High-Stakes Unite the Right Trial Begins in 8 Days
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Welcome ladies and gentlemen to this special edition of Radio Renaissance.
I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance, and we have a special guest today, Jason Kessler.
Jason Kessler is probably known to a lot of you as the permit holder for the Charlottesville rally that was set up to preserve the Robert E. Lee statue, which the other side wanted to take down.
As some of you who have been following events know, there has been a fair amount of litigation that has followed on this.
And the most important lawsuit to come from this, one called Signs v. Kessler, will be going to trial very soon.
Jury selection will take place on October 25th.
The more I find out about this case and the allegations being made, the angrier I get.
If this lawsuit succeeds and the defendants are found guilty, it will be a terrible precedent For anything resembling the rule of law in the United States.
And so, I will give you this information at the end of this podcast, but I would like to give it to you now.
This is how you can donate to the defense, the defense team.
Obviously, the defense has nothing like the resources that the plaintiffs have.
And they really badly need your help.
So the best place to go is to a website Jason Kessler.
J-A-S-O-N K-E-S-S-L-E-R dot US slash donate.
That's JasonKessler.us slash donate.
And I hasten to add that your money will go straight to the lawyers.
It does not pass through Jason Kessler's hands at all.
It goes straight to the lawyers.
So, after all that, welcome Mr. Kessler and thanks so much for joining me.
Good to be with you.
Just to begin, and I don't think most of our listeners will need this, but can you just summarize very briefly the events of the Unite the Right rally?
Okay, so in Charlottesville, Virginia, a black supremacist named Wes Bellamy got on the city council and he made it his cause to tear down history of white Americans, including a Robert E. Lee statue that was in the center of downtown Charlottesville.
I set up the Unite the Right rally to protest this and the destruction of other white American historical figures like Thomas Jefferson.
When we got the permit, the city tried to revoke it and I was forced to fight them in federal court with the help of the ACLU and we achieved a remarkable victory for free speech the night before the rally.
But much to our astoundment, the Charlottesville Police Department did not protect the event and Far-left extremists with Antifa proceeded to attack the attendees.
People fought back and the police used that as cover to declare an unlawful assembly and force everybody out of the park into the waiting arms of Antifa, which only escalated the violence.
And before you go any further, I noticed you used the word black supremacist with Wes Bellamy, and I tend to use those words carefully and scrupulously, but in this case it's probably correct, because he had tweeted out very, very insulting, hateful things about whites.
And I don't believe that that terminology is an exaggeration in his case.
Was he not forced out as deputy mayor, whatever his title was, because of this anti-white mentality that you'd unearthed?
Well, the Charlottesville City Council is basically an extremist organization, you know, and they Gave no consequences to Wes Bellamy.
However, he was on the Virginia State Board of Education and he was forced to resign following these tweets.
And you're right, I would say that the things that he was saying like, white women are the devil, I don't like white people, my favorite thing about being down South is looking down at little white men.
These are things that, you know, were behind his decision to try and tear down American history.
And I think all of the events that followed in 2020 with tearing down of the statues, I think it's important for people to know that legacy.
Yes, it's very important to know the kind of thinking of the people who are doing those things.
And it was you who first brought those tweets to light, right?
Yes.
Yes.
Now as you pointed out, the police failed to protect and this was documented in a very substantial way by something known as the Heafy Report.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
So the Charlottesville government hired a former federal prosecutor named Tim Heafy to conduct what they called an independent review of the events of Unite the Right.
And it's a voluminous report.
covers not only that but also a protest on July 7th where a Klan group had come and actually
the Antifa and far left people had hospitalized police officers and were extremely violent
at that event.
It followed the August 11th events at the UVA Rotunda as well.
But the findings of his report were basically that the police had no intention of protecting
free speech and assembly.
They had a pre-approved plan to allow the violence to occur as a pretext to disband the rally.
And in fact, several witnesses heard the police chief, Al Thomas, saying, let them fight.
It will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly.
And that's exactly what happened.
This is just so outrageous.
But of course, even after the publication of the Heafy Report, it was essentially ignored by the mainstream media, was it not?
This should have been big news, but it was so inconvenient to this whole idea of these hopped up white supremacist Nazis running wild, beating up innocent people, that this just had to be ignored.
I would like to add at this point that a book has recently appeared.
It was published just earlier this year by Ann Wilson Smith called Charlottesville Untold.
