists and related groups were not happy about this and planned a protest for today. Governor warns, they picked up info that some were planning violence. White supremacists come with body armor and guns. An unmarked car hits counter protestors intentionally. One person has died, according to recent reports.

White-Nationalist is a little light of a term

Gotta call them what they are.

Terrorists?
Because what happened today is nothing short of domestic terrorism.

They literally called themselves Nazis. They were terrorizing black churchgoers and using Homophobic slurs. Like I stated earlier, this is why you don't platform nazis.

Wait, isn't Charlottesville nearby where Christian Weston Chandler lives?

Please don't tell me he was involved in this in any way.

@BrentD15
Well, all sides do do it. I mean antifa was basically doing this with assaulting people with bikelocks, pepper-spraying people, and attempting to gun down republican politicians.
Think about it like this, Neo-Nazis are the radicals of the right, and Antifa are the radicals of the left. Radicals of either side will do this shit.

If it makes you feel better, just know that both radical groups are considered domestic terrorist organizations in America. We just got a reminder today that Neo-Nazis are just as capable of terrible shit as Antifa is.

Who?

Read this entire wiki on the guy.
https://sonichu.com/cwcki/Main_Page

Your centrist pandering is completely bullshit. Antifa wasn't being protected by policeman like the scumbags in Charlottesville and aren't given platforms on established media to spread hate and fear. Antifa aren't described as "dapper and well educated anti-racists". Antifa aren't given the benefit of the doubt and are blamed by "economic anxiety" or "political correctness". America treats white supremacy with more sympathy than civil rights leaders of all people.

"Life has many sides, Ed-boys!"

6 million Jews were murdered in Nazi Germany. The violence did not come from "both sides."

When Antifa marches through the street chanting Heil [ Leader in Power] both sides do it will be an applicable argument.

Antifa has never held any political power, and has no sign of ever gaining political power in the U.S. U.S. Politicians have a long standing history with the KKK.

There were no shortages of police officers ready to set up snipers at Ferguson and Baltimore protests, long before they became riots. Known Neo-Nazi groups were allowed to set up a legal rally and police didn't come until after they started beating student protesters.

It's not to say Antifa isn't a problem, the G20 Protests and Berkeley more than prove that, but Antifa hasn't done even a tenth of what the Far-Right has done in America.

Not to mention that Antifa was not the sole group to show up to oppose them. BLM came against the obvious racial elements of the rally. Nazis were the only ones to show up for the right.

Aparently /pol/ has been doxxing the wrong guy in an effort to try and place the blame for the car plowing through Anti-Nazi protesters on some guy who made Anti-Trump comments on facebook.

Both sides are still capable of doing bad things. I'm not denying that Neo-Nazis have done worse things in the past (mostly because Antifa as it is now hasn't existed until literally a few months ago). What I am saying is just because of that we shouldn't just ignore what Antifa does until it gets that bad. We should stop it before it does.

I never said that Neo-Nazis are somehow "better" than Antifa, or vice versa. What I am saying is just because one group of fuckheads do something bad doesn't completely erase the entirety of the bad things the opposing group of fuckheads did.

For fuck's sake, a lot of people (some even on this site) used that SAME FUCKING ARGUMENT when talking about Antifa.

Heartless bastards.

/pol/ being complete dumb fucks? How surprising.

But yeah, now isn't the time to pull the "both sides" cards, it just deflects from the situation at hand. Both sides weren't responsible for mowing down a crowd of people in a car, one side was.

Apparently someone hijacked a helicopter or something.

Literally what the fuck is going on in Charlottesville right now? All this over a stupid statue?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

A helicopter observing the rally crashed.
Both occupants died.

Does anyone know if the protests are still occurring or what they been dealt with? It's starting to look like war down there

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/896501317912240128

Police Chief says incident was premeditated.

So is the car incident being called a terrorist attack yet? Im thinking if the car backed up for another go then you cant really say he wasnt looking to cause deaths.

Cant really see any excuse for the usual deflections of 'violence on both sides!' Also r/the_donald continues to be the worst subreddit by defending neo-nazis.

Senator Ted Cruz is calling for the incident to be investigated as an act of domestic terrorism.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170806023638/https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6rsng3/unite_the_right_in_charlottesville_next_week/

Alright, comprehensive, sourced story. Then I'll respond to some people in this thread and give my thoughts.

This article is a pretty comprehensive cover on what happened.

The event was planned to be in response to the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. Before the event could actually start, they were dispersed by police due to violent conflicts. Some of the neo nazis/white supremacists/white nationalists proposed simply leaving. Others had different ideas.

One man in a white military helmet with a walker talkie, who declined to give his name, spoke about a need for “shooters” who could return to the center of Charlottesville and catalogued with his political allies the number of guns available to them.

