My Fight for Justice in Charlottesville
On April 7th, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear my petition to appeal the decision by a lower court to dismiss my lawsuit against the public officials who, on August 12th, 2017, caused the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville to descend into chaos and violence. For me, this is the end of a five-and-a-half-year legal battle which began on August 9th, 2019—three days before the statute of limitations would’ve expired—when I, along with my co-plaintiff at the time, filed a pro se complaint in U.S. federal court because our “fundamental constitutional rights to freedom of speech, equal protection, and due process” were egregiously violated on that day.
The purpose of that historic rally was to protest the planned removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in downtown Charlottesville by anti-White extremists on the city council. Instead of allowing our constitutionally protected and legally-permitted rally to take place, Leftist city and state officials conspired to create a riot situation which gave them the pretext to crush our First Amendment rights with brute force.
One week after the Unite the Right rally, I wrote under the name “Ahab” a truthful account of what I experienced on that hot summer day in Virginia. In this account, I described how radical Jewish Mayor Michael Signer and BLM extremist Wes Bellamy tried to move the rally permit location to a spot two miles outside of town, while at the same time granting permits for two separate Antifa-style rallies inside the downtown. This last-minute attempt to defeat the purpose of our rally was so blatant that it was overturned by a federal judge in a preliminary injunction, which ordered the city to allow our rally at the Lee statue to go forward.
What transpired on August 12th was detailed in the independent report of a team of attorneys commissioned by the city, known as the Heaphy Report, whose authors “pored through hundreds of thousands of documents, interviewed hundreds of witnesses, and reviewed countless hours of video and audio.” The Heaphy Report left no doubt: Charlottesville descended into chaos and violence because state and local officials foresaw the violence and intentionally facilitated and aggravated the lawless conditions they knew would occur. Whether that was the result of a planned conspiracy or simply many compounding instances of malicious incompetence, the Heaphy Report did not say, but it noted the non-cooperation of city officials such as Police Chief Al Thomas, and his illegal destruction of evidence including text messages from that day.
The full story of everything that happened in Charlottesville 2017 is still not known, but the chain of events and its aftermath has been meticulously documented by the tireless work of many researchers, and these details have been published in books such as “Charlottesville and the Death of Free Speech” by rally permit-holder Jason Kessler, and “Charlottesville Untold” by Anne Wilson Smith.
A book-length treatment is required to set the record straight, but it should suffice to say the media narrative that Charlottesville was a terrorist attack by a gang of armed White supremacists on a peaceful community is a Big Lie comparable to WMDs in Iraq, Russiagate, that J6 was an “insurrection,” that Antifa are “mostly peaceful protestors” or that 40 babies were beheaded on October 7th.
In my account written one week after the event, I reported exactly what happened:
In the streets on the western side of the park, I could see a huge force of national guardsmen in military camos. Beside them was an even larger force of heavily armed and armored black-clad riot police, decked out like automatons in some futuristic dystopian nightmare. And they were moving towards us… not between us and the Antifa, but between us and the Lee statue! In other words, they were lining up on the opposite side of us from the leftist radicals who had attacked us, trapping us between the riot police at our front, and the Antifa at our backs…. emboldened by the police, [Antifa] took it as carte blanche to attack our retreating men with impunity… the state of emergency was declared almost two hours before Heather Heyer was killed. The Virginia State Police, under orders of Governor Terry McAuliffe and in conspiracy with Jewish Mayor Michael Signer, declared an emergency and then proceeded to create one.
These facts were set out in our civil complaint two years later:
In a deliberate effort to deter UTR demonstrators from expressive activity and in open defiance of Judge Conrad’s order, Defendants intentionally encouraged and facilitated mob violence by counter-protestors against lawful UTR demonstrators, creating a civil disturbance as a pretext to disperse the demonstrators before the UTR rally began. This action concerns Defendants’ responsibility for their intentional violations of Plaintiffs’ civil and constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, due process, and equal protection of the laws.