It is a remarkable book that looks very carefully and objectively into all these matters and I note in this book you are extensively interviewed and you have an opportunity for perhaps the first time to speak at length to a mainstream person about what actually happened.
So this is certainly a step in the right direction.
Well, as I said at the outset, this has resulted in a number of lawsuits, and the really important one, the important one in which you are a defendant, you are the number one defendant.
is going to trial very soon.
I understand that just this coming week there'll be pre-trial motions.
Jury selection begins October 25th.
Can you tell me what is alleged here?
What are the claims of the plaintiffs and what's at stake in this trial?
Well, essentially what the plaintiffs are claiming is that it wasn't a rally, it wasn't about free speech, that it was a conspiracy to do racial violence.
And the centerpiece of their claim is that organizers conspired with James Fields, who was convicted of murdering Heather Heyer after he drove his car into a crowd of people.
So, just to make sure, They're saying that this was not a rally to defend the statue or to exercise freedom of speech.
It was a conspiracy to commit violence?
Yes.
That just seems so utterly utterly far-fetched.
Well, the problem is these are some of the best attorneys in the world, and they're very skilled at deception and twisting words.
This lawsuit really shouldn't have gotten this far, but not for the skill of these people, which is a dark skill, and it's a horrible thing to accuse innocent people of something like this.
But what they do is they take communications that people had about Preparation for self-defense at this rally because everybody including law enforcement including the U.S.
Army and Homeland Security knew that there was a potential for violence at this event.
They knew that the instigators were far-left extremists and people had to prepare for that.
There was all kinds of violence throughout 2017 Including riots at the inauguration of Donald Trump, riots at the UC Berkeley campus prior to planned speeches by Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter.
People were hit in the heads with bike locks at different events.
This was no joke and we ourselves were receiving many threats of violence and death prior to this event.
I think that's a very important point to make, that whenever any group that the Antifa types disliked appeared in public, they were likely to be attacked physically.
And so there was a lot of chatter on the internet, we're going to get these guys, namely you people, you especially as the permit holder, and so it was legitimate that you prepare.
But in the context of preparing to defend yourselves, what is the other side's best evidence for this alleged conspiracy to commit violence?
I mean, maybe I'm putting you on the spot by asking you what's their best evidence, but surely there must be something that they can point to.
Well, I'll talk a little bit about the James Field stuff because it's been the subject of recent motions in limine by the plaintiffs.
Right now, they're trying very hard to get certain evidence excluded so that it can't be talked about in court.
One of those things is the HEFI report.
They want that entirely excluded.
They say it's nothing but hearsay.
What?
And another thing is, they are trying to get adverse inferences before the trial even starts saying that James Field was part of a racially motivated conspiracy, which would be a huge Part of their case is really, as I said, the centerpiece of their case.
And the way that they've been going about that is they've been taking the fact that there are a number of defendants who didn't even participate in this case.
They didn't have any faith in the process or whatever.
So they've already got adverse inference saying that these people were Not participating because they were probably hiding evidence of a conspiracy against people like Andrew Anglin, the editor of the Daily Stormer, a man named Elliot Klein, who was a former leader of Identity Europa, and more significantly, he was an employee of Richard Spencer.
I think that's where his allegiance really lied.
But Oh, I see.
So they're saying the fact that these people have not responded in effect proves their case.
Yes.
Well, that's a completely unfounded legal assumption.
Surely the judge is not going to accept that.
Well, adverse inferences are a legitimate thing, although extremely rare.
And in this case, I guess the judge just decided to put the hammer down.
But none of this should In theory, have any effect on people like myself and the other defendants who have been turning over everything.
I mean, all of our social media accounts, we've had our computers and phones digitally imaged so they can get every single thing that we posted over a course of years.
And they've had teams like There are battalions of researchers going over this stuff, picking apart every little thing that we might have said.
But to get to answering your initial question, the evidence that they try to put forth that there was communication with James Field or conspiracy with him is very specious.
There are Charlottesville investigators like Corporal Steve Young, who headed up the James Fields homicide case, who have stated under oath that there was no communication or conspiracy with James Fields.
The FBI says the same thing.
And yet, the plaintiffs push back on that, and they're trying to actually have Corporal Young barred from saying that.
They call his statements and his expertise, quote, unfounded.
And what they're saying is that, no, actually there was communication with James Fields.
For one thing, he followed Richard Spencer on Twitter and he responded to a post of Richard Spencer's one time, which is like extremely weak, like extremely weak.