Some counter protestors didn't stop adding to the responsibility they had for the earlier violent altercations; the article linked above notes that when some of the armed Unite the Right protestors tried to leave in their car, the counter protestors chased them down and threw things at it, attempting to break the windows.

At that point, the car crash happened. It sped through a group of counter-protestors, then backed up at full speed and hit more people. Several people were injured; one died.

Two more people, law enforcement using a helicopter to assist people on the ground, died in a helicopter crash later on.

As linked above, the violence that happened was being considered, at least in part, premeditated by the police, and the driver of the car has been arrested.

In response to all this, Lexington, Kentucky is going to move ahead to remove 2 monuments.

Trump responded to the violence as follows:

Trump said "many sides" were involved in the Charlottesville incidents, drawing fire from across the political spectrum for not specifically denouncing the far right. The violence presented Trump with perhaps the first domestic crisis of his young administration.

"We’re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia," Trump told reporters at his New Jersey golf course.

"We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides."

He also sent his condolences to the family of the woman killed over Twitter.

Condolences to the family of the young woman killed today, and best regards to all of those injured, in Charlottesville, Virginia. So sad!

I advise you check out these photos, courtesy of the Washington Post. You can read about this, but it doesn't compare to seeing people with Ku Klux Klan patches, doing Nazi salutes, and holding shields with the Sonnenrad on it.

Zozzler said:

White-Nationalist is a little light of a term

Gotta call them what they are.

While I missed at first that there were nazis there, it was also attended by white nationalists and supremacists – groups which heavily overlap, but are still distinct.

@Tyranid Warrior

I might have sympathy for your line of thought if you hadn't looked at a violent protest happening primarily due to the actions of an extreme fringe right-wing group and one of your first thoughts was "remember, the other extreme fringe could do this too!" All it rings to me is that you're trying to pull attention off of the horrendously immoral behavior and speech of the protestors, which is not a look you want to give yourself. I'm going to assume that's not your goal out of charity.

No, we do not want to wait for a dangerous group to get more power. However, that in no way justifies shifting attention from a dangerous group that already has power that is also already doing horrible things to another, potentially dangerous group.

Ryumaru Borike said:

Does anyone know if the protests are still occurring or what they been dealt with? It’s starting to look like war down there

It seems to have dispersed now. However, as provided in the first link in my above post, Richard Spencer indicated they were going to come back eventually.

@apanda and Bitter Brit

It was definitely premeditated, and I've heard it called a terrorist attack by other groups already. The police who apprehended the driver seem to be treating it as a homicide, not terrorism. I am not hopeful that it'll be treated as such, but we'll see.

@Tchefuncte Bonaparte

T_D is a safe space full of absolute children on a mental level. They condemn nazism in the post yet fail to realize how nazis are gonna be supporting the rally. The post is utterly idiotic and the upvotes indicate the sub at large likes it. It's no surprise they'd do something that fucking idiotic.

After looking at some of these articles that have come out in regards to what happened, which still appears to look like a massive clusterfuck because half say so and so did this and the other half say so and so did that, I think I might've realized something unsettling.

These radical groups are basically in an infinite loop of feeding each other.

Think about it a little bit, there are these two groups (well technically three or four but those three pretty much function as one whole group), the Alt-Right and the Antifa. The Alt-Right basically rose in response to the years of public shaming of white males which has culminated into a resurgence of these hate groups that have effectively united under one banner. Then, in response to this, a left-wing group that is about as equally capable of hate has sprung up to combat this other group.

What's unsettling about this, however, is that now they effectively feed off of each other now. Nowadays, the Alt-Right will use the excuse of "these violent Antifa anarchists are hurting people!" in order to attack Antifa. While Antifa then uses the excuse of "these violent right-wing fascists are hurting minorites!" in order to attack the Alt-Right. Basically the actions of either group fuels the motivation of their opposing group.

And you can see this basically take place in any protest now. In pretty much every protest there will be contingents of Alt-Right members and Antifa members that always ultimately end up in violent confrontations. We saw this in the Battle for Berkeley Protests, we saw this in president Trump's inauguration, and we saw it today in the Charlottesville protest. And I'm certain in future protests we will see the same thing. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter who started what, because it just continues to perpetuate this cycle regardless.

What scares me about this is there doesn't seem any feasible way to break out of this infinite cycle without one group becoming completely marginalized. If Antifa wins and the Alt-Right backs down, we'll just go back to the years of white males constantly getting shamed again and probably worse. If the Alt-Right wins and Antifa backs down, actual sexism and racism will run rampant in society. And if neither back down, things will get progressively worse and worse until we literally have a civil war on our hands. The only way I see this ending peacefully is that both sides back down at the same time, but that's not going to happen. Both sides hate their opposition so much they will jump at any given chance to attack them while their down.

