Tag: charlottesville riot
Michigan GOP Official Endorsed Violence, Praised White Supremacist 'Heroes'

Michigan GOP Official Endorsed Violence, Praised White Supremacist 'Heroes'

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Shane Trejo, who heads one of Michigan's Republican committees, wrote a 2017 piece that portrayed white supremacists who participated in the Charlottesville rally that year as "civil rights heroes." The Republican official has also praised an anti-Semitic white supremacist for engaging in political violence and said that the left has failed to "stop white brilliance from emerging," adding that "the cream rises to the top, after all."

Trejo is the chair of the Michigan 11th District Republican Committee. He's also a commentator who writes for the right-wing site Big League Politics, where he has been a source of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen in Michigan.

Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill wrote on November 16 that Trejo "made headlines earlier this year when he encouraged the ouster of a fellow Republican who had voted to certify President Joe Biden's election." She reported that Trejo "used to host a podcast with a member of the white supremacist group Identity Evropa" and that he and the co-host "appear to have spoken favorably about white supremacists."

Trejo was also the "News Editor" for the now-dormant website The Liberty Conservative, where he celebrated white supremacists and their use of political violence.

In August 2017, white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the "Unite the Right" rally in support of white nationalism. On August 12, a white supremacist killed anti-racism activist Heather Heyer with his car.

In an August 11, 2017, piece previewing the rally, Trejo defended the organizers of the event by writing:

Having proclaimed the virtues of civil rights for generations, the left is now turning their backs on their principles and openly discriminating against white people who they suspect to be 'racist.'

Unwilling to let the protesters peacefully rally in favor of the Robert E. Lee statue in Emancipation Park, organizers first had their permit for the rally revoked before leftist businesses joined in the witch hunt.

The conclusion of the post directed people to a Facebook event page for the "Unite the Right" rally.

Trejo's piece carried the headline "'Unite The Right' Protesters Become Civil Rights Heroes As Leftists Mount Discrimination Campaign." An accompanying image for the piece featured white supremacists including Richard Spencer, Augustus Invictus, and Jason Kessler.

Shane Trejo piece: "Civil Rights Heroes"

In a November 18, 2016, piece for The Liberty Conservative, Trejo claimed that "unhinged behavior" by "victim groups" has "emboldened the right and has caused whiteness to bounce back." He added: "The left has failed. Even their artificial constructs cannot stop white brilliance from emerging. The cream rises to the top, after all."

Trejo also praised violent white supremacist and antisemite Kyle Chapman, who is also known as "Based Stickman." As the Southern Poverty Law Center summarized, "Chapman was transformed from an obscure Bay Area commercial diver to celebrated right-wing meme in March 2017 when ... he beat a counter-protestor over the head with a wooden rod during the #March4Trump in Berkeley, California."

In an April 24, 2017, piece Trejo claimed, "By inflicting righteous violence onto the skull of a lowly communist, Stickman emboldened many others to stand with him as well." Trejo wrote:

Having not been properly indoctrinated, Stickman failed to understand that it was improper for him to do anything but sit on your hands in the face of virulent leftism. He didn't realize that the big money donors come first, and fighting for freedom comes second. He simply acted like a man, and heeded the call to stand up for his rights. By inflicting righteous violence onto the skull of a lowly communist, Stickman emboldened many others to stand with him as well.

Trejo's piece carried the headline "Based Stickman Shows Libertarians That Bold Grassroots Leadership is Necessary."

Neo-Nazi Spencer Caught In Multiple Lies At Charlottesville Trial

Neo-Nazi Spencer Caught In Multiple Lies At Charlottesville Trial

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

In a shock to absolutely no one, Richard Spencer serving as his own lawyer has proven pretty terrible for, well, Richard Spencer. The glass-jawed Nazi known for barely being able to take a punch (among other undesirable traits) was forced to represent himself in a civil lawsuit after his real lawyer dropped Spencer for failing to pay up and adhere to his legal advice.

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Supreme Court of The United States

Supreme Court Upholds Conviction Of Neo-Nazi Thugs On Riot Charges

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

If white nationalists who engaged in acts of thuggish violence at protests during the Trump years were hoping they could escape culpability with the help of the Trump-appointed courts, then that gambit is not looking very solid right now, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The high court on Monday announced it would refuse the case of two members of the Rise Above Movement (RAM)—a band of neo-Nazi alt-righters from Southern California who like to travel around the country to participate in far-right protests with the intention of inflicting violence on "leftists"—who wanted to overturn the riot laws federal prosecutors had used to convict them for their violent roles in the August 2017 "Unite the Right" riots in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Members of RAM had flown from California to Virginia in August to participate in the event, and had committed numerous acts of violence there, at the culmination of which a young white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a young woman named Heather Heyer and maiming 19 other people. Three of the men pleaded guilty to felony federal charges of conspiracy to riot and crossing state lines to riot in May 2019; two of them, Michael Miselis and Benjamin Daley, filed appeals.

In 2020, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had considered the men's conviction and sentencing on the grounds that the Anti-Riot Law used to imprison them was unconstitutionally overbroad. It ruled that while certain provisions in the law—such as those criminalizing speech that "tends to encourage a riot"—are unconstitutional First Amendment violations, it nonetheless upheld the men's convictions because those charges fell under other parts of the law—namely, the men's "substantial conduct," which included "pushing, punching, kicking, choking, head-butting, and otherwise assaulting numerous individuals, and none of which 'were in self-defense'"—which the court found were perfectly constitutional.