And then they say that James Fields destroyed evidence of the conspiracy.
And what they say the evidence of this conspiracy is, is that he allegedly received two Christmas cards in 2017 from somebody claiming to be a member of Vanguard America, one of the defendant groups.
And so, I guess after the Christmas season, he threw these cards away and did not preserve them as evidence.
Well, is there any evidence that he actually got these cards?
Well, he has testified that he received these cards, so no one would know about it if he did not say something about it, but that was his duty to say that.
The issue is, is that, is it really likely that, you know, like two Christmas cards is sent months after the events
in question contain all the evidence of this mythical conspiracy?
These were even after the event.
Yeah, this was while he was incarcerated in a Charlottesville prison, I guess.
And he received two Christmas cards months after the events, you know,
and we're very fortunate because very recently, a judge shot down those arguments
and said that no reasonable fact finder could infer that the evidence of this conspiracy
came from these two Christmas cards.
Well it sounds as though they've been utterly unable to find any evidence in the possession of You who have responded, you and the other defendants who have responded by turning over all your documents of any kind of conspiracy, but they're saying, okay, these guys don't have any evidence, but the people who have not responded, they're no doubt concealing all kinds of evidence, and therefore even you guys, who are clean as a houndstooth, are guilty also.
Yes.
And they will never allow us to clear our names.
Their media allies are not going to accept it if we beat this thing in court.
And in their documents filed with the court, what they say is, well, we know better than
the police investigator because these defendants don't always use their name in their social
media handles.
And did he really search the social media accounts of every single person at that rally?
Which is just logically ridiculous.
Why do they need to do that when they have the guy who drove the car?
They've searched his accounts.
If he was conspiring with anybody, those would be the people you would focus on, not like sifting through the personal correspondence of every single person at the rally.
Good grief!
Well, and every single person at the rally has not been charged, right?
No.
Well, but it sounds as though, as you say, they've got unlimited resources.
And I remember seeing a list of the lawyers involved in their case, and it seemed about 30.
And then on your side, defending, what is it, a score of different plaintiffs, it looked as though you had maybe half a dozen lawyers.
And these are all of these lawyers, some big hot shot white shoe firms, probably charging four or five hundred dollars an hour, which they can do because they've got all sorts of fancy people raising money for them, do they not?
Yes, this is a political hit, you know.
We're facing something that normally you would have to have the resources of like a major corporation to fight because, I mean, this is big time Lawfare.
These firms, like Roberta Kaplan, has argued before the Supreme Court.
She argued the case.
Who is Roberta Kaplan?
Roberta Kaplan is the primary attorney behind this lawsuit.
She is a Jewish lesbian, identitarian, I would call it, because she's an advocate of those causes.
She started the Time's Up Foundation, which recently got into hot water for defending
Andrew Cuomo against sexual assault allegations.
But she argued the Windsor case before the Supreme Court, which struck down the gay marriage
ban.
You also have some of the largest law firms in the entire world working for them.
The Cooley Law Firm, you have Boies Schiller Flexner, which has represented the NFL, represented Al Gore in the Hanging Chad controversy in the 2001 election.
And on the other side, as you say, I basically have two attorneys, one of which really doesn't Work on the case very much.
He's pretty much just there to be local counsel.
That's Elmer Woodard.
And then I have an attorney from Ohio, James Klinic.
On the other side, you know, I look at the docket and every week they're adding new people.
And these are people with like Expansive resumes.
These are like the niece of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is one of their attorneys.
Recently, there was a guy, Matteo Godi, who I saw that was added and I was just blown away by like, Seeing this guy's pictures that he put up on the internet of this opulent wedding he'd had in Sri Lanka with elephants.
It was like something out of a Bollywood film.
He went to your alma mater, Yale.
All of these people are Ivy League, they're wealthy, they're politically connected, and they're just crushing a lot of these defendants who are politically powerless.
I'll give you an example is some of these attorneys, many of them have written about how noble they are for defending the rights of prisoners and so forth.
And yet one of the defendants in this case, Christopher Cantwell, is currently in prison.
He has been ...held in a no-communication unit, basically, so they can stop him from podcasting over the phone and so forth.
And he has not been able to participate meaningfully in this trial.
In fact, he's complained many, many times in hand-scrawled notes to the court that they aren't even serving him with the legal documents he needed to properly defend himself.
So this is really a beat down of the strong onto the weak, the rich onto the poor.
Does he have counsel at all?
