Charlottesville Was Only a Preview
The roar was the first thing to reach Natalie Romero. “I just heard loudness, like thunder, as if the earth was growling,” the University of Virginia student later testified. Hundreds of white supremacists were marching toward her, their low dog barks alternating with rhythmic war chants: “Jews will not replace us.” “Blood and soil.” “White lives matter.” As she clutched a homemade protest banner, huddling with a small group of students around the base of a Thomas Jefferson statue, Romero feared for her life. A lit torch landed at her feet. A burst of mace hit her. “I felt like a mouse, trapped,” she said. “I felt like I’m about to be burned at the stake.”
The racist rage that enveloped Romero and other student counterprotesters on the night of August 11, 2017, erupted again the next morning in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia. As white-supremacist groups convened for the “Unite the Right” rally in defense of the city’s Robert E. Lee statue, they marched defiantly into a diverse, boisterous crowd of counterprotesters composed of local clergy, students, activists, and townspeople. They used their flagpoles and riot shields to attack anyone they perceived to be a Jew or a Communist, or to be affiliated with antifa or Black Lives Matter. The rally was swiftly shut down by authorities, and the crowds began to disperse. Two blocks from the park, James Fields Jr., an alt-right foot soldier from Ohio, raced his Dodge Charger down a narrow street and directly into a crowd of people, including Romero, leaving Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal, dead and several others severely injured.
[Jonathan D. Karl: The second battle of Charlottesville]
Charlottesville that August offered a preview of the America that we would become: a country in which violently racist sloganeering freely mixes with absurd, carnival antics; a culture in which constitutional principles are treated as cudgels with which to crush political opponents; a society in which gun-toting extremists parade openly in the streets in search of enemies to strike, and then claim self-defense if anyone is injured; and
