Chanting “White lives matter!” “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists carrying torches marched in a parade through the University of Virginia campus Friday night.It's being reported elsewhere that the white nationalists attacked the counterprotesters with "swung torches, pepper spray and lighter fluid."
... the march lasted 15 to 20 minutes before ending in skirmishes when the marchers were met by a small group of counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder.
A short brawl erupted after at least one of the counterprotesters apparently deployed a chemical spray, which affected the eyes of a dozen or so marchers. It left them floundering and seeking medical assistance....
The march came on the eve of the Unite the Right rally, a gathering of groups from around the country whose members have said they are being persecuted for being white and that white history in America is being erased.
The Saturday rally is being held at noon at Emancipation Park, formerly Lee Park, home to a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that the city of Charlottesville voted to remove earlier this year.
The protesters carried torches, which is both chilling and absurd (absurd because they're tiki torches).
Among their chants was "Blood and soil."
#Charlottesville 9:56pm 🔘 CHANTS: "One people, one nation, end immigration" & "blood and soil" pic.twitter.com/FbM1N8Ie1r
— Alejandro Alvarez (@aletweetsnews) August 12, 2017
Other chants: “You will not replace us” and “Jew will not replace us.”
You might assume this is huge news in right-wing media. It isn't, at least so far. It's nowhere on Breitbart's front page (though the front page does feature stories such as "Starbucks Attracts Refugees with Latent TB"). Daily Caller? Nothing. Infowars? Nothing, although Infowars and its news spinoff Newswars both feature an AP story about the League of the South's perpetual calls for Southern secession.
Below the top block of stories (about North Korea), Fox News has the front-page headline "VIRGINIA ON GUARD: White Nationalist Rally Prompts Safety Precautions." The story, which is fairly neutral, focuses on today's planned protests (and Governor Terry McAuliffe's call for everyone to stay away from the protest site); there are a couple of paragraphs about what happened last night. At Drudge the demonstration is a sidebar (Venezuela is Drudge's top story), and Drudge also features the secession story, which is above the story about last night's demonstration.
Maybe it's early yet -- none of these folks are serious 24/7 newsgatherers. Maybe they haven't lined up their talking points yet. (How do we blame this on liberals?)
But they're not jumping on the story. They seem rather embarrassed by it.
Understandably, I think -- it gives the game away. They've spent so much time telling us that liberal accusations of racism are hype that they don't want to expose evidence that they're not hype. They've put so much effort into telling us that defenders of Confederate monuments wish only to preserve "heritage" and "history" that they inevitably want to downplay a demonstration that links support of Confederate monuments to white nationalism.
We'll see how the coverage evolves on the right. Meanwhile, here's my favorite comment, from a thread about Charlotttesville at Reddit's r/The_Donald:
Yeah, bummer.
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