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May 13, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
54:00
Charlottesville — Unite the Right — the Aftermath
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this special edition of Radio Renaissance.
I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance, and I have a special guest on this occasion.
He is Jason Kessler.
Jason Kessler, the name may be known to some of you, he was the permit holder for the Unite the Right rally that took place over August 11th and 12th in 2017, which of course was a huge media event and has now become something of a good-sized legal event.
Mr. Kessler has been sued, as well as a number of other people, for what strikes me as a trumped-up civil rights violation case.
He is also on the offensive as well.
And so, all of these are fascinating developments that I'm going to ask him to bring us up to speed on.
But first of all, Mr. Kessler, I can just go over again, just briefly, what the events were.
What did take place on August 11th and 12th, 2017 in Charlottesville?
Hi, thanks for having me on, Jared.
So, the Unite the Right event was supposed to be about preserving a Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville that the left was trying to tear down, just like they've torn down so many monuments since.
There was enormous pushback from the local far-left community, including Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
The city buckled to that pressure, tried to rescind the permit.
And with the help of the ACLU, I was able to successfully fight in federal court to regain that permit.
At the actual event itself, we thought that since we won the permit, the police were going to show up, protect the event, keep the opposing side separated so that we could actually speak.
That turned out to be naive as the police were ordered to stand down and there was escalating violence as Attendees were attacked on the way into the event.
But it's important to establish that you were a permit holder.
You had a legal right to hold this demonstration.
That's correct?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And so these other people came swarming in to try to shut down the event.
Yeah, they were the aggressors.
Well, tell us more about what actually happened.
Yes, so on the day of the event, I showed up and was really surprised at what ended up happening.
There were hordes of opposing counter-protesters, if you want to call them that, blocking the entrance to the venue, which is something that I was expecting beforehand.
They were attacking protesters.
And basically luring people outside of the event to be beaten down.
The police use this as a pretext to declare an unlawful assembly, pushing the crowd out into the hordes of Antifa where they were beaten with canes.
The flames from an improvised flamethrower with an aerosol can and a lighter were used to shoot at attendees.
And then many hours after the event ended, there was this tragic incident with the car going into the crowd of people.
Yes, that James Field business and the death of Heather Heyer.
That, of course, it seems to me, changed the whole complexion of the event.
Once you actually get a killing, then that's all that people seem to concentrate on.
Yeah.
But, as I understand it, not too long after the event, there was a report put together by a lawyer hired by the city of Charlottesville, no less, named Tim Heafey.
And I've read this HEFI report and I was impressed by how straightforward and honest it appeared to be.
And my recollection is that he said that he got, whether it's testimony or at least accounts from people who would know, that the police chief said, let them fight each other.
And once they fought each other, then we can call it an unlawful assembly and we can get these Unite the Right people out of our streets because we'll say it's an emergency and they can't hold their demonstration.
Yes.
Is that correct?
That's absolutely right.
There were multiple credible witnesses, including my liaison with the Charlottesville Police Department, Captain Wendy Lewis, and the police chief's own assistant, Emily Lance, who overheard the police chief saying, let them fight.
Not only that, the police chief During the Heavey investigation destroyed various text messages and emails and actually created new documents with phony Checklists and backdated them to make it seem like he created these documents prior to the rally so a lot of the the
Extra evidence no longer exists.
It's been destroyed.
And we'll, at least not yet, we don't know what those messages contained.
And it's all very well to say, let him fight.
But if he'd been doing his job, it seems to me, as I recall, there were state police, there were local city police from all around, there were lots and lots of uniformed officers.
If he'd been doing his job, there would have been no way there could have been fighting, right?
You would have been separated.
Absolutely.
And the two heads of the Charlottesville government were the city manager, a guy named Maurice Jones, and in charge of the police that day was Al Thomas, the chief of police.
In a previous permit lawsuit, that city manager admitted under oath that I told him I was
concerned about the Antifa and counter-protesters blocking the entrance to the venue and attacking
my protesters, leading to an escalation of violence on both sides.
I asked him, I begged him to keep the sides separated using the police, and the fact that
they did nothing at all and in fact said let them fight, I think shows people exactly what
went wrong at that rally.
And it's not as though there were no precedents that they could follow.
There had been demonstrations, there had been counter-demonstrations.
Antifa had been very active out in California.
There had been practically pitched battles in which, well, the police in California, in my recollection, for the most part prevented the kind of full-tilt violence that we got in Charlottesville.
So it's not as though this was unplowed ground for them.
Right.
Well, there have been many protests, controversial though they may be, from white identity advocates that have been peaceful and supported by the ACLU.
Unfortunately, in 2017, in the run up to the Unite the Right rally, there were a lot of
outbreaks of police standing down.
