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Charlottesville, Va., established a commission last year to deal with questions about its history on racial issues, and how that past is memorialized in its public spaces. One of the panel's recommendations, which was endorsed by a 3-to-2 vote of the City Council, called for the removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, the Confederate leader. Many critics saw that monument, which was installed in a city park during the Jim Crow era, as marking the space for white people only.

The planned removal of the statue is now tied up in court. Meanwhile, Charlottesville has become a battleground: As the University of Virginia and its home city hold difficult discussions about how to come to terms with their histories, extremist groups see opportunity. People associated with the so-called alt-right, a loose movement known for promoting white supremacist, anti-immigrant, and misogynistic views, plan to March on Charlottesville on August 12.

The city and the university are inextricably linked, and activists on UVa's campus are bracing for the march. In the following interview with The Chronicle, UVa's president, Teresa A. Sullivan, who announced in January that she planned to step down, discussed the institution's history and its role in the debates that have recently taken place in Charlottesville. The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Q. Charlottesville has been in the national spotlight for deciding to remove the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, as well as a recent Ku Klux Klan rally in which protesters were tear-gassed. It got national attention. So what's going on in Charlottesville right now?

A. Well, Charlottesville is interesting, I think, because there's certainly a troubled racial history in this part of Virginia. Obviously, there was slavery. Then there was the Civil War. After that, there was Reconstruction, and in the Jim Crow era, massive resistance. So there have been a lot of things in the troubled history of this part of Virginia, and indeed much of the South.

But we have a progressive City Council that studied the issue of removing two statues the one of Robert E. Lee and the one of Stonewall Jackson that sit downtown. This was also happening in New Orleans, but in New Orleans they were just removed bang. There was no time for protest and conversation and discussion. It's been more than a yearlong discussion in Charlottesville. And the decision of the City Council, 3 to 2, to remove the statues was immediately enjoined by a judge for six months. So that gives us six months of time to hash over the issues again and talk about it.

I think that there are a lot of issues that don't always get reported in the press. One of these is the sense of African-American citizens in the community that glorifying these Confederate heroes glosses over the cause of slavery that they were fighting for. It was clear in the Klan rally that they saw the removal of the statues as something symbolic of a far larger and, to them, more threatening issue, which was the removal of white history. I don't agree with that view, but I thought it was useful to understand that's where they were coming from.

Q. Some of the folks I've talked to in town have said that today's problems go back to Thomas Jefferson and his idea of white superiority and democracy, and that it's not a coincidence that Charlottesville continues to make national news. Is Charlottesville a microcosm of what's going on in the United States, and if it is, what does it mean to the university?

A. I don't know that Charlottesville is a microcosm. But I do think that here you see a clash of red and blue cultures in a way that you don't in a lot of places. And I think that makes a difference.

Contrast Richmond, which is 70 miles away. Richmond also has a lot of Confederate statues. But Richmond began some years ago by also commemorating its African-American history. They put a statue of Arthur Ashe on Monument Avenue. Last week they unveiled a statue of Maggie Walker. So Richmond has approached this a little differently. It's not just a matter of subtracting. It's a matter of adding.

Charlottesville took a different approach, and I think that's where a lot of the problem lies. I would not make this into something bigger than it is.

Q. So some critics might say that the university has taken a while to own up to its past. And other universities have been tackling this as well. What are the dynamics in play? And what is the most valuable work moving forward?

A. So in 2013 I appointed the President's Commission on Slavery and the University precisely to look at the part of our history we didn't know. And they've done some remarkable things in just four years. They've uncovered several slave sites that we weren't aware of. We've had the opportunity to curate those, contextualize them, and provide information for the public about it. We've redone the curation inside the Rotunda to talk about how slaves helped to build that. We have a walking trail of African-American history. We've named two buildings for enslaved families that were here at the university, Gibbons Hall and Skipwith Hall.

And I think maybe most interesting, at the last board meeting, the board approved the conceptual design for a memorial to enslaved laborers, which would be located at the part of the university most closely, just geographically closest, to the Charlottesville community, a kind of symbolic link between the community and the university. And so we're fund raising right now for that memorial.

Q. One narrative I've heard in town is that there were people who did not want the statue removed because they wanted the resources directed more toward contemporary issues not focusing on history. Such as living wages. Many universities have been attempting to deal with their histories, but they're less likely to get involved in social-justice issues. What do you think are universities' roles and responsibilities in their communities?

