12/18/2023 0 Comments Richmond times dis obituary tankThat day in D.C., the police were clearly there to protect Jason Kessler and his neo-Nazi group. They moved their bikes in toward us in unison, restricting the space the group could take up in the street until the conversation at the center of it was compressed and everyone began to feel anxious and heated. Stopping to observe the interaction, we found ourselves part of a gathering crowd, and then were immediately surrounded by triple rows of police officers on bikes in riot gear-three rows to my right and three rows to my left. At UTR2, after the protest itself had died down, my friends and I had stepped out of a restaurant where we had eaten lunch, and found a right wing YouTuber harassing an unhoused man with questions near Lafayette Square. This sudden feeling of being surrounded by police brought me back to a similar situation, when I had attended the counter-protest of Unite The Right 2 in Washington, D.C., a year after the murder of Heather Heyer and the neo-Nazi groups marching on the grounds of UVA in Charlottesville. Some police officers were also wearing similar half-face ski masks, and I asked multiple of them if the law was being waived today due to the cold, but was met with “no comment,” until one responded with merely, “I’m cold.” The law was designed to help aid law enforcement in unmasking and detaining members of the KKK back in the 1950s, but now it’s been largely used as grounds to detain Antifascist protesters. Wearing a mask in Virginia is a felony crime, and local Antifa members I spoke with were frustrated to see the protesters wearing masks without being stopped by the police and asked to remove the covering. Some wore camo-patterned bandanas for the same purpose. Many of the protesters were heavily bundled up in Carhartt jackets, wearing hats and ski masks to cover their mouths and noses in the biting wind. I followed a reporter friend into the thick of it, until bodies and guns pressed into me at every turn-think trying to get on public transit right as a stadium event lets out, but add multiple AK-47s being slung into your back and sides by accident. Later in the day my group and I would run into known neo-Nazi Jovi Val talking to a local activist and loudly denying the Holocaust.īack outside in the cold, protesters were cramming themselves into the center of the rally at the corner of Bank St and 10th. Throughout the day I could hear this term being thrown about in snatches of conversation, and watched as the crowd swelled from just older white men in Carhartts with guns to younger men in expensive tactical gear decked out with stickers and emblems from the Punisher skull to the III%ers logo. Her fears weren’t unfounded-in the weeks leading up to the event, the far-right 4chan message board /pol, where the rally organizers met to strategize, were full of anonymous posts expressing enthusiasm for driving Governor Northam out of office and starting the “ Boogaloo,” a slang term referring to race-based civil war. Delegate Elizabeth Guzmán, a Peruvian-American representing the 31st District, said she felt the need to disguise herself and remove her delegate pin from her jacket as she made her way in to work. Staffers were calling in sick en mass, and the youth-led gun control advocate group March For Our Lives: Virginia bussed in the night before and slept in their representatives’ offices rather than wade through the crowds of protesters (many of whom displayed poor gun safety form, like wearing handguns on belt clips that could easily fall off, or resting the muzzle of a loaded semi-automatic weapon on the tops of their shoes, or leaving guns piled on the ground outside of the rows of porta potties while they did their business). It’s the least-crowded Lobby Day I’ve ever seen, so it means I’m getting all my stuff done here, but everyone’s either at home or outside.” While the thin attendance of Lobby Day may have been fortuitous for her interests, it represented the overall sentiment in the city surrounding this rally: People were afraid. She had worked around the General Assembly in years past, and has seen many Lobby Days over the years. I ran into a friend who’s currently working as a lobbyist. I stopped in the building midway through the rally, curious what the mood was like inside.
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