Before January 6th had become the rallying cry used by the longing-to-be-outraged Left, there was Charlottesville. The so-called Unite the Right rally in which a few hundred white nationalists and some patriots showed up for a licensed protest was eclipsed by the clashes with far-Left extremists, who came equipped to fight. The only takeaway that we are allowed to recall is that one man plowed his car into the leftist crowd, killing a counter-demonstrator.
For years, the 2017 Charlottesville protest was wielded as a baton by pundits and news anchors to assert that right-wing violence was the threat we should all be paying attention to. It didn’t matter how many Islamic terrorist attacks took place, how many riots broke out at left-wing protests, or how many inner cities burned while rioters chanted about killing police officers. Charlottesville was proof of the real problem. Counter-terrorism efforts by the United States government have likewise been obsessed with targeting “right-wing extremists” and “Christian fundamentalists.”
Now, with the January 6th narrative vaporizing due to more footage being released, leftists seem to want to reignite Charlottesville, that it might become a talking point once again. Long after the hitherto mentioned aggressive driver was charged, sentenced, and imprisoned, and six years after the protest, new indictments have been announced.
Were there some especially egregious assaults that had been missed? No, those indicted were charged with felony “burning an object with the intent to intimidate.”
So, they were charged with having torches. If ever there were an obvious trumped-up charge, this is a clear case. It is clearly an abuse of the justice system for political capital.
The commonwealth attorney for Albemarle County, Virginia, James Hingeley, who brought the charges, had pledged to do just this during his election campaign. In a critique of the then-incumbent, he argued, “There’s a law, a burning objects law, that says they can be prosecuted but our prosecutor’s not doing that.” The weaponization of the justice system via sifting for obscure laws is not supposed to be a political strategy. It certainly shouldn’t be anything that one takes pride in.
The danger with cases like these is that the government doesn’t have to win them in order to do the intended damage and destroy lives. The financial toll of fighting charges with a good lawyer can be immense all by itself. The emotional toll can destroy families. Yet it seems undeniable that the charges are not about the men themselves. A six-year belated charge for lighting a torch is absurd, and everybody knows it. Yet, our society has become too fractionated by partisanship for anyone to blink at the notion.
The charges are really about sending a message and deterring any and all protest among those on the perceived Right. It’s a type of terrorism by those who are in positions of power, for it is meant to terrorize the political opposition into silence. It’s the threat that even if you don’t knowingly break the law, they will find something to destroy you and your family with.
Read Three Felonies a Day by Harvey A. Silverglate to see how this happens. In brief, we all break laws constantly, without even knowing it. The criminal code is so voluminous and complicated that we can’t possibly know all of the laws—and not knowing them isn’t a legal defense. Thus, if a prosecutor or a government agency wants to levy charges against you, they can.
Maybe you think the FBI’s infiltration into “trad” Catholic churches will be impotent because those folks are good people who aren’t doing anything wrong. If so, please reconsider. It’s not about what people are doing wrong; it’s about whether they are perceived as threats or whether their prosecution could neutralize opposition to the existing power structure.
These charges have been announced, largely with celebration and self-righteous adulation from the mainstream media, at a time when terroristic organizations like Jane’s Revenge target churches and pro-life centers with relative impunity. Left-leaning extremist groups rarely get coverage from larger news outlets, and they don’t get specialist task forces applied to them.