You saw that in Berkeley where Antifa were using IEDs and improvised explosives, beating
people with canes, hitting people with bricks, rocks, setting UC Berkeley campuses on fire.
It was just a terrible situation, but we had no idea that Charlottesville would do that
when we'd beaten them in a federal court over the issue.
Well, it seemed that there was so much advance notice.
Everybody knew that this was going to be a big event.
Everybody knew that Antifa was going to be out in force, all these counter-demonstrators.
And it's impossible for us to read the minds of the officials in charge at that time, but it's my impression that they just wanted an excuse to shut down the demonstration.
And that was the main thing they wanted to get out of it was to simply stop you from having the rally and giving the speeches and all of that.
And that's what led to this almost deliberate negligence of their own responsibilities.
What other motive would there be?
I don't think that there is any other credible motive.
As much noise as the city manager may have made prior to the event about protecting free speech, the Charlottesville residents were just on fire trying to get this event shut down.
They just had no idea what the First Amendment is about.
They had no idea that hate speech, quote-unquote, is protected.
U.S.
constitutional law.
And we had a right to do this event.
And when they didn't get their way, you know, they were clearly resorting to violence or what's known as a heckler's veto.
And who knows what was in the minds of the Charlottesville government officials, but they were holding closed door meetings, which may not have even been legal under Virginia law.
And they were trying to find some way out of the Constitution.
They were hiring expensive law firms, some of which are suing us now.
So they've been on both sides of that event going after us and trying to say, where is the wiggle room?
How can we get this event canceled?
So they were desperate to use whatever possible means was at hand to shut you up.
Yes.
And the record shows that the former mayor, Mike Signer, was desperately trying to get into what's called the Unified Command Center on the day of the rally.
And that's where the Charlottesville police chief, the city manager, members of the FBI and some others were basically watching this protest and where these comments were made to let them fight.
The fact that the The police chief and the city manager would not let this mayor into the command center.
To me, it's very highly suspect.
There may have been involvement from the FBI.
They were there.
And the Virginia State Police, which, you know, are Which respond to the orders of then-Governor Terry McAuliffe, now running for re-election in Virginia.
But it's clear that I think the city manager and the police chief were trying to mitigate some of the damage of that conspiracy to not allow the mayor and some others to know about it.
Who knows how much advance notice they made in this plan, but it was clearly a pre-approved plan that they were going to declare an unlawful assembly and they were going to allow that violence, which they knew was going to take place, to happen as an excuse.
It sounds as though if there's a conspiracy, it was a conspiracy to deny you people of your First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly.
There absolutely were.
There's conspiracy upon conspiracy with this thing.
Real conspiracies, not the fake stuff that's out there.
I mean, even leading into the lawsuits, you had very influential people in Charlottesville like Dahlia Lithwick, who is a famous legal correspondent and A good friend of the Charlottesville Mayor, Mike Signer, she was calling him on the day of the rally.
Then after the rally took place, she is the one who brought in Roberta Kaplan, who is the head attorney suing the Unite the Right protesters now.
She introduced her to all of the plaintiffs.
So you have like these very connected left-wing Activists and influential people who were conspiring basically to screw us over however possible, whether that was telling the police not to protect us, telling the government to shut down the permit, and after things went wrong because of their meddling, then to blame us in a court of law.
So, well I assume one motivation to keep the mayor out of the command center and as many of the people as possible out is if you have a conspiracy and you're operating it you want as few people to know or only the people necessary to know.
So keep everybody else out.
Well, okay, now that you all were the victim of that conspiracy, apparently you are being accused of yourselves being guilty of a conspiracy.
And this is the main lawsuit.
I understand its name is Sines v. Kessler.
You are the number one defendant.
And I gather it's Kessler et al.
There are a bunch of other defendants involved.
But tell us about the thinking behind that lawsuit and how it's been proceeding so far.
So basically, it's using civil conspiracy claims, which are very different than criminal conspiracy claims, which require a very high bar of evidence.
In civil court, it's a very low bar of evidence.
And with the civil claims, it can be very nebulous.
It's very easy to claim so-and-so was conspiring with so-and-so.
They were in the same room together.
And then you just say, well, they were conspiring to do this or that.
And it can get you to a trial, believe it or not, to say that kind of thing.
So for them, they're saying that the rally was just a pretext to violently attack counter-protesters, specifically racial minorities.
But yet they have no evidence of that.
They say that we conspired with James Fields, the individual who drove his car into the crowd of people, And yet there's no evidence of that.
They've gone through all of our text messages, all of our emails, all of our social media.
There's no evidence of that.
