The New Yorker:
Charlottesville, Virginia, feels enough like Eden that it’s always been easy to hide a certain amount of blood. The town is small—fifty thousand residents, without the college population factored in—and green and idyllic, a hideout of academic and historical reverence nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s a running gag in Charlottesville how frequently the town is picked as the happiest place to live in America. It’s a community that manages to embody the honeyed ease of a small Southern enclave while modelling the progressive values and professional advancement of a liberal city. The idea is that there’s sophistication and dignity in Charlottesville—good food, tasteful living, and sun-dappled long afternoons. And there is. But, as certain reactions to recent events from white friends and politicians have reminded me, an air of enlightened blamelessness is more often concealment than it is proof.
Over the weekend, Charlottesville became the site of an extended white-supremacist revival meeting. On Friday night, like a nightmarish graduation procession, a few hundred white supremacists marched with torches down the long green lawn that leads to the Rotunda, the University of Virginia’s signature building. They chanted Nazi slogans in the open, undisguised, unafraid of being photographed, proud to be seen. They circled a statue of Thomas Jefferson and attacked a group of student counter-protesters who held a banner reading “UVA Students Act Against White Supremacy” at the statue’s base. On Saturday morning, flanked by militia men carrying automatic weapons, the white supremacists assembled in McIntire Park, with swastikas and Confederate flags fully visible; David Duke was there, along with other representatives of the Ku Klux Klan. The counter-protest had grown. Religious leaders had gathered at dawn to pray, and progressive and anti-fascist groups tracked the demonstration to Emancipation Park, which was once named Lee Park, after the Confederate general. There, the violence implied in a “white pride” protest erupted, and the rally was dispersed. As the counter-protesters moved on foot towards the adjacent Downtown Mall, a man who had come to town to show his support for white supremacy drove his car down a wide pedestrian alley, killing one woman and injuring nineteen people; he then backed out of the alley and drove away.
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