SOME INITIAL THOUGHTS ON CHARLOTTESVILLE

A battle of different psychological types.

by Keith Preston

I’m still trying to find out more about what happened in Charlottesville on Saturday. But from reviewing news reports on the incident from across the ideological spectrum, and speaking with people on “both sides” who were present at the melee, here are my initial thoughts.

1. I favor preserving the Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, for the same reason I would favor preserving Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow or the statues of Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston.
2. Decisions about what kinds of public monuments to put up or maintain should be a local community decision with non-residents getting no rightful say in the matter.
3. The Alt-Right people had the right to engage in a peaceful protest/rally and the city of Charlottesville screwed up by trying to revoke their permit to assemble while leaving the permits of counterprotestors intact. A federal court agreed that the revocation of the permit was motivated by political bias, and eventually the permit for the Alt-Rightists was reinstated. Requiring permits to hold a political event is dubious from a constitutional perspective anyway.
4. Counterprotestors, including Antifa, had the right to engage in peaceful protest as well.
5. The Alt-Rightists went over the top by holding a torchlight parade after dark on Friday night. This seems to have been an attempt to intimidate the local community and their political opponents rather than to merely express a point of view. An unnecessarily provocative bad move.
6. The participants in the Alt-Right rally seemed to reflect the entire Alt-Right/Alt-Lite/fellow traveler configuration. My contacts have claimed there were at least a handful of people of color on the Alt-Right side in the demonstration (as is the norm with these events).
7. While it is not true that all participants in the demonstration were neo-Nazis, some clearly were as evidenced by their Roman salutes and displays of the swastika. The organizers of the rally screwed up by allowing groups with this orientation at the rally, and allowing this kind of behavior by those who were present. Neo-Nazis are freaks and losers with a dangerous philosophy that can only detract from any serious political event.
8. The message of the Alt-Right rally was unclear and incoherent, and on par with the usual confused nonsense that goes on at Leftist rallies, i.e. this was an “Occupy Wall Street” of the Right. What was the intended purpose of this demonstration? To defend a statue? Oppose immigration? “Unite the Right”? Unite the Right to do what? Piss off leftists? Piss off local officials in Charlottesville? Would any casual observer have a clue as to what this demo was even about?
9. The carrying of weapons by the Alt-Rightists was legitimate given the well-known violent propensities of the Antifa.
10. There is no evidence that the Alt-Rightists initiated any violence as the rally began on Saturday morning.
11. The initial group of counterprotestors that showed up were also peaceful, consisting mostly of people from the local Charlottesville area.
12. The chaos began when the Antifa and other comparable groups showed up with weapons of their own and began throwing various items, ranging from rocks to water bottles.
13. When the violence began, the police moved in to shutdown the rally, declaring the situation to be a “state of emergency.”
14. The order for such a shutdown seems to have been declared by local Charlottesville officials, probably the mayor or vice-mayor, and arguably in violation of a federal court order. Still looking for additional confirmation on this.
15. Those who ordered the shut down of the Alt-Right demonstration were apparently trying to use the violence instigated by certain subsets of counterprotestors as a pretext for shutting down the rally. Such an action by local officials may have been planned beforehand.
16. By shutting down the rally rather than arresting those responsible for the violence, the police predictably failed to both uphold the law (i.e. the First Amendment bolstered by a federal court order) and protect public safety. Although the primary blame goes to those who were giving the police their orders rather than the individual policemen themselves.
17. The Alt-Rightists who refused to disperse when ordered to do so by the police were engaged in justifiable civil disobedience in defense of their constitutional rights.
18. It has been claimed that the police screwed up by ordering the Alt-Rightists to disperse in such a way that they would come into direct contact with the counterprotestors. I’m still trying to find additional confirmation and details on this.
19. Not all counterprotestors were violent or associated with left-wing extremist organizations. The majority were not. The counterprotestors appear to have represented everyone from local Charlottesville residents, conventional civil rights organizations, ordinarily liberals, those associated with non-violent leftist organizations, loopy but non-violent SJW types and curious onlookers as well as members of violence-prone Antifa, anarcho-communist, and Marxist organizations.
20. While Black Lives Matter was supposedly represented at this event, and people of color were present among the counterprotestors, a super majority of the counterprotestors were white based on the video recordings and photographs taken on Saturday.