We have the head investigator with the Charlottesville Police Department, Steve Young, testifying under oath that there was not only no conspiracy, In the death of Heather Heyer, but there was no communication with James Fields whatsoever.
It's not just him.
So the police, the chief officer who was looking into that in charge of the police himself says that Fields had nothing to do with you guys.
Absolutely, and he looked through all of Field's phone records, all of his social media, and besides that, the FBI out of Kentucky searched all of Field's devices in his home, all of his computers, and they also found not only no evidence of any conspiracy, but no communication whatsoever with any of the organizers of the Charlottesville rally.
This is quite incredible.
But that, I suppose, from an emotional, psychological point of view, that's the centerpiece of their case.
Yes.
Heather Heyer is dead.
And these bad people with Jason Kessler, number one, conspired to make things like that happen.
Yeah, it's a difficult thing even when they don't have the facts on their side because they can bring up, here's offensive speech and we're in this environment where people want to hurt other people who say things that they don't agree with and here you have people saying the most objectionable dissonant speech you could possibly imagine and then on top of that you have the fact that There were legitimately people who were injured in that incident with James Fields.
And that's sad.
It's terrible.
But we did not have anything to do with that.
And they are trying to exploit this situation to attack a political faction.
Well, so as I understand it, this is a federal lawsuit, a federal civil suit, one in which you and the other defendants conspired to deprive certain people of their civil rights.
Now, are the alleged victims of this conspiracy, the people that you're going to deprive civil rights, do they all have to be non-white?
Or can you be depriving white people of their civil rights?
Well, you know, the majority of the Antifa are in fact white.
And so therefore, I would say the majority of their plaintiffs are white, even though they went out of their way, I think, to find a selection of, you know, some of this group and some of that group.
But believe it or not, the civil conspiracy law that this is based on, dealing with the racial aspect of conspiracy, it was created in, I believe, the 60s during the quote-unquote civil rights movement.
And it not only protects racial minorities like African Americans, It also protects their quote-unquote supporters.
So what these attorneys are trying to do is muddy the waters about who their supporters were in this instance.
They're trying to liken violent Antifa criminals to civil rights advocates who were attacked during the civil rights movement.
So that's what they're trying to claim is that even if there was a fight between one of my protesters And an Antifa counter protester.
That's also racially motivated violence.
I see.
Even if it's just white people?
Yes.
Great.
I see.
So that's how they link it to civil rights.
Yes.
Well, so this named plaintiff, are there other plaintiffs as well, or is it just this one person?
No, there's a number of different plaintiffs.
And were all of them injured, at least physically, or maybe some of them just claiming psychological injury?
No, as far as I can tell, the only ones who were actually legitimately injured were the ones who were hit with the Dodge Challenger.
The rest of the people who claim injuries on the 11th or the 12th are In my view, mostly political activists who are trying to exploit this situation to get at, you know, the pro-Lee demonstrators.
So you have people claiming that basically their feelings were hurt and they have emotional distress.
And yet at the same time, there's no evidence that this harmed them in any way.
All of these people claiming emotional distress, like the main plaintiff, Elizabeth Sines, she not only graduated from college, she got A job at a fancy law firm and is doing very well for herself.
How is she emotionally distressed?
How is she harmed?
Well, just out of curiosity, what was, I mean, presumably she was present on the scene.
What exactly happened to her?
So, Elizabeth Sines was present on both the 11th and the 12th.
On the 11th, we did a procession march to the Thomas Jefferson statue at the UVA Rotunda.
And she live-streamed herself, basically following protesters around from a distance.
She was following Richard Spencer around and giggling.
She was clearly not afraid.
Nothing happened to her.
And then on the 12th, she went and protested the event.
She claims that she was near the street where the car went into the crowd of people, but that she was not hit, but she suffered emotional distress from the incident nevertheless.
So, her emotional distress is the basis for this charge that you conspired to injure her, but her injuries are nothing more than this claim of emotional distress.
Yeah.
Well, she's actually a very wily political operative, you know.
After the rally was over, she went to the home of a fellow law student who actually is one of the law clerks for the judge in our case.
We had to file a motion to get this guy recused from the case because he's one of her best friends.
So her best friends were helping to decide these cases.
Oh, for heaven's sake.
I see.
So she was a UVA law student at the time?
Yes.
I see, now she's gone on to some fancy firm.
She's gone on to bigger and better things.
Well, lucky girl, lucky girl.
Well, you've made it sound as though there is essentially no evidence for this conspiracy and certainly not a trace of any kind of communication between any of the defendants and this Fields guy who, for reasons best known to himself, committed this violent act.
So, if I were the other side's lawyer, and I was summing up for the jury, and I was trying to persuade them to convict you folks of conspiracy, what is the evidence I would point to?
