A Brief Reflection on 'Charlottesville'

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Speaker 7 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

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Speaker 13 There is a regular episode this week. A proper second episode for a brand new show.

Speaker 13 Something I put a lot of time into to give listeners to the show what I hope is an impressive introduction to it.

Speaker 13 It's already recorded and edited and scheduled. But I realized on Sunday night what the date was, August 11th.

Speaker 13 How can I tell you, my new listeners, about the weird little guys trying to ruin America without acknowledging that?

Speaker 13 Today, as I'm writing this, it's Monday, August 12th, 2024.

Speaker 13 Seven years ago, Charlottesville was invaded by neo-Nazis, Confederates, secessionists, white supremacists, white nationalists, racists, and anti-Semites of all allegiances.

Speaker 13 That's what started my obsession. That's where this show was truly born.

Speaker 13 Because I spent the last seven years trying to understand those men.

Speaker 17 What brought them here?

Speaker 13 What made them that way?

Speaker 13 What do they actually believe and what are they just saying out of opportunism or for shock value? And do they even know the difference anymore?

Speaker 13 Weird little guys, this show wouldn't exist but for the years I've spent looking for and then looking at those guys in particular and then trying to track them back in time.

Speaker 13 What groups were they in? Who runs those? Who founded them? What ideological lineage do they spring from?

Speaker 13 When I look at a photograph of a man beating my neighbors in the streets of my hometown, I wonder not just, who is he?

Speaker 13 But how did he get here? And I don't mean did he fly into the Charlottesville airport and then rent a car? Did he park in the garage downtown or on some side street?

Speaker 13 in front of a house where someone I love is raising their family. I mean who did he follow?

Speaker 13 And how did that man arrive at a place where he could command command strangers from the internet to follow him into battle?

Speaker 13 It's like making a family tree, but the fruit is bitter and rotten, and the roots are cracking our foundations.

Speaker 13 I think as the show progresses, many of the men who played a role in the Unite the Right rally will earn their own full episode. A lot of them are incredibly weird little guys, without a doubt.

Speaker 13 But it didn't feel right letting this week go by without marking it. without putting a pin in the state to say, here is where the show was born.

Speaker 13 Because over the years, as I accumulated thousands of pages of notes trying to find a source for what happened here, I realized the timeline of one man's crimes doesn't begin with the date of the charged conduct on the affidavit.

Speaker 13 It doesn't begin the day he decided ideological violence was an option for him. It doesn't begin the day he joined an extremist organization or the day he was radicalized or even the day he was born.

Speaker 13 The more I dug on any one story, the more I realized you have to reach decades into the past to even begin to understand why you were looking at a photograph of a man with his hands around the throat of a counter protester in full view of an entire police department.

Speaker 13 Charlottesville, as people refer to that day, that event in this place, didn't begin when they bought their boarding passes or joined the Discord. It started before they were born.

Speaker 13 And it continues long after the barricades were removed and everyone went home. That's a very long story, and I hope I can get started on it with this show, but today we can't start at the beginning.

Speaker 13 We're still in the middle.

Speaker 13 I don't know how much preamble you need.

Speaker 13 I don't know if you remember the Unite the Right rally beyond a handful of the same photos every outlet seems to run as shorthand for white supremacist violence. A few fleeting images.

Speaker 13 A close-up photo of men shoulder to shoulder, torches in hands, mouths open, mid-shout, faces contorted with the effort to be heard above the roar, to have their cry of Jews will not replace us be the loudest.

Speaker 13 A man's body tossed into the air, bouncing off a Dodge challenger. You've seen the photo.
I know you have. But do you know his name?

Speaker 13 A photo of a line of men in homemade uniforms and plastic helmets cosplaying as American black shirts plowing through peaceful protesters. You'd recognize these images if you saw them.

Speaker 13 You've seen them. You'd look at them and say, that's from Charlottesville.
But you wouldn't mean Charlottesville, the place.

Speaker 13 The mid-sized college town where people cross the street in that spot every day to get to the public library.

Speaker 13 No, you'd mean Charlottesville, the moment in time, Charlottesville, the violence, Charlottesville, the Nazi rally.

Speaker 4 And that's not your fault.

