Thoughts on the Charlottesville Tragedy

By Eddie Howell

The tragedy of Charlottesville is multifaceted event with plenty of blame to go around. Few except the neo-Nazis themselves would justify the obvious evil of racism or white supremacy. But President Trump is right to recognize there is blame on many sides.

The leftist governor of Virginia and the leftist mayor of Charlottesville want to blame Mr. Trump for the troubles, but they themselves failed to the point that many injuries took place and a life was needlessly lost. A Washington Examiner editorial puts a spotlight on this:

Ahead of the event, the Washington Examiner's Tom Rogan warned against the city's attempt to relocate the Nazis from their desired place of protest. He pointed out that the more sensible course would be to allow them to protest in Emancipation Park as a way to contain them and keep the counter-protestors away from them.

The authorities instead chose to allow the warring factions to intermingle, with predictable results. Charlottesville became a small war zone. Making matters much worse, the police were apparently ordered to stand by as the various factions beat each other bloody.

Further, the editorial details how the governor and mayor failed to protect the First Amendment free speech rights or the neo-Nazi organizer, who was chased away from his press conference. The ones who received a permit to protest the removal of a statue were attacked by people who had no permit, and should not have been there.

It is obvious that neither Governor Terry McAuliffe nor Mayor Mike Signer understands the First Amendment, although both have likely taken an oath to protect the Constitution. They doubled down on their failures. People want to say hate speech is not free speech, but actually it is protected by the First Amendment, as firmly established in Supreme Court cases. If these people don't have free speech rights, no one else does either.

As for the person who killed a woman and injured several other people, his day in court is coming. The hate in the heart of someone who would do this is evil indeed. But it's too bad some common-sense precautions weren't taken which could have prevented this from happening.

Further, as Mr. Trump suggested, there were “fine people” there to protest also, and also among the counter-protesters. You don't have to be a racist or white supremacist to oppose the removal of historic statues or any Confederate monuments. As Condoleeza Rice pointed out, hiding history is not a good thing.

There is hate on “many sides,” as Mr. Trump said. But the strongest hate in America today appears to be the hysterical leftist hate campaign against President Trump.