What's going to be my key argument?
So there are two separate things.
First of all, there are things that people, random trolls, said on the internet.
Offensive things.
Unidentified people.
Yeah, unidentified people that were in chat rooms that claimed that they were going to the event and they said offensive things.
Like what?
On the far right, there are people who say the Holocaust didn't happen, but if it did, it would be a good thing.
Things that I disavow and don't agree with, but that kind of stuff, they will say, is an intention of violence, of wanting to do genocide to a protected group of people.
Okay, but we, so far as we know, we don't even know who those people were or whether they were at the rally.
No, we don't know that they were there.
And in fact, some of the people, at least one of them that they cite has been identified and didn't go to the rally.
I forget what this individual's name was off the top of my head, but he said something about, I want to know if it's legal.
to run over protesters, which is an incredibly stupid thing to say, but he was not somebody
I see.
who was an organizer of the event. He didn't go to the event. He didn't communicate with
James Fields. So I don't see how that is relevant. Then you have a separate issue of what the
actual organizers of the event said. And you have to put it into the context of the fact
that Antifa was violently attacking all of these events, including an event that Milo
Yiannopoulos was going to speak at at the UC Berkeley campus.
They had gotten events by Ann Coulter shut down and various others.
And so people were clearly expecting Antifa violence.
So one of the things that I said was it might be a good idea if people bring free speech implements like picket signs that can be used as self-defense weapons if things get ugly.
So what they do is the way that they try and spin that to support their position that I
was planning violence, not defensive actions, but offensive actions to hurt and harm people's
civil rights, is they have brought in these real quack academic anti-extremist quote unquote
researchers who have theories about something called double speak. And they say that when
people in the what they call quote unquote white supremacist movement say self-defense,
they actually mean offensive violence. And so that's the kind of thing that the case
is really going to hang on is whether the jury believes these people's argument from
authority that you can't believe what I said with my own mouth, but you got to believe
their convoluted conspiracy theories.
In other words, if Jason Kessler says to Nathan D'Amico, who was running, I guess it was Udentity Europa at the time, another participant of the group, if you say to him, well, we're going to have to defend ourselves, that is double speak, meaning let's go out and break their faces and attack them.
Exactly.
And then they bring up things about the fact that people talked about having shields and helmets and so forth, and yet we weren't making a secret of it.
They try to imply that we were.
Another one of their theories is that there's a backstage front stage where a quote-unquote white supremacist will say one thing in public and a different thing in private.
But in fact, we were communicating with police the entire time.
We asked them, is it okay to bring shields?
Is it okay to bring helmets?
And clearly, it's not because we were trying to do offensive violence, but we knew that we were expecting violence.
We were the ones who were going to have our civil rights violated, and we needed to protect ourselves from the actual things that they ended up attacking us with on that day.
Sticks, stones, balloons filled with feces and bleach, all kinds of things.
Well, uh, this is quite, quite astonishing, really.
But even if there is this backstage, front stage, or whatever it is, don't they have all of your communications anyway?
All of your text messages, all of your email messages, everything.
So, it's not as though they can say, okay, this is what Jason Kessler was saying to the police or the press, but this is what he was really saying to the other organizers.
Because they've got everything, haven't they?
Yeah, they have everything.
But these experts in these fluent speakers or at least understanders of double talk, they're going to explain to the jury that when you said defense, you actually meant offense.
Right.
Wow, great.
And so you have a trial date, end of October on this.
Yes.
Wow.
Now, I assume that this science person is being represented pro bono by a bunch of white shoe top flight law firms who think they're just doing God's work by trying to snare you with what sounds to me like a completely cooked up conspiracy charge.
Yeah, well, I mean, these people are making bank.
There's a non-profit that's supporting it, which calls itself Integrity First for America.
The primary attorney is a woman named Roberta Kaplan, who argued the gay marriage case before the Supreme Court.
Oh, is she going to be arguing in court?
Yeah, she's one of them, but it's not just her.
She's already a fabulously wealthy, privileged person.
She has An office in the Empire State Building that is millions of dollars in rent per month.
And then you have the other largest law firms in the country, Cooley.
You have Boies Schiller Flexner, which has represented Harvey Weinstein, Al Gore, the NFL, And that's the law firm, in fact, that was trying to help Charlottesville get my permit revoked prior to the rally.
So that's the firm that's on the other side.
They've been fighting you right from the start.
Yeah.
And these people have raised, you know, they haven't put out their financials in several years, but last I checked, I think 2018, they'd already raised $9 million from like some of the wealthiest CEOs and actors and investors in the country.
Whereas you guys are scraping together to hire whoever you can, I imagine.
Nobody's going to step forward and offer to represent you pro bono, I imagine.