This is just a reflection on everything that has happened this last year or so. In the regards to the actual protest that has happened here, I honestly don't know what the hell happened besides the fact that Alt-Right and Antifa people met up and fought again, but this time the Alt-Right has the "honor" of being the first to actually kill someone in a very barbaric display of violence. All I know is this is but another battle in this "war" between the Alt-Right and Antifa, which to me doesn't seem like it'll ever end until the complete destruction of one side, because the opposing side won't settle for anything less.

@Rivers
I will say I wasn't entirely the best frame of mind when writing that (but I see myself as at least a slightly honorable person so I don't seek to wipe out evidence of mistakes I've made in the past). I was just…mad at all this really. Mostly because I just hate to see this stuff happen, how every protest like this always seems to be ruined through violence on the part of Antifa and the Alt-Right. As well I remember a while back when a similar situation with Antifa happened people kept citing "they're only doing it in response to all the horrible stuff these people did." To have those people do the opposite thing here and condemn the action without taking into account what might've triggered it just seemed like a double-standard to me at the time.

The Alt-Right basically rose in response to the years of public shaming of white males

Neo-Nazism does not deserve such a rationalization. Certainly its adherents think of themselves as victims and certainly its ranks are composed primarily of insecure young white men; but when an attempt to remove a symbol of a once-was white supremacy is met with antisemitism and calls for an ethnostate, they make clear that they are the victims of nothing but a diseased ideology.

Hitler's fascism rose by feeding on the legitimate fears of communism in the population of germany.

Is it so unreasonable to consider the so far unattended fears of antifa a comparable breeding ground?

I agree with his claim that the activities of Antifa and Neo-Nazis feed into each other. But few if any of the complaints that resulted in the formation of the alt-right could be considered legitimate by any sane person. To imply that the prejudices of Twitter pundits or college sophomores are to blame for the rise of a supremacist movement is to also implicitly excuse the myriad illnesses of the Neo-Nazi mind: the conspiracy theorizing, the entitlement, the insecurity manifesting as bigotry, the political and economic illiteracy among other things, turned up to fever pitch.

Just as your average Antifa had long been radicalized into communism or anarchism by the time they were persuaded to attack their perceived political enemies, a person does not read a few news articles about college protests and decide that this warrants the destruction of Global Zionism. They have at that point already decided to accept the tenets of so noxious an ideology: the impetus is entirely on them, and I don't accept any attempts, explicit or implicit, to make excuses on their behalf.

The bastards are planning to to the same thing in Boston next week.

What are the chances of that one turning into a total shitstorm?

Well 1 is technically still a probability, but generally you don't use words like "odds" or "chances" for a certainty.

I honestly think they're trying to bait "the left" into violence towards them to fuel their persecution complex.

What a cluster fuck of a culture war. Bostons either going to fizzle out before anything happens due to the police there going full riot gear mode. Or it's gonna be like this but much worse, because now the other side of the isle has a fair bit of warning of where the Nazis are headed, and the desire for revenge is likely to resonate with the fanatics and extremists on that side.

Because this is, at the end of the day, a display of what happens when extremism is allowed to fester. Freedom of speech is important and so no view should be squelched. Just as a left wing protester can chant death to America, burn effigies of people, and call for a purge of all people who enjoy capitalism, you have those on the right who preach of killing Jews, oppressing minorities, and also probably chant death to America as well. Both are allowed because both are views, and when you start to strangle out views, you only defeat yourself.

Because it wasn't that long ago that viewpoints such as "lgbtq people deserve respect" and "minorities are no different from white people" were fledgeling views considered in the same vein of immortality as racism and sexism is today. Do not forget that had a brief period in our history where we disregarded viewpoints we didn't like as being worth existing and held trials for people to see if they were communist or not.

Any law or change to the law you make to surpress speech you hate now, will be used against speech you do like later on. That's how the system works, and I think people need to consider that more carefully before they say the types of things they say, and campaign for the removal of rights they think are too easily abused.

Trump still hasn't really said much about this, has he? All i've seen so far is copy/paste tragic event lines.

Just as a PSA, please, anyone who currently is residing in Boston right now, regardless of your political affiliation, get out now.

I'm fairly sure that during this next protest more people are going to die on both sides this time. We are literally going to have a battle take place.

Judging by the downvotes and upvotes this threads becoming as polarized as one could expect on an internet discussion of free speech on a non-political site.

Regardless, I hope the Boston Police Department deploys their full arsenal of riot gear and has their police force properly prepared for the violent clashes that are going to spark if the Boston Protest takes place. Say or think what some of you do about the Police, these kinds of violent acts can only really be avoided by police intervention before it gets ugly.