The Supreme Court's announcement leaves the convictions of Miselis and Daly, as well as the rulings in their appeals, in place. As is typical, the high court offered no comment in turning away the cases.

Daley faces a 37-month prison term, while Miselis was sentenced to 27 months.

The Rise Above Movement's existence and its activities were first exposed in detail in a ProPublica investigative piece published in October 2017. Nearly a year later, federal prosecutors filed charges against the men and another Charlottesville participant, Cole Evan White. Four other RAM members, including co-founder Robert Rundo, were charged in October 2018 with conspiracy to riot as well; however, their convictions were overturned on appeal in June 2019 by a federal judge who deemed the law unconstitutionally overbroad. Those charges were reinstated this March, primarily as a result of the Ninth Circuit's 2020 ruling.

RAM, as a 2019 sentencing memo explains, "represented itself as a combat-ready, militant group of a new nationalist white supremacy and identity movement. RAM regularly held hand-to-hand and other combat training for its members and associates to prepare to engage in violent confrontations with protestors and other individuals at purported political rallies. All three of the defendants attended these trainings to prepare for their violence."

Like most far-right street-brawling groups, their entire raison d'être was to provoke fights with far-left and anarchist groups, particularly those attached to various campuses in California and elsewhere. "RAM's goal when they attended these rallies was simple: They sought to provoke physical conflict, or—even better—they looked for any reason to serve as an excuse which they believed would justify their use of violence against their ideological foes," the memorandum notes. Their violence included events in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, California, in the spring of 2017.

At the Aug. 12, 2017, event in Charlottesville, the RAM gang once again played a leading role in provoking violence on the streets, both at the Aug. 11 tiki torch march onto the University of Virginia campus and at the main Aug. 12 event in Charlottesville around the Robert E. Lee statue in a downtown park. The men were especially exultant about the Friday night march in which they had massively outnumbered counterprotesters and had mercilessly assaulted them: "After the students and protestors left, Miselis's own Go-Pro video captured him yelling 'total victory' and 'we beat you tonight, we'll beat you tomorrow too!'"

The next day, they engaged in such violence as punching protesters and knocking them to the ground, at which point they began kicking them so hard that Miselis broke his own toe. Daley infamously attacked a feminist and began strangling her, caught in an image reproduced frequently, and then threw her to the pavement with such force that she suffered a concussion.

Afterwards, online conversations made clear that "the defendants' primary regret about their time in Charlottesville was not having exacted enough violence."

Rundo, who fled the country after being cleared on appeals, is now an international fugitive. He is believed to be currently hiding out in Bosnia while being sought by police there, after having been expelled from Serbia.

On Charlottesville Anniversary, Activists Hit Organizers With Anti-KKK Act

On Charlottesville Anniversary, Activists Hit Organizers With Anti-KKK Act

Two years have passed since the Unite the Right rally of August 2017, when hundreds of white supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia and one of them murdered counter-demonstrator Heather Heyer by driving his vehicle into a crowd of counter-demonstrators. Many other acts of white nationalist terrorism have occurred since then — mostly recently, an anti-Latino attack in El Paso, Texas that left 22 people dead. But activist Amy Spitalnick, in an August 12 article for NBC News, explains how a law used to fight the KKK in the 19th century can be used to fight extremists in Charlottesville in 2019.

Spitalnick, who heads the organization Integrity First for America, notes that her organization is “working with a coalition of Charlottesville community members injured in the Unite the Right rally to sue the two dozen individuals and organizations responsible.” And the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, Spitalnick stresses, is “central to our case” and is “one of the few legal remedies intended to deal with private — rather than government — conduct that violates civil rights.”

The KKK was founded in 1865 and quickly became a major source of domestic terrorism in the United States. Six year later, the Ku Klux Klan Act was passed by a post-Civil War Congress and signed into law by Republican President Ulysses S. Grant — and it offered a “civil remedy,” Spitalnick explains.

“Following its passage,” Spitalnick recalls, “the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan organization was effectively dismantled and did not resurface until decades later.” And 148 years later, that law is still on the books and can be used to address the harm caused by events like “what happened in Charlottesville.”

The organizers of the Unite the Right Rally, Spitalnick emphasizes, engaged in activity that violated the civil rights of Charlottesville residents.

“Over August 11 and 12, 2017, they marched military-style on the University of Virginia and downtown Charlottesville,” Spitalnick asserts. “They carried semiautomatic weapons, swastikas and other hate symbols — as well as torches to evoke the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. They chanted ‘Jews will not replace us,’ ‘blood and soil’ and ‘white lives matter.’ They violently attacked students, clergy and other community members.”

Spitalnick goes on to discuss her lawsuit against the Unite the Right organizers, writing, “If everything they own now and in the future can be jeopardized, it makes it much more difficult to recruit followers for these horrific causes. Some defendants cited the lawsuit in deciding against returning to Charlottesville last August.”

Spitalnick wraps up her article by noting that the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 can be used not only against extremists in Charlottesville, but in other places as well.

“The last two years have proven that Charlottesville was not an isolated incident, but a flashpoint in the rise of extremist violence that’s connected to the attacks that followed,” Spitalnick writes. “Before killing 11 Jews in a synagogue last October, the Pittsburgh shooter communicated with some of the Charlottesville leaders…. With this trial — and the judgments we expect to win against these extremists — we can help reverse that deadly and hate-filled cycle.”