Thoughts on Charlottesville, 8 years later

The media is the enemy of the truth

I recently published a series of essays, both here on Substack, and in the form of a Kindle document, called “The Truth About Charlottesville.”

To summarize: Having been in attendance for the “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12 2017, expecting to see a rally by Southern partisans protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a park, I instead witnessed an all-out, coordinated ambush on those gathered for the event.

The counter-protesters— a BLM- and antifa-affiliated rent-a-mob, encircled the event-goers and attacked them continually, for a space of almost an hour, with utter impunity. They launched numerous projectiles, including glass bottles and smoke bombs, which could have caused great injury, yet none of the cops at the scene did anything to stop any of these repeated assaults.

Then, just as the rally was scheduled to start, an armored van pulled up, a dozen geared-up SWAT guys emerged wearing armor and helmets, with batons in their gloved hands. One of these men took the microphone, declaring that the gathering was unlawful. This goon squad then proceeded to advance upon anyone not immediately willing to disperse, which had the effect of making the event-goers have to turn around and attempt to make their way through the same screaming, shrieking gaggle of thugs who had been assaulting and harassing them for the past hour, which only led to the perpetration of further assaults.

Later, several members of this unrestrained mob ran after a car driven by one of the event-attenders with baseball bats. When the driver swerved defensively to shake off this zombie apocalypse— because he had absolutely no reason to think that this crazed, violent group of fanatics wouldn’t drag him out of his vehicle and beat him to death if they could— he hit a large girl in this group of miscreants, who unfortunately perished (whether from the impact or from heart trouble is unclear), before he was able to escape.

Yet that very evening, the news— both locally, nationally, and globally, was relating an entirely different, totally fabricated account of what happened. If you read or watched the news, and believed what you were reading or hearing, you would be left with the clear impression that it was the “neo-Nazi” attendees of the event who instigated the violence, that the antifa were heroically defending themselves, that the Virginia police did their jobs properly, and that no one, was robbed of their freedom of speech by arbitrary state fiat.

You would furthermore be convinced that James Fields, Jr., the driver who was being assaulted by a legion of baseball bat wielding antifa, was actually the aggressor, that he ran into Heather Heyer out of murderous spite, not because he was panicked and feared his life was in danger.

Moreover, people believed the lies that were being told concerning this event. Fields even got sentenced to prison for his entire life. Few, if anyone, has remarked upon the blatant injustice of this verdict. Who mourns for James Fields, Jr. today, as he rots in federal prison?

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What Charlottesville taught me is that the media, as it is currently constituted, will lie with shameless abandon, and feel itself perfectly justified in doing so. In nearly every case, the “agenda” trumps the truth.

Before the Charlottesville era, while certainly not a media ally, I didn’t exactly think the scribes, scribblers, and talking heads were quite so awful as I now know they are.

I knew that the networks and the newspapers were largely owned and controlled by corporate interests, but I wasn’t aware of the thoroughgoing totality of the extent of that control.

I was aware that news reporters tended to lean to the left politically, but I expected that some of them would have a greater interest in paying attention to what actually happened and reporting it honestly, instead of promulgating some deeply erroneous version of events without any pangs of conscience whatsoever.

Since Charlottesville, however, I grown doubtful of everything they ever say. And I mean, everything. What Pravda was to Soviet Russia, so CNN and The New York Times, and the Washington Post are to contemporary America.

I wish them every ill imaginable (they have earned it!), and I’m pleased as punch to witness their ongoing demise.

Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist, and Muze, as well as the recently-published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.