Well very recently he has found a couple of fellow inmates who might not be attorneys themselves but have spent a lot of time reading legal books and I'm told that some of them are actually quite good and their precedent has been used in real cases.
But he's...
He's maybe gone a little bit overboard and once he got these guys filed like dozens of motions, but some of them do have merit.
Not the least of which is that he's asking for more time to prepare for this trial because he hasn't been given the evidence to review.
He hasn't been allowed to respond to the various motions and now he's going to be forced to defend himself against people who are claiming that they're going to chase him around for the rest of his days hounding him for money if he loses.
Good grief.
And I suppose if he's currently in prison, so can he even come and defend himself pro se?
Or certainly his jailhouse lawyers are not going to be let out to defend him.
Well, as they say, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease and all these motions that Cantwell has filed and the handwritten notes looking somewhat hopefully pathetic, I think, have made it so the judge has taken notice and definitely granted him a few of the things he's requested, like having the U.S.
Marshals Service transport him to Charlottesville so that he can be there in person during the trial acting in his own defense.
Where is he in prison now?
I think he's in transport on the way to Charlottesville.
He might already be in Charlottesville.
They had him in that isolation unit in Marion.
I'm not sure which state that's in.
I haven't looked at it.
I think that's Ohio, but I'm not sure.
It might be.
Well, there's probably a number of others.
There's a number of Marians, I think.
Wow.
Now, this is really, as you say, an utter Samson versus Goliath kind of undertaking.
But once again, now there was a lot of other sporadic and much less significant violence in addition to James Field driving his car into that group of protesters or counter protesters.
Is any of that violence being evoked as part of your crime of having organized that or is it all really concentrating on James Field?
Well, they have a number of defendants.
Most of them, certainly the actual people who were seriously injured, were claiming injuries related to the James Fields incident.
But they do have a few who claim to have been injured on August 11th or 12th during actual
protest events themselves.
But just speaking for myself, not as my attorney or anything, but I don't see where these people
really had real injuries.
A lot of them are political actors with a vendetta.
And if you listen to the things that they are claiming injury for, it's all emotional
distress related to First Amendment protected activities.
They say, you know, I heard them chanting, I saw them marching, and I haven't been able to sleep the same since, and blah, blah, blah, and, you know.
So, in other words, you're being accused of conspiring to deprive them of sleep.
Yeah, essentially.
Just an example of the best that they've got in terms of violence prior to the James Fields incident.
There's a left-wing preacher named Seth Wispoway who claims that he was shoved while he was in the process of Locking arms with other left-wing preachers to block assembly into the rally.
So he was committing an illegal act and he claims that he was shoved and fell into a bush.
Now obviously I don't condone that if that actually happened.
There's no evidence that I condone that but that is not a serious injury.
So these people are named plaintiffs in the case?
Yes.
I see, I see.
But no one, so far as you can tell, has had a real, actual, serious injury.
No, only the people who were hit with the car.
Obviously, you know, those are very serious injuries and despite the political differences, they deserve some sympathy for their pain and suffering.
The question is, you know, should innocent people be forced to suffer for something they had no hand in?
Right, well I would assume that James Field's insurance company has probably paid out to them, certainly for their injuries.
Yes, and these people, you know, they've had sympathetic media taking photographs of them putting up GoFundMes, they've raved six figures, plus the insurance money, as you say, I'm not really caught up on how much they got there.
But these people are making a lot of money.
They get publicity, which is most likely helping them in their career paths in certain instances.
But, you know, my sympathy is still with them for, you know, what they've gone through.
I just did not have anything to do with that.
Right.
And, well, again, this all goes back in my mind to this What strikes me as an utterly preposterous claim that you, as the permit holder, and the other people who were involved in putting together this rally, were conspiring to injure them.
This just seems so outrageous that the judge, for him to have even permitted a trial of this sort to go forward, strikes me as a miscarriage of justice from the outset.
Tell me a little about the judge.
His name is Judge Moon, is it not?
Yes, Norman K. Moon.
He's a Bill Clinton appointee.
He's very old.
He's in his 90s.
This might be one of his last cases, to be honest.
But really, my concern has been Less with Moon than the people he's put on his court.
He's had a number of law clerks that have had serious conflicts, in my opinion, that would render them unable to impartially decide this case.
And for an aging judge, he's going to rely very heavily on those law clerks to author opinions and do research for him and so forth.