The complaint was strong, but it could’ve been much stronger if I’d had access to evidence that has since been uncovered. Governor Terry McAuliffe, who for decades had been the Clintons’ top fundraiser (with presidential ambitions of his own), later freely admitted his nakedly partisan political motive, along with his ultimate culpability for the breakup of our rally, and its dispersal into the mobs of armed Antifa waiting for us on Market Street:
This was the largest white-nationalist gathering in the United States in decades, and the neo-Nazis and other fanatics were giddy. They were having the time of their lives…. [David Duke] grinned and beamed to well-wishers. “This represents a turning point for the people of this country,” Duke said that morning. “We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump, and that’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.” The crowd loved it…. The words these marchers were spewing were unbelievable. Profane, disgusting, infuriating….
I knew it was time to start thinking about declaring a state of emergency and dispersing the gathering, so at 10:21 a.m. I called AG Mark Herring; my counsel, Carlos Hopskins; and Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northham to put them on notice that I was preparing to declare a state of emergency….
At just after 11:15 a.m. my phone rang.
“Governor, you’ve got to declare a state of emergency…. Screw protocol.”
I didn’t need to think about it at all—not for half a second. I’d seen enough. It was time for decisive action.
“That’s it,” I said. “Send ‘em in! Send in the State Police. Send in the Guard. Clear the damn park.”
The record reflects that at 11:28 a.m., via text message, I confirmed that I had authorized a state of emergency. Immediately after my action, at 11:29, the city declared it an unlawful assembly.”
This account was published in McAuliffe’s book, “Beyond Charlottesville: Taking a Stand Against White Nationalism,” which was released days before our complaint was filed—and days before the statute of limitations expired on the two-year anniversary of UTR. A man who made tens of millions of dollars as an attorney working for banks and corrupt politicians was not so stupid as to admit such things while civil or criminal charges could still be filed against him. McAuliffe was listed as a defendant in our suit, but our complaint against him was later dismissed because the court claimed we failed to include enough particulars implicating him personally.
It’s worth noting that Gov. McAuliffe almost certainly would’ve secured a top job in Hillary Clinton’s administration had she prevailed against Donald Trump in 2016, so his revenge motive against what he then perceived as Donald Trump supporters was likely personal as well as ideological. It’s also worth noting that, while he lauds the two Virginia State Police officers who died in a helicopter crash on that day, their widows both subsequently filed multimillion-dollar wrongful death suits against the Commonwealth of Virginia and the VSP for negligence in maintaining the helicopter. As with Heather Heyer, when the media talks about the “deadly” Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, they fail to mention all the deaths were caused by unsafe conditions created by the authorities!
Former Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer was dismissed from the lawsuit because he supposedly was not in charge on that day, with operational authority for the city of Charlottesville falling on City Manager Maurice Jones. But Signer’s own deeply political and ideological role in shutting down the UTR rally was later admitted in his own 2020 book, as reported by Jason Kessler in “Charlottesville and the Death of Free Speech”:
A mysterious closed-door meeting was schedule for City Council on August 2. While the topic wasn’t announced, it was clearly top-secret discussions about the rally…. At the time, the contents of the meeting were a complete mystery to the public, including me. But with the release of his book Cry Havoc in 2020, former Mayor Mike Signer described what went on. Signer, who is Jewish, had an adversarial and very sensitive reaction to criticism of his Jewish heritage from both the left and right. Following the rally, he would go on to become a fierce partisan for the Jewish ethno-state of Israel…. On January 31, 2017, after the election of Donald Trump, Signer called a vainglorious press conference to announce that Charlottesville was the “capital of the resistance….”
