🔎 An Unbiased Perspective on #Charlottesville 🚘

I interviewed a special guest on the insane events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Ford Fischer is editor and chief of News to Share was on the ground reporting.
There's a lot to take in, and I wanted to get an independent perspective on how everything unfolded there.

Fortunately, despite the myriad of violence- Ford is in overall good health.
He has pepper spray burns and was physically attacked / caught in the crossfire
The biggest news there was the seemingly intentional car crash, where 19 or more people were hit by a pileup of three different cars.

He witnessed one person having CPR administered for several minutes and it appeared they had given up. He reported on live video that it looked like she had died, which the Governor confirmed an hour later.

There was also a report of a helicopter crash, and two police officers monitoring the rally also passed away. Ford went to the crash site but police stopped anyone from getting close.

The ramifications from this are gonna be very big, and will be playing out later.

Earlier in the day the Unite the Right were in the area that they were designated, and police mostly had a hands-off approach. The police had set up barricades between the rally participants, and those protesting the rally- who were basically supposed to say outside of the park.

The problems really arose when the rally-goers had to walk through the counter-protesters in order to get into the park. This is where most of the violence occurred at that peripheral and that was where the militia were taking the role of separating the two groups.

Antifa condemned them by saying they were defending the the rallyers whereas the militia said they were truly neutral and were just trying to stop the violence. It basically turned into a war.

There's a real question to be asked about how we got to this point. Yes there's a big divide and conquer strategy at play here and a lot of polarization. Many are saying that this is only the beginning of it and we have been seeing the inclinations of this from the very beginning.

It would be very interesting to get a critique and kind of a report on how the police managed this situation. We've seen from other events like in Berkeley, where there was police and they left the scene and let these two sides fight each other and we saw that repeatedly happen in other protests.

Ford reiterated that the police stayed uninvolved for the first couple of hours until eventually the barricades were taken down by the Antifa. Once there was no physical barrier between Antifa and the Lee park protestors, the police declared it to be an illegal gathering before noon when the rally was initially supposed to start.

Violence has started before this time but police ignored. Once they declared the rally canceled riot cops slowly emptied the entire park. Ford realized that this move by the police had been a tactical error as the Unite the Right protesters ended up permeating out to mingle with the leftist protesters.

This caused violence to erupt for four miles in every direction. The clashes had expanded becoming much more chaotic and confusing.

The police likely knew this was going turn into chaos once they tried to shut down the rally. It really doesn't make sense from a policing standpoint. Luke had witnessed a similar occurrence in San Diego during a Trump rally when the police, instead of dividing the two sides from one another, they police forsed everyone together causing massive clashes to take place.

If the police had taken an approach more similar to the militia they might have stopped the violence. If they had allowed the rally to continue and basically kept the two protests separate, letting them scream at each other from behind layers of cops.

Ford posted a photo earlier on his Facebook of a man who pulled his handgun out of his holster and pointed it in his direction. Granted many people were open carrying so having a rifle slung over your shoulder was not a huge deal but to actually unholster in a menacing manner was not expected. That sort of thing started happening once the the two sides were pushed together. The police could have been putting themselves in the middle saving a lot of people from getting hurt.

There's a lot of finger-pointing going on now from all sides. The left are saying that it was the Unite the Right rally that instigated the violence. Others are saying that it was Antifa being more aggressive, instigating much of the conflict. This was probably consistent with other clashes where the left wing tended to initiate the violence. The main difference in Charlottesville is that the right was prepared for this in terms of weapons and shields.

From what Ford had witnessed it was the Traditionalist Workers Party, a party with a national socialist philosophy (Ford described them as neo-nazis under a different name), came with shields and helmets.

When Antifa went to confront them they sprayed from behind their shields and they were hitting people with batons. They were clearly prepared to beat the crap out of the people who opposed them and that's exactly what they did.

From a political perspective this is a sad day in American politics, especially with people dying. The trajectory of where this seems to be heading is very concerning. With billionaires like the Koch brothers financing the right and then other billionaires like Soros financing the left, it's really more about the up / down that people should be concerned with- not right / left.

The night before there was political discourse where about 250 Alt-right had a rally holding torches and it looked like a KKK style event. They marched through campus. They were chanting extreme right-wing political stuff and then the left wing who chanted the counter chants like "No Trump, no KKK, no racist USA," so there was a little bit of political exchange.

Charlottesville was honestly just about fighting, there were speeches that the Unite the Right had planned but were cancelled and Antifa had their normal chants but there were hardly no debating or conversation. Any that might have taken place became a confrontation, screaming, and fighting.

At the at the end of the day, if one looked at any two people in a fight swap their positions there wouldn't be much of a difference. It just became this left versus right- red VS blue, team 1 against team 2 kind of factionalism.

Ford said:
"I think it's worth thinking about how we got to a point in political discourse where people feel like fighting each other on the streets is going to have some kind of a real-world outcome?

And to the AntiFa, are you really going to beat the crap- or literally beat the racism out of somebody's head?.. I I kind of doubt it..

And and on the right- are you really going to defeat leftist government by beating up some random leftist on the street?.. Also probably not!"

And that's not to say that ever that they're gonna be able to achieve what they want through books and debates and things like that but they're gonna do a lot less damage if they pursue peaceful means to their own agenda."

Very well said, Ford! Especially with both 'sides' trying to be right all the time, and upholding one side, instead of trying to see both sides of the situation.

Thanks Ford, for your great, independent work!