And, you know, so for instance, at the time that we tried to have this initially dismissed, he had a law clerk, Dasher Pascoe, who was head of the UVA Jewish Law Students Association.
And the issue is, is that it is clear from some of the rhetoric that I do not condone and do not support from some of the rally attendees that they don't like Jews very much.
And these activists, you know, Jewish individuals, don't like them back.
So Dasher Pascoe was in Israel on a pilgrimage, an identity or a citizenship pilgrimage during the Unite the Right rally.
She put up posts depicting the rally and saying, we have to stand up against these people and their hate in whatever way possible.
This person helped with Judge Moon's opinions for the motions to dismiss that we did in 2018.
Similarly, he has a career law clerk named Robert DeRise, who has actually worked for the Israeli government.
He defended the Israeli Ministry of Defense in a famous incident where the Israeli military boarded a A ship bound for Gaza with aid supplies.
They shot and murdered.
That is a very famous case.
They prevented the ship from delivering those supplies.
And they murdered, I forget how many people, about 10 people.
And he's also represented the The defense minister in cases against the Bank of China and so forth.
But that doesn't necessarily disqualify him from theoretically rendering objective opinions on your case, but it certainly does show that he's got a certain point of view.
I hope not, but you know, not me personally, but it's clear that Richard Spencer has voiced extremely hostile opinions towards Jews.
Mike Painovich, who was one of the planned speakers.
I mean, it's just a lot of people associate, even though they weren't organizers of this event, that Daily Stormer had something to do with the rally.
And Daily Stormer Frequent critic of Jews.
And so you look at that stuff and you can see why someone whose political inclination is in the opposite direction would have a lot of hostility towards these people.
And then finally, his more recent law clerks, including Joshua Lefevre, And Hutton Marshall, I discovered by going to their Facebook pages that they had group photos with the lead plaintiff in the case, Elizabeth Sines.
They're all hugging each other in a group photo, and it says, best of friends.
And the The law clerk, Hutton Marshall, actually had that as his header image.
I mean, these were good buddies, and they ruled on the case where my lawsuit against the city of Charlottesville was dismissed.
Well, that's outrageous.
Do they continue to work for this Judge Moon?
Well, we were able to get them dismissed at that time, and they probably moved on by this point, but those kinds of things cause a lot of concern for me about whether this is a judge who is hiring activists and pals of the plaintiffs who want to see a particular verdict, or whether he's hiring people who are going to call this down the middle.
Well, ultimately, this is going to be a jury trial, is it not?
Yes.
Well, jury selection is going to be a hugely, hugely important part of this.
And ultimately, if you get sensible jurors and a remotely reasonable case comes up for them, That's to say that all of the exculpatory evidence is not completely withheld by these crazy motions in lemonade, then you have to hope that fair-minded American people are going to find that there was no conspiracy.
Yeah, we're going to see.
I mean, you know, obviously I'm nervous about that.
But what the attorneys keep saying is that, you know, they've always seen juries, you know, rise to the occasion and try to do the right thing when these come to trial, even in high octane emotional trials like this one.
And there are questionnaires that probably have already arrived at the homes of these potential jurors.
It goes into many, many things, including their support for the alt-right, support for Black Lives Matter, support for Antifa, their support of Confederate monuments, whether they feel that white Americans are discriminated against or not.
It goes into very, very many things.
Well, let's hope they answer those questions honestly.
Yes, I hope so.
Because that's something you just never know.
As I recall, in the Derek Chauvin case with George Floyd, It turned out that some of those people answered their jury questionnaires in very doubtful ways, you know, when you get on the jury.
So we'll have to see.
I understand in the case of Ahmaud Arbery, who was this Guy who's thought to have been shot while jogging.
They've sent out summonses to a thousand potential jurors because they know they're going to sift through a whole lot to get somebody who presumably is going to have an objective view.
But they're going, in your case, they're going to the Charlottesville jury pool, I suppose.
Well, not just Charlottesville, it's also the surrounding counties.
So, it's the entire 5th District of Virginia.
So, you also have rural areas that are going to be accounted for.
One of the drawbacks is with all these COVID rules, you know, they ask people whether they're comfortable abiding by the different COVID rules and, you know, the people who might be more inclined to our point of view on these things, Might not be willing to sit around wearing masks and doing all this COVID stuff for four weeks of trial.
It's going to go for four weeks.
Now, the kinds of people that are ideal for a jury trial like this are not what people are thinking.