Why do people keep saying that le evil SJWs led to the creation of the Alt-Right, that's just beyond silly. There would have been no Alt-Right had our only problem been miserable losers bitching about straight White males on Tumblr. Nationalist movements are not born because of hurt fee-fees.

>demonize FUCKING white males for past few years

There is a world outside of /pol/ you know, right?

>Why do people keep saying that le evil SJWs led to the creation of the Alt-Right, that’s just beyond silly.

Especially considering they consist almost entirely on college campuses and online forums. meanwhile, the alt-right actually hold political power.

The alt-right are a bunch of cowards. They can't even handle stupid teenagers on the internet saying stuff they don't like.

Antifa was basically born out of hurt fee-fees from Donald Trump being elected. Why not something similar for the Alt-Right? Doesn't make either of their motivations any better.

@poochyena

>White people are suppose to "man up" and not take the constant shaming they get.
>Minorities can literally get people thrown in jail for shaming them.

Well now, ain't that just not fair? We're all suppose to be equal right? Then shouldn't that mean that either everyone gets shamed and has to man up and not take it seriously, or everyone can throw people in jail for shaming them?

Until one of those two things happen, there will not be equality.

Antifa is an organization that's been opposing fascism, or what they perceive as fascism for many decades, it wasn't created just recently. It's just that they have more work now, I suppose.

The Alt-Right has an explicit goal of trying stop the White genocide, among other less important things. I guess you could say that some of the Left's inflammatory rhetoric helps to recruit more followers, but that's about it. "Triggering feminists xd" is not what it's all about.

If you've spent time on an American college campus you'd know that the radical leftism isn't just confined to tumblr.

You are right that Antifa has existed for a rather long time, but not in the way it is now.

It originally came into being back during World War II when there was legitimate fascists attempting to take control of the country through organizations such as the Friends of Germany or the German-American Bund. Since then, it splintered into several separate groups and basically went dormant for a long time (primarily because during this time the Red Scare happened and many people started suspecting them of being communists, and you all know what would happen then).

But then this 2016 election has since "reawakened" them in a sense since someone they perceived as a fascist got elected. One problem with them however is that they basically lump everyone who doesn't agree with their ideology as a "fascist," which most right-aligned people really aren't.

@Straight outta Constantinople

This is actually why all this really gets me heated. Yeah, there's the usual tweets of "white genocide is the only good genocide" and "white people are good for nothing," but seeing it happen in real life is really something else.
I've seen this stuff in real life. I've seen "minority rallies" where white people are banned from going, even if they want to support them too. I remember I was actually late to class one time because there was a fucking protest and the protesters made me have to walk a quarter mile around them to get to class. And what gets me about this is a lot of people there basically respond with "thank you sir, may I have another?"
What gets me so pissed off about this rhetoric is that if you replace "white" with any other race you'd immediately get people calling for your head. Really, if someone on Twitter said "black genocide is the only good genocide," they'd have a mob after them. But when they change the word "black" to "white" it's just magically OK for some reason.
No one should have to go through this. Not black people, not white people, not asians, not Middle Eastern people, not Jews, no one.

Oh, I guess you're talking about the American Antifa, fair enough, I don't know much about America, so I just lump all the different Antifa branches together. The European Antifa remained very much active. Especially in Eastern Europe, where we've actually had Antifa and Nationalists literally killing each other. I lump the Alt-Right together the same way, meaning any modern European identitarian movement, since they're all very similar, and not just the autists form 4chan.

Well, the Antifa's goal is protecting what they consider marginalized people at all costs, so I kind of see how they would view legit Right wingers as a threat. Most Right wingers other than, you know, the "OK, just lower the taxes a bit and I don't care about anything else at all" kind of people.

Say, deporting illegals is not even a Right wing position, it's just following the basic law. Supporting traditional marriage as opposed to gay rights is a very basic Conservative position. Both of these have nothing to do with fascism, but you could claim do target marginalized minorities, so Antifa would still have strong feelings about it.

Did you literally just ignore the entire rest of the thread after that point?

Can we please stop the "The Alt-right were pushed to this by the Radical-Left" bullshit? You can use the same argument backwards, saying the Radical-Left was pushed to riot by IRL racists, homophobes, /pol/, the KKK, Trump, etc. It will just go in a circle of people excusing their shitty actions as "Them reacting to oppression/hate" It doesn't matter what they're reacting to, it doesn't excuse violence and murder!

I'd also like to point out that it's also pretty infuriating after months of seeing the entirety of the left demonized in the comment section after every college tantrum, that when the right does the same shit, it's also the left's fault. Hypocrisy like that drives me nuts.

In regards to the protest, did anything else come up about that helicopter crashing? How did that happen? Did someone shoot them down or something?

I think both need to be beaten down when they do this, I just think the left's antifa came first and whose enabling by the government were what made the alt right emerge.

what are you even talking about?