Rally planning should have been handled by police for a safety plan free of political bias and sabotage, but Signer took a heavy hand in injecting his political agenda into the process by retaining the powerhouse law firm of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP at a cost of $30,000, paid for by the Charlottesville taxpayer, to advise him on how to legally relocate the rally. Even though the law firm warned that moving the rally would likely be unconstitutional, Signer ignored their advice and began lobbying his other City Councilors hard to adopt his relocation plan…. The hot shot attorneys from Boies Schiller also warned that City Councilors like Signer were overstepping their bounds by trying to implement a decision that was under the authority of the police chief and city manager. “But we still had to formally stay out of the decision to pass legal muster,” Signer wrote. “In other words, the attorneys were united in advising us that we could not actually make the decision. We could just tell Jones it was the decision we wanted him to make.”
It is now clear that on the city level, Jewish Mayor Michael Signer was the main political and ideological force driving the decision-making process that led to the attempt to illegally relocate the rally based on a “heckler’s veto,” and later, to shut the rally down by force. Yet the courts rejected his culpability in our lawsuit because we didn’t know all the particulars at the time, and because of the legal technicality of the city manager being formally in charge, even though Jones was clearly carrying out orders.
As for Police Chief Al Thomas and City Manager Maurice Jones—both of whom are Black—it is now clear they were both “fall guys” for the decisions made by higher-ups, and that both of them got “sweetheart deals” for their role in shutting down the rally.
A former member of the Charlottesville City Council and watchdog citizen journalist, Rob Schilling, published evidence on his blog that the December 18, 2017 “immediate retirement” of Police Chief Al Thomas announced by the city was in fact a deception. Thomas was not retired, but quietly stayed on the city payroll in another position with a salary of over $135,000 in 2018, which was only disclosed by Charlottesville Director of Communications Brian Wheeler due to a FOIA request.
This hidden deal followed an agreement reached between former City Manager Maurice Jones and the City of Charlottesville, whereby Jones was “forgiven” more than $80,000 in student debt he owed the city upon taking on his position, which required a masters degree. This was reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch on August 8th, 2018:
Charlottesville invested $250,000 to help Maurice Jones move to the city and obtain a master’s degree after it selected him to be city manager in 2010.
As Jones prepares to become the manager of Chapel Hill, N.C., following his ouster in May — the latest in a series of departures from the city government — more than $80,000 that the city lent him is being forgiven.
Jones had paid back about $32,000 of a $113,000 loan to help finance a down payment on a new house in Charlottesville and pay the mortgage on a home in Albemarle County he was having trouble selling after he was appointed city manager in December 2010.
On Monday, Mayor Nikuyah Walker announced that under the terms of his contract, Jones won’t be required to pay back the remaining $80,667. The contract wipes out Jones’ debt because his removal from the city was not for a specified cause.
Jones is the most recent high-level city official to leave his job following the Unite the Right rally last August. It began with white supremacists fighting openly downtown with counterprotesters as authorities watched and ended with one death and more injured after a car sped into a crowd of the counterprotesters.
Since then, the police chief, city attorney and director of communications all resigned or retired…. City officials said Jones will receive a $115,000 lump-sum payout. His salary for the fiscal year that started on July 1 was $197,000.
City officials have been mum on the details of why they decided to not extend Jones’ contract, but signs of a strained relationship between Jones and elected leaders surfaced on occasion, such as after the deadly rally last year.
Jones clashed with the mayor after a memo leaked that revealed the City Council laid blame on him and other city officials after the rally.
Jones later rebutted the council’s assertions and revealed that former Mayor Mike Signer threatened to fire both him and former Police Chief Al Thomas during “the height of the crisis” because the two officials barred the mayor from entering a command center.
It looks very much like the hapless Black police chief and city manager were both put in the position of implementing the political decision made by Gov. McAuliffe, Mayor Signer and others to shut down the rally, and that both of them were quietly released from their positions with what amount to payoffs from the city government to keep them quiet and make it worth their while to take the heat on themselves. Further details of the threats, secret offers and other corruption might have come out had my lawsuit made it to the discovery phase, but it was dismissed before it could go that far.