It's probably not, hopefully, going to be either somebody who is a dyed-in-the-wool Trump
supporter or a Black Lives Matter supporter.
It's probably going to be somebody who doesn't pay attention to the news that much. Yeah,
I heard about that, but they haven't formed a strong opinion. Those are probably the best
compromise for both sides. The real danger, and I know this from being involved in a number of
cases in Charlottesville after Unite the Right, is that people might think if someone has a clear
conflict, like maybe they support Antifa or Black Lives Matter, that if we found that or they
answered that honestly, that they would be able to get a vote.
The judge would strike them.
But that's not the case, actually.
It's basically a situation where the judge will ask them, even still, do you think you can put those beliefs aside and render a fair verdict?
And all they have to do is say, yeah, I can still do it.
And they can't be struck for cause.
Basically, the attorney would have to use one of their Like, I think it's six strikes to remove them.
Oh, boy.
And this is going to be presided over by a 90-year-old judge, you said?
Yes.
Wow.
Wow.
Boy, there's just so many strange things in the balance here.
Yes.
And it's got horrific consequences, not just for you, but the precedent that this could set.
For people being found guilty of a serious civil crime for really nothing at all on the basis of no evidence.
Yeah and I mean I won't go into it too much because I did talk about it last time but on that score they have these expert witnesses that are these These university professors and the kinds of things that they're there to say are very Orwellian.
You know, they want to take statements that people say about self-defense preparations and say, no, self-defense is a code word.
Actually, it means offensive violence and.
That's, I mean, to take a professor who is probably very far left and then give them the authority to say, I know who these people are.
Anybody who thinks like they do is a liar.
And you have to believe the opposite of whatever they say.
I mean, how can you convict somebody based on something like that when there's no evidence that That what they say is true.
So basically, the other side is hired experts who are going to say, uh, okay, this defendant says he had no contact whatsoever with James Field.
Well, everything he says is a lie.
So he clearly did have contact with James Field.
I mean, that's something of an exaggeration, but that's almost what you're describing.
Well, maybe not on facts.
They can't invent facts out of thin air, but they can wildly interpret things falsely.
Like I said, to take statements about self-defensive preparation, and then they don't even mention that they're a violent Antifa.
They They claim to be such experts of what they call white supremacists, yet they don't know who the mortal enemies of the so-called white supremacists are.
They don't know that these people have a prerogative of showing up and doing this first-strike violence to shut them down.
It's a travesty and these people are basically just mercenaries trying to frame people for murder, essentially.
Well, I'm going to repeat the website where people can contribute to your defense.
It's jasonkesler.us slash donate.
And that's your name.
J A S O N K E S S L E R dot U S slash donate.
And to repeat, the money just goes straight to your lawyers.
It doesn't.
And there are various different ways to do it.
People can give crypto if they like.
I understand.
The money goes straight to them.
You don't touch it.
So there is absolutely no conflict as far as whether or not it's going to anything but your defense team.
Well, boy oh boy.
Well, let's talk a little bit about the offensive suits that you had filed.
I understand that all the other lawsuits are pretty much in abeyance, waiting for the results on this case.
But tell me about the other suits that you were involved in.
Well, the primary lawsuit is alleging First Amendment violations by the Charlottesville Police Department, the Virginia State Police, that they conducted a heckler's veto by allowing the counter protesters to attack us as a pretext to disband the rally and abridge our free speech rights.
As I said, we hit a snag with that one in that Moon's court dismissed it at the lowest
federal level, the Western District of Virginia.
It had the problem of these law clerks being involved with it.
But we feel like it was a really, really bad decision.
It's not in keeping with precedent.
The police do have an obligation to protect speakers from violence.
That is a clear precedent and it doesn't matter what Judge Moon says about that.
He's wrong.
So we feel like it's going to be overturned at the Court of Appeals level for the Fourth Circuit.
However, you know, the decision is long in coming there and we believe that's because these The Court of Appeals wants to wait and see the result of the signs case before they hand down their ruling, but it's our strong feeling that one way or the other, if we can win signs, that we're going to break through on the offensive level, even if we have to take that all the way.
To the Supreme Court.
If the Court of Appeals also ruled against us, we would be in a strong position for appeal to the Supreme Court because there would be conflict with other circuits around the country.
You'd have basically every other circuit in the United States saying the police have to protect speakers from violence, and then this one district is trying to make An exception for Jason Kessler.
And to say no, the police can do whatever they want.
They can allow a riot to take place to shut down a speaker they don't like.