Thankfully, we do have two very brave attorneys.
We have James Klinic out of Cincinnati, Ohio, and Elmer Woodard out of Blairs, Virginia, who's our local counsel.
And they're doing a fantastic job making sure that we catch up with all of our responsibilities to the court, making sure we turn over all the evidence that we have to in discovery.
But we still have to raise a substantial amount of money in order to be able to fight back against things like the expert witnesses, which are massaging the truth and throwing up enough smoke to confuse the issue.
Are you going to have to hire your own expert witnesses?
Unfortunately, it's too late for us to hire an expert witness, but we're hoping that we have a few tools, and I won't reveal them now, to be able to combat this report.
Well, I would think, really, a smart and experienced lawyer on cross-examination can just tear something like that apart.
To say, I mean, do you really mean to say that when these people say defensive action, they're talking about attacking people?
Yeah.
I mean, that just seems so preposterous, but it all depends on what the jury thinks, I guess.
My understanding is this has been a tactic for a long time of groups like the SPLC, and I think that this lawsuit is based on some of the litigation that the SPLC has been doing for decades.
I see.
Well, I suppose, I assume that your lawyers asked for a change of venue to get it out of Charlottesville, because it made such a stink in Charlottesville, you're hardly going to get an unbiased jury, it seems to me.
Well, I wish that we could have gotten a change of venue.
I don't think my lawyers felt like it was going to be very successful.
I mean, there's almost no circumstance in which the change of venue seems to work.
I mean, even in the Derek Chauvin trial, which was the largest possibility you could imagine, that the jury was going to be tainted in that area and they didn't move the venue.
But it's not quite as bad as it seems there because it's a federal case.
So it's not just going to be Charlottesville.
It's going to be the surrounding area, including the counties.
I see.
I see.
Well, that's good.
Well, you know, another lawsuit that you were involved in, It had to do with an episode that I saw.
I think I saw it on live television when it was happening.
This was the press conference that you gave immediately after the August 12th events.
And you tried to explain your position on this.
You hardly got three words out of your mouth in front of the microphone.
Before a swarm of people attacked you under the noses of what looked to me like 40 uniformed officers, chased you away from the microphone, beat you up.
This was an astonishing thing to me.
And all of the press had been foaming at the mouth about all this horrible violence that had taken place the day before.
And then these people attack you, one lone defenseless guy in front of a microphone, and they all seemed to cheer.
Yeah.
I mean, the media, which has constantly denounced us and blamed us for the violence that took place, you know, were in ecstasy over the violence that was done to me.
There was a bloodlust in the air from those people.
And it's really been a difficult thing.
You would think that the police would have prosecuted those people who attacked me right away.
But in fact, I had to pursue it myself.
I had to pull them kicking and screaming to investigate these people.
But this makes no sense.
They were right there on television.
And it's not as though this was during COVID and they're all wearing masks.
You could tell exactly who they were.
But you had to force them, force them to undertake any kind of prosecution.
Yeah, that's right.
And as I recall, you succeeded in getting guilty verdicts, but no satisfaction.
Well, I got two...
Let's see, I got a guilty verdict against two of the individuals, one who had punched me in the back of the head and one who had shoved me a number of times, and then a woman who had jumped me from behind.
I initially got a conviction against, but then it basically, when the appeal happened and it was going to be tried before a jury, My attorney, the prosecutor, said this is the worst jerry pool I've ever seen.
These people are laughing like it's a joke, and they are going to let this woman go.
So we had to basically settle for this woman apologizing, essentially, even though she had assaulted me on camera in front of the entire world.
But these are criminal matters.
I mean, how does a district attorney say, okay, well, yes, obviously assault is going on here and you're pressing charges.
It's their job.
They have an obligation to carry through, do they not?
Yeah, you would think so.
And I mean, I eventually was able to get them to do their jobs.
The police anyway, the Charlottesville prosecutor wanted nothing to do with the case.
And I actually had to get a special prosecutor from a conservative district, Goochland.
A guy named Mike Caudill came out and, you know, he was just all business.
Wait, wait, wait.
The Charlottesville prosecutor who has responsibility for Charlottesville, which is where this all took place, he refused to take the case?
Yeah, I mean, that's par for the course.
I've been attacked multiple times in Charlottesville.
My recording equipment destroyed.
I've been stalked through the streets.
I've been attacked by police, even, who've destroyed my equipment as I was filming.
And the prosecutors never want to go through with the case.
And when the evidence is so profound that the case has to go forward, they will recuse themselves and appoint somebody from another district.
Brief.
Boy, it certainly does not sound like blind justice.
Lady Justice up there with the scales, the blindfold, whatever happened to her?
