This country has fallen into the abyss.

Violence erupted on Saturday as hundreds of white nationalists had gathered here for a rally and clashed with counterprotesters, resulting in at least one death and prompting the governor to declare a state of emergency.

After the rally at a city park was dispersed, a car plowed into a crowd near the city’s downtown mall, killing at least one person and injuring at least 19 others, according to a spokeswoman for the University of Virginia Medical Center. The authorities did not immediately say whether the episode was related to the white nationalists’ demonstration, but several witnesses and video of the scene suggested that it might have been intentional.

Well, if you look at the video, there seems little question it was intentional.

Witnesses said a crowd of counterdemonstrators, jubilant because the white nationalists had left, was moving up Fourth Street, near the mall, when a gray sports car came down the road and accelerated, mowing down several people and hurling at least two in the air.

“It was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Robert Armengol, who was at the scene reporting for a podcast he hosts with students at the University of Virginia. “After that it was pandemonium. The car hit reverse and sped and everybody who was up the street in my direction started running.”

People who make a principle of racial hatred are more likely to do that kind of thing than people who don’t.

Donald Trump has unleashed a nightmare on us. He did it deliberately, with malice aforethought, both to get attention and acclaim for himself, and because he likes it.

Saturday afternoon, after initially issuing a brief denunciation on Twitter, President Trump, speaking at the start of a veterans’ event at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., again addressed what he described as “the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

In his comments, President Trump condemned the bloody protests, but he did not specifically criticize the white nationalist rally and its neo-Nazi slogans beyond blaming “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”

Which is a malevolent, blood-curdling lie.

“It’s been going on for a long time in our country, it’s not Donald Trump, it’s not Barack Obama,” said Mr. Trump…

No too damn right it’s not Barack Obama, but it damn well is Donald Trump. Barack Obama is the one who went to that funeral in Charleston; Donald Trump is the one who targets immigrants and Mexicans and wanted to see the Central Park 5 executed for something they didn’t do.

The demonstration, which both organizers and critics had said was the largest gathering of white nationalists in recent years, was organized to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park that once bore the name of the Confederate general, but was renamed Emancipation Park.

It was organized to protest the removal of a symbol of slavery. They want to keep symbols of slavery in public spaces. That’s their “cause.”

The turmoil in Charlottesville began with a march Friday night by white nationalists on the campus of the University of Virginia and escalated Saturday morning as demonstrators from both sides gathered in the park. Waving Confederate flags, chanting Nazi-era slogans, wearing helmets and carrying shields, the white nationalists converged on the Lee statue and began chanting phrases like “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”

We’re in the abyss.