May 2023.
Tag Archives: Charlottesville
A busload of bullshit.
Re: claims that Antifa “infiltrated” the Trump supporters and manipulated them into the attempted coup. Someone asked me to put my two cents in about this tonight (always a dangerous request), so here goes.
It’s preposterous. This appears to be a desperate conspiracy theory meant to mitigate the public relations catastrophe for the Trump administration following the Capitol insurrection. There is soooo much footage of the perpetrators, and nothing to suggest that they are somehow a multitude of brilliant, Oscar-worthy actors who are nefariously impersonating Trump supporters. (C’mon.)
Here’s a hint — anytime someone claims they witnessed a “busload” of actors or impersonators, there is a good bet it is colossal bullshit. The whole actors-on-busses scenario is a common conspiracy theory. The last time it was in play, I was hearing it from pro-Trump apologists of the Charlottesville violence perpetrated at the Unite the Right rally in 2017.
I asked them for evidence repeatedly for it. The best I got was an undated picture of two parked busses without passengers — the person who sent it to me couldn’t even name the vehicles’ location. It could have been any two empty busses, anywhere in America.
That’s it. That was the only “evidence.”
I would be extraordinarily surprised if there was even an ounce of truth to this new claim. Its appearance today simply underscores how desperate the Trump camp is to conduct damage control.
Here is the rundown from Snopes.com
It’s all about branding.
Maybe the Kurds should have worn swastikas on their uniforms, so that Donald Trump would support them.
Photo credit: Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ Rally. Anthony Crider; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:37, 9 April 2018 (UTC) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D
A Holocaust survivor reacts to the Nazis at Charlottesville. (Huffington Post)
And here I have been reading that one third of Americans don’t even believe that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
Tomorrow is July Fourth. In addition to celebrating, let’s remember what America should be fighting against.
Tonight’s thoughts:
- I wonder how long it will take for people to start referring to the Trump administration as the Turd Reich? I can’t be the first person who thought of this. The pun is too easy.
- “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that.” I wonder … is this how he would describe World War II?
- I’m thinking of renouncing my past statements of admiration for the French resistance during World War II. It has been brought to my attention that they were operating with a government permit.
- The Russians. The Nazis. Foreign dictators. It’s like the only people who Trump won’t criticize are the villains from 1980’s action movies. What’s next? Is he going to tacitly defend Zuul from goddam “Ghostbusters?”
[The memes are not my own:]
VICE News interviews alt-right during the Charlottesville protests.
If you are a good and decent adult in the United States today, you need to watch this.
“Charlottesville: Race and Terror.” Elle Reeve of Vice News interviews Christopher Cantwell and other white nationalists throughout the events in Charlottesville this past weekend.
“To speak of atrocious crime in mild language is treason to virtue.”
That’s Edmund Burke speaking, or at least we think it is — the statement was attributed to him by John Stevens Cabot Abbott in 1876. It seems relevant with an eye towards Donald Trump’s apparent equivocation about the neo-nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia.
There are two other Burke quotes that might spring to mind, too, after this past weekend’s alt-right rally and the murder of a 32-year-old counter-protestor, Heather Heyer.
The first is one I grew up hearing from my father, although today I discovered that it, too, may be apocryphal: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” (I’ve read that there is no primary source citing Burke as the speaker here; he may have been paraphrasing John Stuart Mill.)
But Burke definitely penned a similar sentiment: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
Chimney Rock Mountain overlook (photo)
This photo isn’t one of my own; nor was it taken around Roanoke. This was taken from Chimney Rock Mountain, which is just north of Charlottesville, Virginia.
I pulled it off of Wikimedia Commons, though, because the mountains around Roanoke look so much like this. (And the camera I am using just cannot do them justice.) I get to see something like this every day. It’s wild.
Photo credit: By Chimney_Rock_Mountain_Overlook.jpg: Ed Brown derivative work: Patrick {oѺ∞} (Chimney_Rock_Mountain_Overlook.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 