{"id":338683,"date":"2017-12-09T19:43:36","date_gmt":"2017-12-09T18:43:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/how-free-speech-lost-in-charlottesville\/"},"modified":"2017-12-09T19:43:36","modified_gmt":"2017-12-09T18:43:36","slug":"how-free-speech-lost-in-charlottesville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/how-free-speech-lost-in-charlottesville\/","title":{"rendered":"How Free Speech Lost in Charlottesville"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"\">\n<p>America\u2019s news reporters couldn\u2019t get enough of last summer\u2019s Charlottesville mayhem when the story tangentially involved Donald Trump. But when a special report commissioned by the city this week finally gives us something approaching a detailed story of what happened that awful day, the media couldn\u2019t care less.<\/p>\n<p>Read the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.hunton.com\/en\/news\/final-report-independent-review-of-the-2017-protest-events-in-charlottesville-virginia.html\" target=\"_blank\">report<\/a>\u00a0yourself. As with any governmental snafu, plenty of shortcomings are detailed in the city\u2019s planning and actions, not to mention a dubious effort by the police chief after the fact to control the fact-finding. A bigger picture, though, suggests the city should have canceled the white nationalist groups\u2019 permit on grounds that the city couldn\u2019t assure their safety given the expected influx of counterprotesters.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, this would have been to invite a First Amendment lawsuit. It would have meant, as the city\u2019s lawyers argued, issuing a \u201checkler\u2019s veto\u201d to left-wing activists, who sadly were the primary threat of violence.<\/p>\n<p>The white nationalists may be crazy but not the kind of crazy as to welcome being manhandled by a mob 40 times their size. And\u00a0<em>force majeure<\/em>\u00a0is a pretty good legal argument.<\/p>\n<p>I should point out, this is my conclusion, not the report\u2019s. The report, by former federal prosecutor Timothy J. Heaphy, a partner at Hunton &amp; Williams, couldn\u2019t be clearer that most Charlottesville residents revile the \u201cwhite supremacists,\u201d but the report\u2019s first line also refers to Americans\u2019 belief in \u201can ordered&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/redice.tv\/news\/how-free-speech-lost-in-charlottesville\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>America\u2019s news reporters couldn\u2019t get enough of last summer\u2019s Charlottesville mayhem when the story tangentially involved Donald Trump. But when a special report commissioned by the city this week finally gives us something approaching a detailed story of what happened that awful day, the media couldn\u2019t care less. Read the\u00a0report\u00a0yourself. As with any governmental snafu, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2520,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-338683","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2520"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}