Well, anyway, that, as I say, I saw that live when it happened.
And I remember thinking, this is one of the most outrageous things I've ever seen.
Here's a guy trying to explain his point of view on this very Yeah, I've never been able to really have a platform to explain myself.
and they would even let him talk and the media seemed to think that's great and
the police do nothing. Yeah I've never been able to really have a platform to
explain myself you know you would think with a major news event like that Fox
News or somebody would come and ask me what is your perspective of what
But it was so easy to blame the people who were the political dissidents, who had speech that folks didn't agree with, rather than to look at this real government conspiracy to shut down people's civil rights.
Yeah, it's incredible.
Well, that brings us to your offensive cases.
At least you have a civil rights case against the city, do you not?
Yes.
Because as we mentioned earlier, it seems very clear from the evidence that is publicly available that the authorities conspired to make it impossible for you to exercise your First Amendment rights of assembly and free speech.
Yes.
And so tell us about that case.
So that case is based on Section 1983 civil rights violations.
We're alleging that the city used a heckler's veto to shut down our First Amendment rights.
And a heckler's veto is essentially when an unruly crowd who disagrees with the speech uses violence or disorder in order to cause conditions where the government will shut down the event to restore a public order.
It's supposed to have some responsibilities to take reasonable steps to try and quell that violence or disorder.
If they don't do anything, they can be held liable for that.
I think in our case, I mean, the evidence is already very strong before we've even gone to trial that This is what happened that he report and the stand down order from the police chief being first and foremost amongst the evidence.
It was dismissed at the district court level and now it's on appeal at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Basically, instead of arguing that our rights were violated, the presiding judge, Moon, Norman Moon, tried to argue that there, in fact, was no such thing as a heckler's veto, and that the police have no duty to protect speakers who are being attacked by a mob, which is a pretty novel ruling, and we were floored when we got it.
Wow, that sounds like one that an appeals court will just dropkick.
Absolutely.
We feel like it's going to be a very strong appeal, even given the controversial nature of the case.
Because the Hector's veto, that's a very well-established constitutional understanding.
I'm sorry to say that the New Century Foundation, our organization, has had to sue a government agency on exactly those grounds, and we won.
Because that's settled law.
The government has the responsibility to protect your constitutional rights.
And it seems that not only did they not protect them, but they deliberately put you in harm's way to give themselves an excuse to shut the thing down and deprive you of your rights.
Right.
Yeah, they're trying to rely on a wrinkle about whether the police have a duty to protect people within the heckler's veto doctrine.
So, there is case law, there's something called De Cheney, which is referred to as De Cheney.
Which says that police don't have a duty to protect a random person who is a victim of a crime.
But there is a well-established exception to that, and that is the heckler's veto.
Right.
You're not a random victim.
This was plotted.
Everybody knew well in advance what people want.
The Antifa groups were clearly wanting to shut you down, break up the organization, break up the demonstration, and it was clearly law enforcement's job to prevent that.
Seems to me.
Absolutely.
Okay, well, good luck on that.
So, it is on appeal now.
Do you have any timetable in terms of expecting a ruling?
Not really.
There's a lot of discretion for the judges, so it could happen at any time.
We've requested oral arguments.
They don't have to Give it to us.
We suspect that maybe they're waiting until the science case is over.
We feel like the science case is the only thing that is standing between us and victory in this thing.
And even if the district court didn't go our way, we feel like There is an incredibly high chance that this is the kind of case that would be picked up by the Supreme Court because you can't have conflicts between different regions of the United States on something this important.
There needs to be a ruling from the top down to create a uniform standard.
When it came time to get the permit to hold the demonstration, the ACLU went to bat for you.
And this sounds like a perfect case for the ACLU to take.
But it's my understanding that ever since Charlottesville, in fact, the ACLU has completely turned its back On anybody who could, by the most remote and deft gymnastics, be accused of white supremacy or racism.
They're just not gonna support the right of freedom of speech for people like that.
Yeah, Charlottesville was the death knell for the old ACLU and now it's really a situation where those rights that they used to champion, even for dissident groups, are hanging on by a thread.
We have to raise our own money, we have to hire our own attorneys, if we can find them, and we have to renew those rights because new precedents can be created.
Those old cases protecting the right to protest for dissident groups free of violence can be overruled you know as new judges activist judges or or as just through neglect from groups like the ACLU no longer stepping in to defend them.
There was a time when they really did have an admirably principled view of freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech for anybody and everybody, even if I violently disagree with the content of it.
But to me, this is Charlottesville and your case really are a perfect, perfectly clear example of their having turned their back on any principled defense.
They're only going to go and help you if they agree with what you say.
So, in effect, they're no longer defending freedom of speech, they're defending certain points of view.
