Cool Zone Media.
There is a regular episode this week, a proper second episode for a brand new show, something I put a lot of time into to give listeners to the show what I hope is an impressive introduction to it. It's already recorded and edited and scheduled, but I realized on Sunday.
Night what the date was? August eleventh?
How can I tell you my new listeners about the weird little guys trying to ruin America without acknowledging that today, as I'm writing this, it's Monday, August twelfth, twenty twenty four. Seven years ago, Charlottesville was invaded by Neo Nazis, Confederate secessionists, white supremacists, white nationalists, racists, and anti Semites of all allegiances.
That's what started my obsession. That's where this show was truly born, because I spent the last seven years trying to understand those men, What brought them here, what made them that way, what do they actually believe in? What are they just saying out of opportunism or for shock value? And do they even know the difference anymore? 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.
What groups were they in?
Who runs those who founded them? What ideological lineage do they spring from? 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, but how did he get here? And I don't mean did he fly into the Charlesville Airport and then rent a car? Did he park in the garage downtown or on some side street in front of a house where someone I love is raising their family.
I mean who did he follow?
And how did that man arrive at a place where he could command strangers from the internet to follow him into battle. It's like making a family tree, but the fruit is bitter and rotten, and the roots are cracking our foundations. 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.
But it didn't feel right letting this week go by without marking it, without putting a pin in this state to say here's where the show was born, 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 half a David. 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. 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 or on the throat of a counter protester in full view of an entire police department 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, 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 his show, But today we can't start at the beginning we're still in the middle. I don't know how much pre emble you need. 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.
A close up photo of men shouldered 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.
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?
A photo of a line of men in home made uniforms and plastic helmets costplaying as American Black Shirts, plowing through peaceful protesters.
You'd recognize these images if you saw them. You've seen them.
You'd look at them and say, that's from Charlottesville. But you wouldn't mean Charlesville, a place, the mid size college town where people cross the street and that spot every day to get to the public library. No, you'd mean Charlottesville, the moment in time, Charlottesville, the violence Charlottesville, the Nazi rally.
And that's not your fault, that's completely understandable. 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. Today, as I write this, I had to get up from my computer to go downtown. I stopped at Fourth Street. There are always purple ribbons tied around a street sign, the intersection where Heather Hire was murdered, her favorite color. Today there is a small vigil.
I didn't know Heather, but I stop on that spot often to think of her. 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.
Seven years to the day, to the hour, to the minute even and I'm sitting in a tiny upstairs courtroom with a man who never got to give his speech at the rally that day. A courthouse employee held a door open for me. I'm there so often, they're used to seeing me in my little notebook. He told me,
I look nice today. I said thank you, because the alternative was to say that I'm wearing my blue sun dress with birds on it because the birds are purple, and it was the only thing I could find this morning.
In Purple was Heather's favorite color.
It doesn't matter at all, but when there's nothing you can do, you do things.
That don't make sense.
I didn't know her. I don't think she would care that the birds on my dress are purple. 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. Heather Hire was a person, a real person with a job, a little dog, and friends and
a family who loved her. 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. She was not the first or the last innocent life lost to right wing extremism, but her death is what set me on this path, and I remember.
Her today and I hope you will too.
It is perhaps a bit trite to end with a quote from doctor Martin Luther King Junior, but in his nineteen sixty three book Strength to Love, he wrote returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.
Doctor King may have had the strength to love his enemies. Your pastor would tell you Jesus wants you to love your enemies. 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. I do this because I love everyone else. I know doctor 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 think
our love can transform the hate in their hearts. Maybe your pastor can do that, Maybe you can do that. But what I mean is that we have to love each other enough to protect the most vulnerablem We have to love our vision of the world that we want to live in enough to fight for it. We have to love the idea of society without them in it enough to throw our bodies down like sandbags against a rising tide of fascism and the light driving out of
the darkness. That's what I hope to be. 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.
And that's why I'm showing you these weird little guys. Weird Little Guys is the production of coal Zone Media. Or more from coal Zone Media.
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