The complaint was dismissed by Judge Norman K. Moon, the infamous Charlottesville judge who was revealed to have several “Antifa” clerks working on his staff and writing his politicized legal opinions. This bombshell revelation, first uncovered by Jason Kessler and later reported on by Eric Striker for “National Justice,” led to a motion by my co-plaintiff and I to get Judge Moon to recuse himself, since he did not disclose this shocking conflict of interest until it was uncovered by citizen-journalism in early 2020.
Unsurprisingly, Judge Moon declined to recuse himself.
Mainstream media reporting on my lawsuit has mischaracterized it as me charging that the police failed to protect us from counter-demonstrators on August the 12th. This is not true. Everyone who attended the UTR rally knows we could have, and did, protect ourselves from violent anti-White extremists. In spite of the fact that the ranks of the counter-demonstrators included professional agitators, violent career criminals, armed thugs and activists with detailed plans to commit criminal mayhem and violence against UTR attendees, the fact is that even with police “standing down” to let them attack us, the vast majority of our people made it into the permitted rally area unharmed.
If police hadn’t intervened, we would’ve been able to hear the speakers and carry out our demonstration during the time permitted, and we likely all would’ve been able to leave the park in an orderly fashion and make it back to our vehicles without anyone getting killed or seriously injured. The problem with Charlottesville, and the reason for my lawsuit, was not principally that police failed to protect our side from the other side, but that police attacked our side and drove us into the other side. They dispersed our rally while failing to disperse the Antifa and BLM counter-demonstrators. In fact, the only place the dispersal order was enforced was inside the tiny confines of the park where we held the permit. Leftist counter-demonstrators were given the run of the streets by city authorities!
As I pointed out to Judge Moon in one hearing, if the dispersal order had been enforced as “content and viewpoint neutral” (which is a very serious constitutional legal requirement), then why were hundreds of Antifa still marching around the streets in triumph nearly two hours later, when a frightened young man named James Fields—after plugging in GPS directions to take him back home to his mother in Ohio—accidentally turned down a street and found his vehicle under attack by an armed mob?
Moon’s dismissal of our suit, which was later upheld by the Fourth Circuit Court and reaffirmed by SCOTUS’s declining to review my petition, was based on some very specious interpretation and legal reasoning: that police and officials could not be held liable for acts while carrying out their duties (which doesn’t apply in constitutional matters), that we didn’t include enough particulars about certain defendants (more evidence would’ve come out in discovery, or became known after the complaint was filed). Normally, at the dismissal phase, plaintiffs are to be assumed to have the facts on their side, and this is doubly true in a case of such constitutional import and public interest.
Incredibly, Moon’s court even asserted that peaceful, permitted rally-goers have no right to police protection from violent counter-demonstrators. In my appeal to the Fourth Circuit, one federal judge even asked defendants’ attorneys to clarify their argument that I would’ve had no right to expect police protection even if there was no violence from our side, and all the violence came from the other side. And yes, defendants’ attorneys affirmed it, that was their argument!
During my hearing with Judge Moon, I asked that if their position was that peaceful, non-violent, legal permit-holding demonstrators have no right to police protection from violent thugs who come to shut them down, then how are we supposed to exercise our First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of assembly? Neither Judge Moon, nor defendants’ attorneys, nor the three judges of the Fourth Circuit court, nor the SCOTUS were able to answer that question.
All I wanted is a blueprint on how we can exercise our rights.
If the burden is on us to defend ourselves, then so be it, but let the courts affirm we have the right to defend ourselves. This right was explicitly denied to us by the aftermath of UTR, however. As with James Fields, or the half-dozen or so men who went to prison for defending themselves in the anarchic clashes after the police broke up our rally, we are told we have no right to police protection—but also that we have no right to protect ourselves.