Well, unfortunately, there are actually attorneys who have gone to bat in Um, highly controversial circumstances to defend freedom of speech, even for a quote unquote white supremacist or other dissidents who won't defend Charlottesville.
But it's this new environment is posing new questions about, um, free speech that have never, uh, been there before because there's a weaponized anti-speech movement out there that is unlike anything that ever existed before.
So it's well enough to say, well, we support the rights of these groups to speak.
But what if the police stand down and you have an army of some far-left paramilitary group that's going to attack you?
Do you also support the right to self-defense against that?
Or are you going to blame the people for the violence that they didn't cause but was forced upon them?
And in any case, If a group is trying to make its voice heard and instead they end up in fisticuffs or beating each other with sticks, they certainly have not had an opportunity to assemble and exercise their freedom of speech.
Yeah.
No, I agree that the atmosphere in the United States today has gone against freedom of speech in a way that I find quite terrifying.
And anybody who's in the dissident business, and I'm of course a dissident, we have to look over our shoulders all the time.
So far, there have not yet been laws that passed to make what I say and what you say illegal to say, but I do not find that entirely out of the question.
But anyway, I understand, okay, so you have got a civil rights suit against, it's the city as it turns out, the city is the... Yeah, the city of Charlottesville, the police chief Al Thomas, the city manager Maurice Jones, and the head of the Virginia State Police Response, Becky Kranis.
Okay, great.
And that's on appeal, and we don't know when we'll get a ruling.
Now, I understand that you also have a freedom of information case going against the police chief and the city manager, perhaps others as well, in order to find out what exactly were their communications in terms of deciding to let them all battle it out, and so we can call a state of emergency and shut them down.
Yes.
Now, how is that going along?
So, in the aftermath of the rally, you know, I was looking for any way whatsoever that I could uncover more of the conspiracy that was done against our protest.
And one of the few tools that I had was a law called FOIA, Freedom of Information Act.
And so that allows you to request a lot of different types of documents.
And thankfully, I had that Hafee report, which was exposing a lot of what was going on behind the scenes in the government.
So I had details I could pull from that.
Oh, here's an email that was sent.
Here's a text message.
I could request things like the text messages that were destroyed by Al Thomas and the command staff.
Knowing that he texted with the city manager, I could request his text messages.
The city of Charlottesville was not forthcoming.
I bet it wasn't.
No.
At one point I had requested emails and text messages sent by the city manager, Maurice Jones, on August 11th and 12th.
Judging from the Haphy report, I highly expected that there were text messages explicitly condoning a police stand down.
And talking about, you know, just flagrantly violating the rights of the protesters.
I was told that no such documents existed.
And I asked why?
Is it because they're deleted?
Did you lose them?
What happened?
No response.
Almost a year later, the former mayor, Mike Signer, wrote a book called Cry Havoc about his accounts of the Charlottesville rally in which he explicitly talked about the text messages and emails that he sent with the city manager and with the police chief.
So there I have the evidence that they exist.
But not only that, but he described with great specificity the time and date of those messages and in fact described the content of many of those messages.
Wow, well that was a gift to you!
Yes.
But if he had not written this book, you probably would have been completely foreclosed from even asking about these.
Well, do they exist?
Were they destroyed?
Are you gonna be able to find these?
Well, this is the ongoing saga of trying to find whatever was behind the mystery of these text messages.
I filed a lawsuit against the city of Charlottesville representing myself pro se because I couldn't really afford to hire another attorney at that time to fight yet another lawsuit.
Right before trial, the city of Charlottesville started panicking and they turned over A series of documents, one of which contained 2,500 pages of emails that they said didn't exist.
And their excuse was, oh, we didn't see that you had requested the emails.
We thought it was just the text messages.
Then with regards to the text messages, they sent me a letter saying, oh, we're sorry.
The city manager wiped his phone when he left to find employment elsewhere.
This is not something that is legal in Virginia, by the way.
This is actually a class 1 misdemeanor for people to destroy.
Because these are public officials and these are public documents.
Yes.
And they have no right to destroy them.
Exactly.
Especially the city manager.
In Virginia, those city manager communication documents are supposed to be kept permanently in agency.
So, at the time, I was able to get And I was able to get these 2,500 pages.
Oh, you got your costs back.
Yeah, I got my costs back.
Right.
But in terms of finding that, like punishing the city, holding them accountable for destroying the records,
I was told I had to take it to a higher court, from the district court to the circuit court, which
is going to set precedent for all of Virginia.
When I filed that lawsuit, I got a preliminary order from the judge saying that the city
can no longer destroy those records while the case is going on.
And thankfully, an angel investor was able to step in and hire me an attorney.