21. Most of the actual violence that was initiated during the melee was started by the Antifa and other “hard left” contingents among the counterprotestors. This is not to say that all counterprotestors were to blame for the violence on their side. Again, most of the counterprotestors were non-violent.
22. While the leftists seem to have initiated most of the violence on the collective level, there were plenty of incidents of the rightists initiating violence on an individual and small group level. The most egregious incident of non-lethal violence inflicted by Alt-Rightists reported thus far was the beating of Deandre Harris by five Alt-Rightists with sticks.
23. There have been reports that acid was contained in the pepper spray used by the Antifa on the Alt-Rightist known as “Baked Alaska.” Still looking for confirmation of this.
24. Clearly, the most egregious example of violence on either side was the ramming of a car into a crowd of protestors by Alt-Rightist Jason Fields, killing one person and injuring between 19 and 34 others (I’ve seen conflicting reports as far as the numbers).
25. Assuming that Fields is guilty as charged (innocent until proven guilty and all that), there is of yet no evidence that any other person was involved in carrying out this attack, although it has been reported in the MSM that the feds are conducting an investigation.
26. Some Alt-Rightists, and even at least one journalist covering the event, have claimed that Fields was acting in self-defense in order to avoid a Reginald Denny-like situation. However, the video footage and witness accounts released thus far would seem to make this a highly dubious claim, given the speed and direction of the vehicle.
27. The person killed in the car-ramming incident, a 32 year old paralegal and left-wing activist named Heather Heyer, does not appear to have been engaged in any violence and was merely a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
28. Those who have applauded the killing of this woman are cretins.
29. The Charlottesville police revealed themselves to be utterly incompetent when it comes to their basic professional responsibility of maintaining public safety. According to numerous reports, the police essentially disappeared just as the violence was escalating.
30. A public riot and melee of this kind would normally justify dozens if not hundreds of arrests. However, as of this writing apparently only five arrests have been made. One was Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer, who was arrested for trying to give a speech after being ordered to disperse. Another was Jason Fields, the suspected car rammer on murder and other charges. Three others were arrested on misdemeanor assault and weapons charges.
31. It has been claimed that the Charlottesville political leadership ordered the police to stand down during this incident, presumably for the purpose of allowing the Antifa to “have at” the Alt-Rightists, though such claims are unproven. However, similar patterns have been observed when incidents like this have occurred in “college towns” with left-leaning local governments.
32. The response by public figures to this event, including politicians, media personalities, celebrities and other assorted douchebags has been lame and predictable. The near universal chorus has been one of “Official Bad People marched in Charlottesville! Eww, bad!” in a manner akin to school children pointing to a kid picking his nose in the cafeteria.
33. The most reasonable response thus far has come from, ironically, President Trump himself for daring to point out that violent street fighting involving “hatred, bigotry and violence” actually occurred on “many sides” during the course of this disaster, rather than merely taking one side as if violent Communists and other left-wing extremists are not dangerous and undesirable in a manner that parallels their fascist/Nazi rivals.
34. Given the racially charged nature of this event, it is important to point out that African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Middle Easterners, Native Americans and other minorities appear to have had very little to do with this incident from any direction. A super-majority of participants in this conflagration on both sides were white people. Actual people of color have admirably avoided participating in these Left/Right skirmishes for the most part (this is not to say that there are not other serious problems in many communities of color). It would seem that such incidents are largely the responsibility of rival factions of loser white people.
35. The nature of these conflicts appear to be less racially or ideologically motivated, and more psychologically motivated.
36. Contrary to frequent misconceptions, the current Left/Right battle in the US is not between races, genders, sexual orientations, social classes or even ideologies as is often maintained. Instead, it is a battle between tribes representing certain psychological types.
37. The psychology of the Left is aptly described in the “Mass Psychology of Leftism” section of Ted Kaczynski’s “The Industrial Society and Its Future” (this not to say that Kaczynski is an admirable person or that his wider anti-tech ideology is correct).
38. Kaczynski accurately characterizes the Left as follows: “Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful. Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative,” “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve every one’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.”