That this makes certain types of protest de facto illegal in the United States should be obvious to everyone. I personally experienced the Charlottesville formula at an Alt Right event at MSU in early March of 2018, as a legally-permitted event to hear a speaker in a campus building was shut down by police who allowed violent anti-White extremists to attack listeners who held tickets to attend the lecture, effectively forming a gauntlet blocking the entrance so that attendees had to either turn back, or literally fight their way to get inside. Those who did fight to get inside, were then arrested by the police.
This same formula was recently applied at UCLA against pro-Palestinian demonstrators during the nights of April 30th-May 1st of last year, an event I covered in detail on my show “Modern Politics”. The first night, the police stood by and watched as dozens of masked, militarized thugs, including active IDF members and Israeli citizens, carrying metal pipes and other weapons, violently stormed an encampment of totally peaceful, non-violent students demonstrating against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The next night, the police moved in—not to protect the constitutional right of the demonstrators to free speech and assembly—but to physically smash and break up their encampment with clubs, chemical agents and rubber bullets fired at point-blank range.
Evidently the government’s answer is: the blueprint on how to demonstrate peacefully and legally for White rights or against Zionism, is simply don’t do it.
Obviously, the reason why my lawsuit was dismissed, in spite of all the evidence, and why the dismissal was upheld by federal judges and finally the Supreme Court, is because the false narrative of Charlottesville is foundational to this crumbling regime.
At the time UTR happened—and I remember this vividly—I returned to my normal, white collar desk job (my body still bruised from the lumps I’d taken by masked anti-White thugs, my eyes and skin still stinging from the chemical agents police sprayed in my face), I was pleasantly surprised to discover virtually all of my White, middle class coworkers excitedly talking about the rally and sympathizing with our side. I just sat quietly and listened as, one and all, they talked about what they would do if they were attacked by Antifa, how it was clear James Fields’ car was under attack, how our side was in the right. I had the same experience in Charlottesville, when I was briefly treated in a medical tent by kind White ladies from the local community. All of them sympathized with UTR attendees and hated the Antifa. The people were with us.
Trump briefly gave voice to this popular sentiment when he made his famous “both sides” statement—until his Jewish handlers cowed him into towing the party line. After that, the narrative set in, and this was later reinforced by the “Nuremberg Trial” sham spectacle of the James Fields trial and the Sines v. Kessler case, miscarriages of justice which saw some of the most wealthy and powerful Jewish lawyers in the country, along with corrupt judges and officials, railroading working-class men, saddling them with penalties and judgements that can only be described as insane.
Americans who witnessed the same political witch-hunt and mass hysteria following the J6 rally have some idea of what the Charlottesville defendants experienced. But unlike the J6 attendees, who were pardoned by President Trump because of their partisan loyalty to his person, the idealistic young men who had their lives destroyed by the System after Charlottesville have no billionaire coming to bail them out. Young men are still being hounded and persecuted for the crime of having carried tiki torches—like the statue of Liberty!—at a rally the night before, and stiff prison sentences are being handed out to completely innocent men.
Charlottesville was such a historic moment in the life of our nation, Joe Biden even cited it as his primary reason for running for president in the year 2019. The myth of Charlottesville as an un-American, illegal, immoral White supremacist terrorist attack—when in fact it was the most legal, most moral, most American defense of liberty and the rights of White people not to have our blood and our memory erased from this land—has taken its place alongside Emmett Till, George Floyd, and the Holocaust as being one of the mythological tentpoles holding up the secular state religion of the regime. The rulers of this System would rather imprison or kill an unlimited number of innocent people, and violate their own constitution and all their avowed founding principles, than let the false narrative about Charlottesville come undone in the public consciousness.
This can be seen in the fact that in spite of the “anti-woke” counter-culture which seemingly swept the country upon Donald Trump’s return to office earlier this year, there has been no attempt to correct the injustices of Charlottesville. Tucker Carlson won’t touch this story, neither will Joe Rogan, let alone Ben Shapiro. Anti-Woke “conservatives” still serve the same masters, and their masters only have an interest in White populism as long as it serves Zionist and capitalistic ends. This is why the Supreme Court, which is now conservative-dominated and packed with Trump appointees, wouldn’t touch my case. This is why no Trump pardons will be coming for the young men being tortured in federal prisons only for the crime of exercising their First Amendment rights.