So we got an individual named Andrew Bodo, who is the preeminent FOIA attorney in all of Virginia.
He's literally written the book, Virginians Guide to FOIA.
book, Virginians Guide to FOIA.
And so we're fighting that out in court.
Now the latest wrinkle, every time I push this further, they fall back and they reveal their duplicity on this
issue.
So whereas they said that the phone had been wiped and there's no way to get these messages,
once the judge issued that order, they couldn't destroy the files.
They panicked and they called a new hearing in which they revealed, wait, the phone, we just found the phone.
We didn't know it was missing, but we found it.
And it's been damaged, not wiped, but just damaged.
And they don't say how it was damaged, whether it was hit with a hammer.
whether it was flushed in a toilet, whether it was hit with bleach or whatever else.
And so now we are basically fighting over whether they want to allow the police department to come
in and like the fox in the hen house, open up the phone and decide whether there are files there.
And we're saying, no, we want an independent electronic forensics firm to come in and do that.
Wow, so it sounds as though you're making painful but steady progress and you're gradually putting these guys in a very tight spot.
Exactly.
Well that's great, that's great.
So it sounds as though on your offensive front you are cautiously optimistic or maybe even incautiously optimistic of a favorable ruling on your First Amendment case from the Appeals Court And you look like you're moving forward on your freedom of information lawsuit, but now I guess what's coming up really in the most important way is the end of October, the trial in which you're on the defensive.
Yes.
Well, it sounds as though ever since Charlottesville, you've pretty much devoted your life to law and lawsuits.
Yes, this has become my life now.
You probably have no more about this stuff than a lot of lawyers by now.
Yeah, I think so.
Like, there's a healthy, I think, fear of the court system and the civil court system is not kind to people who aren't corporations or millionaires.
If you're just a common person who happens to be targeted by A political racket, you know, who doesn't care about money.
They just want to prove a political point and destroy you in the process.
Well, it certainly sounds like that's what Signs v. Kessler is all about.
Yes.
People who've got unlimited money and the best lawyers that money can buy trying to crush people who have practically no resources and who certainly, as far as I can tell, did absolutely nothing wrong.
That's right.
Wow.
Well, if anyone wants to help you with this, and as you noted, it's an expensive business, how can people help you?
Sure, we have a plan to defeat this lawsuit.
The facts and the law are on our side, but we have to even some of the resource disadvantage so we can combat these people.
It's a totally winnable fight.
It doesn't seem like there's too many winnable battles for the right these days.
This is one of them, and it would be huge and humiliating for them to lose this.
We need to raise, I would say, at least $30,000 to help enact our plan to combat These expert witnesses to get our attorneys into court through a three-week trial, which is not inexpensive.
No, $30,000 sounds like a modest sum under certain circumstances.
No.
I mean, if we could raise more than that, certainly that would help.
The costs are not limited to $30,000, that's for sure.
But I think that that would help to alleviate the burden for some of the folks who are falling behind a little bit and being able to afford things.
But we have many options for people who want to support us.
To learn more about the case, you can go to UTRDefense.org.
That's UTR as in Unite the Right.
UTRDefense.org.
And you're going to see, you can send money directly to the attorney.
So you don't have to worry about, you know, sending money directly to a dissident and The potential problems that could cause.
It's going to the Attorney James Clinic.
You can send it using apps like Cash App, Venmo.
You can send Bitcoin.
His mailing address is there if you want to send cash, check, money order.
We have a site called GiveSendGo that also has a fundraising option.
Okay, well it sounds like once somebody has gotten to UTRDefense.org UTRDefense.org.
There are many ways to help out.
It sounds like that's the place to go and I think that's a very smart thing that you can give the money directly to the lawyers.
It doesn't have to be in the hands of someone whom the press is going to tell you is a wicked man.
Yeah.
Go straight to lawyers.
Wow.
Well, is there anything else that you'd like to say to the Radio Renaissance audience?
Anything else that, I mean, you've seen the court system operating, you've seen the way the other side operates, do you have any observations of particular interest?
What would be your final words to our listeners?
Well, I just thank them for their support and I hope that they won't ever be dragged into this kind of mess.
But if they are, you know, be savvy.
Consult an attorney because, I mean, a lot of things are stacked against us, but also, You don't win any battles that you don't fight.
And I think there are a lot of winnable fights out there, not just for my particular circumstances, but for people who are doxxed or have their businesses or families targeted by these left-wing criminals.
I think there are a lot of options for people.
Well, it sounds as though you are in a fight in which you have a chance.
And certainly, I would support any opportunity for you to get a fair outcome.
And I suspect our listeners do too.
So, well, thank you very much, Jason Kessler.
I really appreciate your coming in for this podcast.
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