Not long ago, Charlottesville was a city apparently under the rule of law.
That perception changed in 2011 when the city’s under-qualified and overpaid City Manager, Maurice Jones, ordered his police department to stand down as socialist Occupiers overran Lee Park.
Most recently, Mr. Jones’ precedent of institutional lawlessness was extended by Mayor Michael Signer, who contrary to city code, was allowed to hold a large public protest on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall—without obtaining a lawfully required permit.
This weekend, Jones and Signer’s chickens came home to roost, as two high-profile protests in Downtown Charlottesville again catapulted their notorious city into the national news cycle:
- On Saturday, controversial, self-described identitarian and University of Virginia graduate, Richard Spencer, convened a relatively peaceful, if not visually disturbing, torch-lit rally in Lee Park
- On Sunday, Alt-Left activists and Cultural Marxists held a Lee Park counter rally in which three attendees were arrested and a police officer was assaulted
Buried in local coverage of Sunday’s event was a damning quote from Charlottesville City spokeswoman, Miriam Dickler:
“While we prefer protesters get permits like any other event, such assemblies are protected by the First Amendment and we do not interfere unless we perceive a legal or safety issue.”
While the law states that permits are necessary for large public gatherings, Mayor Signer’s recent “Capital of the Resistance” rally, for which he eschewed—and then defended violating—the assembly permit process, put the city in a precarious position in regard to code scofflaws and violators.
Signer and Dickler’s comments to NBC 29 in the wake of the original Schilling Show “permit” exposé left little wiggle room for law enforcement:
According to City Spokeswoman Miriam Dickler there is a city regulation that requires a permit, but that rule is seldom enforced and a public event without a permit is “not uncommon.”
Signer says he did not get a permit to host the rally, but also says the city never enforces the rule requiring a permit and will continue that practice.
Charlottesville’s now-established culture of lawlessness has turned to bite the posteriors of the bumbling, self-aggrandizing Mayor and incompetent, lackeyed City Manager who continue to feed it. Their rabid quest for legal relativism in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Charlottesville has led to cultural chaos and debased governmental authority. Ultimately, law abiding citizens will suffer inevitable consequences.
Missing from this post is a condemnation of white supremacist Richard Spencer, or an acknowledgment that if the city had enforced the permit requirement, Spencer could have just gotten a permit, and the same confrontations would have occurred. The city’s decision not to enforce the permit rule in no way caused this weekend’s unfortunate incidents.
Spencer is a menace and his views are despicable, but the Left needs to do what the Christian Right has not done: lower the volume and treat its opponents as fellow human beings, who are more than the sum of their faults and blind spots.
As visually disturbing as the rally on saturday was, it was far more orderly and protesters obeyed lawful commands to leave (i wondered if it was before closing time they were ordered to leave?)
However the protest on Sunday was lawless and out of control. We saw this with Occupy Cville. As long as they were granted squatters rights for the park they were fine but once they had to leave they turned on their mentor szakos like angry children.
Looks like their “chickens have come home to roost”!
Spencer preaches white supremacy, and he and his followers chanted the Nazi slogan “blood and soil,” and the worst thing you can say about them is they were visually disturbing?
[…] in the delusional world of Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer — who fashions himself a modern-day James Madison — calls for lawlessness and open defiance of […]