See the pretty torches burn
Last night in Charlottesville, Virginia:
Self-proclaimed white nationalist Richard Spencer led a large group carrying torches and chanting “You will not replace us” Saturday in Charlottesville, protesting plans to remove a Confederate monument that has played an outsize role in this year’s race for Virginia governor.
“What brings us together is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced,” Spencer said at the first of two rallies he led in the college town where he once attended the University of Virginia.
At the second rally, dozens of torch-bearing protesters gathered in a city park in the evening and chanted “You will not replace us” and “Russia is our friend,” local television footage shows.
Shaun King posted a photo on Facebook:
After about ten minutes the fighting started, and the police broke up the rally.
Spencer was in Charlottesville to protest a City Council vote to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. A court injunction has halted the removal for six months.
The statue has become a rallying cry for a Republican running for Virginia governor this year, Corey Stewart, who was chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign in Virginia and chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors.
Of course Lee committed treason, but I guess Republicans don’t object to that if it’s from the right as opposed to the left.
Torches. I guess they are openly identifying with the Klan now? Or don’t realize that’s what comes to mind when white people carry torches to protest against people of color and say things like “you will not replace us”?
They just want to make sure that when the time comes, the statue of another treasonous person, currently occupying the Oval Office, is welcomed.
“Russia is our friend”!??! Wouldn’t some of these people have been amongst the staunchest Birchers and anti-communist cold warriors just a few years ago? People who probably were pissed off enough at France to call their French Fries “Freedom Fries” when they did not join the Bush/Blair Travelling Road Show and War Crimes Coalition? These people are okay with foreign interference in an American election? Oh, right, an election that resulted in the coming to power of a Republican. These same people, these 2nd Amendment People, would be forming militias by now if such foreign interference by ANY country (not just a nuclear armed, adversarial one) had helped to bring about a Clinton victory.
They would have been forming militias had Clinton won without any interference.
“Russia is our friend”? Is it?
Over and above what Bruce said, I suspect the leaking of CIA/GCHQ malware that has caused so much recent trouble was done by Russia. I can’t think of another reasonable candidate (possibly China, but Russia seems a lot more likely).
Of course, the main culprits are the CIA and GCHQ (and others) who pretended they were keeping us safe by not telling us about the vulnerabilities they found in the software we all use, choosing to weaponise them against other nations instead. That did not work out so well, did it? Our intelligence agencies do this all the time. They contrive to make and keep us all vulnerable in the hope that it might make people in other countries vulnerable too. The logic of this approach and its connection to security escapes me entirely.
But Russia is not our friend. I’ll be surprised if it turns out that Russia is not behind the malware leaks.
Let me be more clear: the source of the actual leaks from the original source seems complicated and I have no opinion on who did it. But as for putting the malware code on the web where anyone can (and obviously did) use it, I’m guessing Russia, for what it’s worth.
“Russia is our friend”
This is not your Grandpa’s racism anymore.
latsot,
According to initial reports, Russia experienced the most intense and widespread attacks. Why would the Russian government provide its own criminal class with the tools to disrupt the Russian net? If a total cyber war between the West and Russia ever occurred the Russians would probably lose. Would the Russian kleptocracy take such a risk?
Also, it’s difficult to determine how the level of slack security by public institutions and corporations compounded the effectiveness of the attack.
Hello, 1860s.
“You will not replace us.”
Is that a promise? Some of us are really, really hoping you die out and never come back.
Contempt, presumably. I haven’t looked into who suffered most and I might change my opinion when I do. But who else seems the likely culprit? Russia rings truer for me than other governments, individual hackers or hacker teams or corporations for a number of reasons. But it’s just an educated guess.
I don’t know what “total cyberwar” means, but if Russia is demonstrating that it knows about the malware tools that CIA/GCHQ have developed and allowed to be stolen then it ups the ante. More of a cyber cold war, I’d say.
Not here. Our government ministers actively blocked the renewal of support contracts and the like in the NHS. That was certainly an enormous contribution to the effectiveness of the attack. Now, of course, those same ministers are blaming the NHS for what happened.
‘Why would the Russian government provide its own criminal class with the tools to disrupt the Russian net?’
Easy, because the Russian government IS the ‘criminal class.’
Deo Vindice