And this is why, in spite of the backlash against “woke,” none of the hundreds of statues toppled and melted down in the frenzy of anti-White iconoclasm over the past few years will be going back up. The anti-woke “counter-revolution” led by Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin might get you more White men in your military recruitment ads, but General Robert E. Lee won’t be taking his honorable place in bronze back up on that pedestal. That will have to wait for a new time.
Until that time comes, I am very proud to have waged this legal battle for as long as I could. I’m proud that all my filings and the permanent legal record will stand for all time as documents setting out a factual account of what happened. I’m proud that my children and hopefully my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will one day be able to see how I took the right side in the most important fight of our lives. I’m proud that I was able to wage this battle with a minimum of resources and that I was able to tie up countless enemy attorneys and many, many times the resources I spent in making these corrupt, rotten people defend themselves and their actions. I’m proud my name will be forever associated with this fight.
We should always fight for our rights. As I’ve often said, we need to either force this democracy to work, or make them shut democracy down so hard, it will be obvious to all that it’s an illegitimate sham. It’s never been more obvious to me that the “freedoms” set out in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are a cynical joke to the actual masters of America, and that if you cross them politically, these rights will be discarded even if it presents a spectacle of the most grotesque and absurd hypocrisy. It’s important for our people to see this, and for nations around the world to see it, to know that there is zero legitimacy behind this regime. It stays in power by virtue of money and force—bribery, blackmail, and bullets—and when those run out, it will have nothing left. Then our people can begin to live again.
I want to thank Glen Allen and Fred Kelly of the Free Expression Foundation. The original complaint was filed pro se, but I never could’ve appealed it to the Fourth Circuit or petitioned the Supreme Court without their help. They are some of the last honest attorneys in America, and some of the only ones who have any courage. I also want to thank Greg Conte, my original co-plaintiff, and Augustus Invictus, who helped prepare the original draft of the complaint. Augustus has been cast into prison repeatedly for his beliefs, and they are still trying to put him away for carrying a tiki torch that night nearly eight years ago!
I want to thank all those who donated and privately chipped in with legal costs. I never wanted this lawsuit to take away funds from those who were waging their own very critical defensive battles against the Sines v. Kessler suits, or trying to stay out of prison, but thanks to the volunteer work of many men we were able to keep going for a tiny fraction of what a suit like this would normally cost. In this country founded “by lawyers, for lawyers,” the process is often the punishment, the rich and powerful have a decisive advantage and openly brag about using so-called lawfare against their political enemies. But this lawsuit shows how a committed and honest group of men can crowdsource a legal battle that is truly David vs Goliath in proportions—I hope it becomes a model for how our people push back when their rights are violated. The enemy won this round, but they can’t win them all, and the more we fight for our rights, the harder and more costly it becomes for them to suppress us.
Lastly I would like to thank every last man and woman who attended the Unite the Right rally on August 11-12th, 2017. This lawsuit was a symbolic fight for all the young men who sacrificed more at Charlottesville than I did: all those who spent years in prison, who had their careers or reputations destroyed, who ended their own lives, who still have the threat of imprisonment hanging over their heads. For all their sakes, it was worth it.
Thank you for fighting this important fight and being an honest and reliable face for the movement. The hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of this system becomes more starkly evident every day, and you continue to do your part to reveal it.
Warren, thank you so much for all your hard work and effort. You, and all the other brave men at Charlottesville who have been persecuted know that your sacrifices were not in vain, and that we will one day rally again peacefully, together united in purpose, fellowship, and Kinsmanship for our preservation. Consciousness is rising. Thank you Warren for your courage and your Service.