August 16, 2017

CHARLOTTESVILLE FALLOUT CONTINUES.

In an artist’s rendering of his bail hearing, James Alex Fields Jr. is seen via video link from jail as he appears before Judge Robert Downer in Charlottesville. (Stringer/Reuters)

-- Years before James Alex Fields was accused of driving his car into a crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville “at a high rate of speed,” his disabled mother had twice called 911 to report violent behavior and threats from her son. Jack Gillum, Michael E. Miller, Arelis R. Hernández and Steve Hendrix report: “[In 2010, Samantha Bloom] — who uses a wheelchair — locked herself in a bathroom, called 911 and said her son had struck her head and put his hands over her mouth when she told him to stop playing a video game … On another occasion, records show, he brandished a 12-inch knife. Once, he spit in her face. ‘Mom is scared he is going to become violent here,’ a dispatcher wrote in a log of the November 2011 call in which [Bloom] requested police help in getting her son to a hospital for assessment. The portrait of a violent teen emerged as Fields was denied bail Monday during his first court appearance in connection with the Charlottesville attack.”
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A TURNING POINT IN THE DEBATE OVER CONFEDERATE MEMORIALS:


-- Unintended consequences: James Fields may do for the debate over Confederate statues what Dylann Roof did to the debate over the Confederate flag with his June 2015 massacre at an African American church in Charleston. It has become more politically untenable for ambitious elected officials to defend the memorials because they don't want to get lumped in with the extremists who descended on Charlottesville to keep the Robert E. Lee statue.

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-- Organizers of Saturday’s rally are now blaming Charlottesville authorities for the violence that played out.

 Politico Magazine’s Ben Schreckinger writes: “Before this weekend’s events, the alt-right had been a bastion of pro-police sentiment — especially when it came to police shootings of unarmed black victims and clashes with the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, the alt-right’s leaders are grappling with the realities of being identifiable members of an unpopular minority group in public. ‘I have never felt like the government or police were against me,’ said white nationalist leader Richard Spencer[.] … [Rally organizer Jason] Kessler claimed the city’s police failed to follow through on plans for protecting the rally that they had discussed with him. He also said that during planning for the rally, one police captain divulged to him that authorities were communicating about the event using their personal emails to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests.”

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A WINDOW INTO RESURGENT RACISM:
-- Bigger picture: “Why are people still racist? What science says about America’s race problem,” by William Wan and Sarah Kaplan

“Many Americans responded to this weekend's violence in Charlottesville with disbelieving horror. How could this happen in America, in 2017? “This is not who we are,” said Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine (D). And yet, this is who we are. Amid our modern clashes, researchers in psychology, sociology and neurology have been studying the roots of racism. … ‘In some ways, it’s super simple. People learn to be whatever their society and culture teaches them. We often assume that it takes parents actively teaching their kids, for them to be racist. The truth is that unless parents actively teach kids not to be racists, they will be,’ said Jennifer Richeson, a Yale University social psychologist.”

Experts are also linking the weekend violence to the scourge of domestic terrorism carried out by white males, who have carried out almost twice as many mass attacks on American soil than Muslims have in recent years.

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-- A Twitter campaign to name attendees of the Unite the Right rally has already forced two universities to come out with condemnations of white supremacy. Avi Selk reports: “[T]he Twitter user @YesYoureRacist asked for help identifying ‘Nazis marching in Charlottesville.’ The anonymous user linked to copious photos and videos of the rally — swastikas and crowds of shouting white men. Within minutes, names began to pour in, and consequences began to unfurl in home towns across the country. The first target was a man spotted in a crowd of tiki-torch-wielding marchers, whom Twitter users identified as Cole White, a cook at a hot dog restaurant in Berkeley, Calif. By Saturday evening, the restaurant had posted signs in its windows and sent a statement to The Washington Post — the cook was no longer employed.”

-- But, but, but: There have been instances of Twitter users misidentifying rally attendees. The New York Times’s Daniel Victor reports: “A man at the rally had been photographed wearing an ‘Arkansas Engineering’ shirt, and the amateur investigators found a photo of [Kyle] Quinn that looked somewhat similar. They were both bearded and had similar builds. By internet frenzy standards, that was proof enough. … Countless people [Mr. Quinn] had never met demanded he lose his job, accused him of racism and posted his home address on social networks. … For someone whose only sin was a passing resemblance to someone else … Mr. Quinn bore the direct consequences of the reckless spread of misinformation in breaking news, a common ritual in modern news events.”

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FBI and DHS Warned of Growing Threat From White Supremacists Months Ago


WHY WERE THE WARNINGS OF LAW ENFORCEMENT IGNORED?

-- Foreign Policy’s Jana Winter first reported “The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in May warned that white supremacist groups had already carried out more attacks than any other domestic extremist group over the past 16 years and were likely to carry out more attacks over the next year[.] … The report, dated May 10, says the FBI and DHS believe that members of the white supremacist movement ‘likely will continue to pose a threat of lethal violence over the next year.’ … The FBI … has already concluded that white supremacists, including neo-Nazi supporters and members of the Ku Klux Klan, are in fact responsible for the lion’s share of violent attacks among domestic extremist groups. White supremacists ‘were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016 … more than any other domestic extremist movement,’ reads the joint intelligence bulletin.”

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-- Vanity Fair’s Sarah Ellison writes on how Charlottesville became “ground zero for white supremacy”: “Charlottesville may always look pretty on the outside, but as someone who attended U.Va., and recently reported on the school, it’s actually a sadly predictable location for the biggest and bloodiest white supremacist rally the nation has seen in decades. Charlottesville is perhaps one of the most liberal towns in the South. It is also one of the whitest.”

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 The deeper cultural resentments and anxieties that Trump is trying to tap into. A survey by PRRI earlier this year found that 48 percent of white working-class Americans agreed with the following statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” Seven in 10 believe the United States “is in danger of losing its culture and identity.” A feeling of cultural displacement was one of the strongest predictors of whether someone supported Trump in the 2016 election, stronger than any economic factor.