Speaker 13 That's completely understandable.

Speaker 13 That just means it's my responsibility to ground these stories in the places where they happen, to tether these individual men to the context from which they arose.

Speaker 13 Today as I write this, I had to get up from my computer to go downtown. I stopped at 4th Street.

Speaker 13 There are always purple ribbons tied around a street sign at the intersection where Heather Heyer was murdered. Her favorite color.

Speaker 13 Today there is a small vigil.

Speaker 13 I didn't know Heather, but I stop on that spot often to think of her.

Speaker 13 Today I stopped at that spot for a few minutes, and then I walked to the courthouse to sit for hours listening to lawyers argue motions in a case against one of the headline speakers at the rally that killed her.

Speaker 13 Seven years to the day, to the hour, to the minute. even.

Speaker 13 And I'm sitting in a tiny upstairs courtroom with a man who never got to give his speech at the rally that day.

Speaker 13 A courthouse employee held a door open for me. I'm there so often, they're used to seeing me in my little notebook.

Speaker 13 He told me, I look nice today. I said, thank you.

Speaker 13 Because the alternative was to say that I'm wearing my blue sundress with birds on it because the birds are purple and it was the only thing I could find this morning and purple was Heather's favorite color.

Speaker 13 It doesn't matter at all, but when there's nothing you can do, you do things that don't make sense.

Speaker 13 I didn't know her. I don't think she would care if the birds on my dress are purple.

Speaker 13 But I woke up this morning on the date that she died, and all I can really do is to keep trying to tell the stories of the men who set a murderer on a collision course with the crowd she marched with that day.

Speaker 13 Heather Heyer was a person, a real person with a job, a little dog, and friends, and a family who loved her.

Speaker 13 It isn't fair to her memory to reduce her to a martyr, a concept, an idea, to shrink her down to the moment of her death and to use her name as shorthand for lives lost to fascist violence.

Speaker 13 She was not the first or the last innocent life lost to right-wing extremism.

Speaker 13 But her death is what set me on this path. And I remember her today, and I hope you will too.

Speaker 13 It is perhaps a bit trite to end with a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 13 But in his 1963 book, Strength to Love, he wrote, Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.

Speaker 13 Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Speaker 13 Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.

Speaker 13 Dr. King may have had the strength to love his enemies.
Your pastor would tell you, Jesus wants you to love your enemies.

Speaker 13 I don't know that I have that strength, but I work so hard not to harden my heart. I am actively working every day to remind myself, I don't do this because I hate my enemies.

Speaker 13 I do this because I love everyone else.

Speaker 13 I know Dr. King had something else in mind, but when I say only love can drive out hate, I don't mean we have to love the ones that hate us.
I don't...

Speaker 13 think our love can transform the hate in their hearts. Maybe your pastor can do that.
Maybe you can can do that.

Speaker 13 But what I mean is that we have to love each other enough to protect the most vulnerable among us. We have to love our vision of the world that we want to live in enough to fight for it.

Speaker 13 We have to love the idea of a society without them in it enough to throw our bodies down like sandbags against a rising tide of fascism.

Speaker 13 And the light driving out the darkness?

Speaker 13 That's what I hope to be.

Speaker 13 I want to shine a light into these dark corners. Like laundry hung on the line to bleach the stains, I want to be the hot southern sun on an afternoon in August.

Speaker 13 And that's why I'm showing you these weird little guys.

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Speaker 12 I couldn't even believe it was real.

Speaker 7 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Speaker 9 Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Speaker 10 Kennedy was killed. Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Speaker 7 Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr. Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Speaker 11 Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 17 Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime. My husband said, your dad's been killed.
This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Speaker 17 I was just completely in shock. Liz's father murdered.
And her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound.

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Speaker 17 More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers.

Speaker 5 We're still fighting.

Speaker 17 Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 19 It was an unimaginable crime. It's four consecutive live terms for Brian Koberger, who killed the four University of Idaho students.

Speaker 19 Nearly 30 months of silence. Until

Speaker 19 bombshell development Brian Koberger has agreed to plead guilty. No trial, no testimony.

Speaker 6 The defense are on the sinking ship.

Speaker 18 This isn't the justice you wanted, but this is justice.

Speaker 19 Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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