39. Back in 2003, I described the kind of people who comprise groups like the Antifa in the following way: “…nutjobs, freaks, dysfunctional personalities, punks, brats, crackpots, thugs, crybabies, mediocrities, Peter Pans, cultists, ignoramuses, sociopaths, reactionaries, authoritarians, totalitarians, Communist dupes, left-wing fascists, liberal butt-lickers, tree-huggers, intellectual incompetents and stooges for the left-wing of state-capitalism…” Then as now, this would seem to be an accurate description of the general character of the hard Left in its contemporary Western form (though not necessarily in its historic or contemporary non-Western form).
40. The psychology of the Right is more difficult to pinpoint, because the Right is a nebulous collection of those whose only unifying thread is opposition to the Left. The psychological makeups of the Right appear to range from conventional “right-wing authoritarians” (Altemeyer) to those with a conservative “moral psychology” (Haidt) to transgressive individualists to sociopathic opportunists to run of the mill adventurers to youngsters engaged in rebellion against perceived leftist authority to well-intentioned but largely uneducated persons to any range of cranks, hobbyists, social failures, misfits, criminals, and mentally disturbed persons.
41. In many ways, these battles are comparable to religious conflicts between those who become fixated on various archetypes for whatever reason and consequently embrace the identity of those who share a similar or related fixation. In other words, the Left/Right conflict, at least in its present day Western (and especially, American) form is essentially a religious battle akin to a rivalry between Protestants and Catholics or Sunni and Shiites.
42. During the time that this conflict has been going on, the US Congress is trying to pass legislation that would be among the most restrictive of political freedom in US history, i.e. the criminalization of the movement to boycott Israel. Looking over all of the leading Alt-Right websites in America, I can’t find any discussion of this proposed legislation. What could be better evidence of Zionist power over the political process? And yet all of these professional anti-Semites couldn’t care less. Likewise, the only leftist criticism that has been voiced of this legislation thus far has been from the genuinely anti-imperialist sector of the far left, mostly Stalinists and liberal non-interventionists, which hardly represent the mainstream of the Left. Ironically, while this is going on, both Left and Right in the US are hardly noticing, and are instead fighting in the street over statues commemorating a state that only existed for 4 years, and was defeated 152 years ago. This indicates that both Left and Right, in their present forms, are generally worthless as a foundation for building a genuinely revolutionary, radical, or even authentically oppositional movement in North America.
43. I’ve been saying all along that eventually someone was going to get killed in these street fights, and that the state would certainly use this as a pretext for a crackdown on political freedom, and with the support of much of the public who see these events as nothing more than lunatics wreaking havoc. Many alt-rightists and leftists I know have fantasies of some kind of Weimar-like epic battles, to which I always respond that America is not some weak nation devastated by world war and depression like Weimar. The US has an elaborate an internal security apparatus as East Germany during the Stasi era. Pretty soon they will start making examples of the leaders of these actions.
44. One commentator has summarized the situation very well: “The average person is ignorant to the fact that 1) the State is an institution of violence that inherently leads to division and loss of freedom 2) the ruling class behind the state (call them Illuminati, new world order, deep state, etc) have always used Order Out of Chaos as their method to divide, conquer, and pick up the pieces, ensuring their agenda continues.Even those who recognize the violence of the state don’t always understand the depths to which this conspiracy goes. Until you become aware of BOTH these pieces of information you are missing the bigger picture.For example, the altright and allied racists are bigots but they are also responding to years of bullshit from the extreme left telling them they should feel guilty for their heritage or that they are to blame for everything. It doesn’t justify their hate but leftists need to be aware. But at the end of the day both sides are being played.The ruling class creates and funds movements across the board. They create wars, create refugee/migrant crises and stoke the flames of reaction. They fund the good guys and the bad guys. They fund revolutionary and the counter revolutionary. Even when it came to Hitler he was being funded by interests that had their own agenda. If you are allowing yourself to be reactive and your actions dictated by these movements you are what is known as a useful idiot.
    
    
    Think deeper. Look at who benefits from your actions. The people at the top, behind the scenes, have studied human behavior and psychology. They seek to control world events and manipulate us into supporting our own division and eventual domination. We have to be smarter than them.”
45. Amen.

Also published at Attack the System.