Re: The media's misuse of "peaceful" or "non-violent". Not to mention "protesting racism" and "violence erupted".
1. There's a difference between peaceful and non-violent. Peaceful is a higher standard. Communists and Nazis can be non-violent at a given time, but they're brutal totalitarian movements. They're not "peaceful".
2. When you're marching with groups of armed Communists or Nazis, you're neither.
Neither side in this was peaceful or non-violent. Both sides came prepared for a fight. And while not everyone on both sides was a Communist or a Nazi, if you're marching with a group that's brandishing weapons and signage from one of two totalitarian movements that killed millions of people, you know what the ride is.
It's possible some of the lefties thought of it was just going to be a rally against racism and some with the other side thought it was just going to be a free speech rally. Maybe names like Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Richard Spencer or David Duke didn't mean anything to them. It's possible. But nobody is that historically ignorant that they don't know what a red flag with a hammer and sickle or a swastika stands for. If you see those and you don't fall out, then you're a fellow traveler. At best.
By now any participant had plenty of opportunities to read previous stories about past rallies and had a pretty good of what was going to happen. That's what they were there for.
3. Both sides were "protesting racism". In the sense that they were both racisal nationalists protesting the other side for being the wrong race and having the wrong kind of racial nationalism. That doesn't make either side anti-racist. It means they're both racists.
So we have a clash between two groups of totalitarian racists identifying with ideologies that murdered millions of people and which have been at war with the United States. There is no right side here. Only two wrong sides. And yet the media insists on glorifying and defending one side.
4. The violence didn't "erupt". It escalated.
Both sides came prepared to fight. Antifa appears to have started the violence. Certainly it won the fight. Then it escalated further beyond the usual physical violence to murder.
The fake outrage over it is tiresome. This didn't come out of the blue. You had different groups getting into fights with each other. It's not surprising that it escalated beyond throwing rocks, bricks, punches, trying to set things on fire, etc... Violence tends to escalate. The authorities chose to let it escalate.
Eventually it turned fatal. That is what happens when you let two sets of totalitarian thugs and anyone stupid enough to tag along with them fight it out in the streets. There's no sympathy here. Just basic sadness that our society has come to this. That our institutions have failed this badly. That Weimar America is becoming a reality.
Violence doesn't stop where you think it should. Neither do totalitarian movements. We're back in Greensboro Massacre territory. And it's fundamentally offensive to compare what happened in Charlottesville to Charleston. It's like comparing the invasion of Poland to Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. There are no innocents here. The only thing worth mourning is America.