You're the sole plaintiff here?
At this point, yeah.
At one point we had an activist named Matthew Parrott, David Parrott, who Who is on the case, but he's not on anymore.
He went to another legal team.
So, it's just me.
Well, certainly good luck on that.
And I hope you have competent appellate counsel, because appeals court lawyering is not necessarily the same as trial court lawyering.
Yeah, it's the same legal team, James Klinic and Elmer Woodard, and Mr. Klinic has a lot of experience with federal appeals, so he should be well suited for that.
I guess, though, if the Sines v. Kessler case goes against you and it turns out that instead of seeking a permit for a free speech rally, what you were really doing is seeking a permit for an opportunity to deprive other people of civil rights and conspire to commit violence, then that would make your case a little harder, wouldn't it, at the appellate level?
Yeah, that's our understanding is that we have to win the signs case to prevail.
We don't feel like there's any other legal argument that is valid to dismissing our case.
If we beat the signs case we're gonna be able to finally be in the catbird seat against the city of Charlottesville in the state of Virginia.
Wow, well then presumably if you're to win signs and win against the state and the city, let's hope there could be
substantial damages awarded.
That's what I'm thinking, and I think there's really nothing else that could even
begin to address. I mean, at the time of that rally, I was an up-and-coming organizer.
I was going on all kinds of media programs.
I had all of my websites and social media up.
And because of the way they sabotaged this event, really, they have damaged my First Amendment rights permanently.
They've made me into a pariah.
They've made me into somebody who's accused of causing the violence in Charlottesville.
You know, I really can't organize rallies the same way.
You know, I can't go on a lot of platforms that I used to.
They have permanently muzzled me and the only way they can even begin to address that is to give me money.
Have you been able to state your positions on any kind of mainstream media?
I mean, I know that after the rally you held a press conference and you were physically attacked under all the TV cameras and assembled reporters.
There were police out there.
You were physically attacked.
You didn't even have a chance to speak.
It was one of the most outrageous things I've ever seen.
Here you are trying to present your point of view and you are violently permitted from speaking.
And I know it went to trial.
Hardly any consequences at all for that.
But since that time, have you had any opportunity to speak to any kind of mainstream media?
Well, the closest that I got was OAN interviewed me at length about the events of Unite the Right.
I've done other interviews with mainstream media that weren't really in-depth interviews, didn't really go into the facts of Unite the Right.
I know when I was doing the 2018 rally in Washington, D.C., I got interviewed but I think it was Good Morning America or something like that and that was perhaps the the most mainstream interview that I'd done but really it was just for a quick soundbite.
Yes, those things are utterly superficial.
You can't really explain because the most important thing at this point to those of us who are not involved is the potential consequences of signs v. Kessler.
And if that goes wrong, then that is such a frightening precedent for
making people pay for something they clearly didn't do.
Yeah. I mean, the media and all of the power structures in America
have really been involved in a conspiracy of silence about the true facts of this event.
You know, I mean, you never...
Even though this is probably going to be a media freak show when this trial happens, you know, there's no serious
request for interview to me from mainstream media.
They want to do hit pieces on me, like some of the far-left Antifa-aligned outlets.
But beyond that, there's no curiosity.
I write a lot of articles on my own website, on VDare.
There's an article up on Ameren right now that talks a lot about the facts of this case, and these are indisputable facts.
The evidence is in pictures, it's in videos, it's in testimony under oath, and people are trying to suppress that.
Just to give you one example is, you know, the August 11th event, where they claimed that it was peaceful UVA students who were viciously attacked by racists.
Oh, that was the day before?
Yes.
Yes, the day before the big rally.
The day before we marched on the UVA campus to honor Thomas Jefferson, there's a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the University of Virginia.
At the UVA Rotunda and our chats were leaked.
We were planning to do it like as a private event so that we could avoid counter protesters, but the Antifa had other ideas.
And yes, there were some UVA students.
These are UVA students who follow websites like It's Going Down, an Antifa blog.
But you also had, you know, the Antifa Torch Network, one of the primary umbrella organizations.
They say it's not a group.
There is such a thing called Antifa Torch Network that was there.
You had the other primary umbrella organization, Antifa ARA, Anti-Racist Action, that was there.
The people who were there included Tom Massey and Tom Keenan, who are Philadelphia militants who attacked Hispanic Marines, ironically calling them All kinds of racial slurs and attacking them.
You had a guy named Brent Betterly who was convicted of domestic terrorism related charges for planning to firebomb.
So they were the torchlight rally?
Yes, these people were there.
You had a guy named Paul Menton who's a very confused individual who's now an Antifa activist but he used to be a skinhead and Supposedly, well, he was convicted of this, so these facts are established.
He was watching a movie with some of his buddies one day.
One of their friends apparently said something in favor of necrophilia, as strange as that sounds, and so they murdered him.
They beat him over the head with a hammer until he died.
And Paul Minton was convicted of abuse of a corpse, ironically, abuse of a corpse for hiding the body of the murder victim.
And so these were the people who were embedded with the UVA students at the University of Virginia.
But when you look at the fighting that happened, the mainstream conception is like, oh, they're just beating up UVA students.
No.
I'm not condoning the fighting that happened there, but there were some seriously dangerous people embedded at that rotunda.
Well, that's what always happens.
If any kind of Right-wing or conservative or racially-oriented dissident group has a public appearance, they're attacked.
And if there's any kind of defense, then it is the dissidents who are blamed.
Yeah.
That is just par for the course to the point where it's become almost impossible to have any kind of public demonstration of this kind.
Well, okay, the last thing I wanted to ask you about was a FOIA case you had against the city of Charlottesville and the officials involved there, and I gather that's not gone well.
No, unfortunately not.
This is a very important case within the state of Virginia and for people who are interested in the fall out of Unite the Right as well. But the Charlottesville
Independent Review alleged that the police chief had destroyed text messages.
That's the HEFI report. Yes. The HEFI report alleged that the
police chief, Al Thomas, had destroyed text messages related to the review,
related to the Unite the Right rally. Text messages are public documents. He can't do that.
If you're a public servant. Yes. And also, I tried to get text messages
of the city manager who was in charge of the rally. He was the head honcho.
And I was told that he also wiped his phone rather than preserving these text message documents.
So after winning an initial FOIA case against this city manager in the city of Charlottesville, I filed a lawsuit at the Virginia Circuit Court level alleging that they had violated the Public Records Act by destroying these documents.
I had to wait An incredible amount of time for a ruling, but essentially what happened was the judge dismissed my case saying that there is no private right of action under the Virginia Public Records Act for destruction of documents, that it has to be filed by the Library of Virginia.
The catch is that the Library of Virginia has never, never, never in its history used this statute to punish officials for destroying documents.
So the situation now in Virginia is that if you want to get really incriminating documents of public officials in Virginia, There's just no practical way you can get that because if we're talking about something on the level of criminal wrongdoing or something which could cause these officials civil liability, they're going to destroy those documents because there is no repercussion for that.
If an official destroys a public document and then you request it, they can lawfully say, that document doesn't exist so we don't have to turn it over.
Theoretically, the Library of Virginia, that's attached to the state legislature, that's a state organ of some kind?
Yes.
Theoretically, it could ask on your behalf to make these documents public.
That would be incredible and I would love that to happen.
I would also love for the Virginia legislature to tighten up these laws because I just, you know, I can't afford to appeal this particular ruling.
It would be, $20,000 to $30,000 to do this.
Well, this ruling seems to have very substantial consequences for the state of transparent government in the state of Virginia.
And did this get any kind of attention from the press at all?
I don't think that the press has written a single article about it.
And yet this is going to have ramifications for all Virginians.
And we're not just talking about white advocates.
We're not just talking about conservatives or Trump supporters.
You know, this is allegedly something that liberals and left-wing people also care about.
They don't want corrupt officials destroying documents.
So how corrupt are we willing to make society in order to- To thwart people like you?
To thwart me personally?
Are we going to toss the First Amendment?
Are we going to allow rioting to shut down free speech?
Are we going to allow the government to destroy documents to cover up misconduct?
Those are all very, very important and serious questions.
And I'm afraid that we are moving in the direction of having all of those questions answered in a way that Tramples on the rights of Americans and makes anything semblance of democracy or rule by the people impossible.
Well, on that note, I will thank you once again, Jason Kessler, for coming by and talking to me about this.
This seems like a very, very important case that's going to trial.
And for the third time, I'm going to explain to people how they can contribute to your defense.
And that is at the website JasonKessler.us slash donate, and the money goes straight to the defense team.
So, unless you have any other wrap-up comments, we'll close it here.
Do you have anything to add?
No, just thank you for having me on.
Well, it's been my pleasure, and good luck, and may justice be done!