A. Well, as the Charlottesville case shows, there isn't just one point of view in a community. There are many points of view. And I'm sympathetic to the issue that the city, which is relatively small and landlocked, has a limited tax base, is now going to spend, not just the money to remove the statues, but there's going to be a lot of money for police overtime. And there are going to be court costs and so on.

I can understand why people are frustrated with that. There are certainly issues in the city. Affordable housing is an important one. And I see university experts involved in almost every aspect of city life. There is not a commission or a committee or a board of a nonprofit that typically does not have university people engaged on it. I think that it's more important for us to encourage the members of the university community to engage with Charlottesville than to tell them how to do it. And I've made a real effort not to tell them how to do it.

Just to give you one example, our students provide 3,500 volunteer hours a week in the city of Charlottesville. And they do all sorts of things from Habitat for Humanity to tutoring children having trouble with math.

Q. What is the role of the university as a central player in the free-speech debate? How does the university fit into the picture?

A. Well, our first responsibility is educational. Some current studies that have come out indicate that this generation of college students doesn't really understand or agree with free speech as it's been interpreted by the Supreme Court. And so making it clear what free speech is and is not, I think, is part of what our job is.

And that also applies to things like the Klan rally. The Klan has the right to rally. We might not agree with what they say. We can publicly disagree with what they have to say. But they do have the right to be there and to say it. By the same point of view, I think our students have the right to hear different viewpoints. And they don't have to agree with those viewpoints. But they have the right to hear about it.

I think our educational role here is really primary, and supersedes everything else. We have had our own free-speech issues here in the past. And I've tried to see to it every time that the university comes down on the side of free speech. We do have a green-light rating from FIRE, which is still pretty rare among American universities.

Q. So this decision on the statues is getting a lot of attention from outside groups. With the demonstrations and upcoming rallies, is Charlottesville becoming some version of Berkeley? And, in the midst of that, do you see yourself as a national leader? And what answers might you have for other leaders?

A. Well, I'm not sure that we're like Berkeley. I mentioned we're a city of 50,000. Our nearest major metropolitan area is Richmond, which is not nearly as large as San Francisco. So there's a lot of ways in which I think we are not similar.

In other ways, we are. We're an active research university. A lot of this community is affected by the fact that this fall we'll be bringing 23,000 students here together. That really changes the size and the focus of the city. So, yes, I think those things are important.

And whether I see myself as a leader is not really so important as whether I'm seen that way by others. And I think that, because of our heritage, because of the stance we've taken on free speech, I do think people will look at us to see how we act. And, to me, what is most important is that these 23,000 students have an opportunity to hear and engage the central civic issues.

One of the things we believe we do is that we produce students for lives of civic responsibility. And it's very easy, in the current political turmoil, just to go hide and say, I'm not going to have nothing to do with this. We like to encourage our students instead to be willing to engage engage intellectually, at least even if they don't become engaged otherwise.

Q. Do you have any other thoughts on this alt-right "Unite the Right" rally that's happening in August here?

A. Well, that is a very different kind of thing. It appears that it will be a coalition of, I would say, politically right-leaning groups who probably have different agendas and don't all have the same platform more difficult to deal with than, say, the Klan, which has a long and discredited history, I might mention, and which today is not seen, I think, as a particularly vibrant organization. I think it's worth noting that the Klan members came from North Carolina. They weren't even from Virginia.

With the alt-right, it's a different kind of situation. I think that they exist in part to be provocative. I think they exist in part to have people take the bait. I think that there is, at some level, a desire for violence. And that is what I think we have to be on our guard about. One thing that's important to me is that our students, in expressing their civic engagement, remain safe. And that will be my principal concern about this upcoming rally. For my own part, I would just prefer these people not get a bigger audience.

Q. Is that becoming a harder space to navigate, balancing free speech and safety with these groups?

A. Well, what's difficult here is the position of police because they have to form a line to protect the speakers that's a free-speech obligation. But then the protesters are facing a line of police, and they feel angry about that. They want to get at the people who are conducting the rally and speaking. And so then you get the issues about the police and how they control the crowds and so on. So, yeah, that's a difficult space to navigate. It's one of the reasons I think the counterprotests are better done in ways other than coming and confronting the original rally.

So when the Klan was here there were three or four events around the city, all very well attended, not covered by the press, which gave people an alternative venue to express their opinions.

Julia Schmalz is a senior multimedia producer. She tells stories with photos, audio, and video. Follow her on Twitter @jschmalz09, or email her at julia.schmalz@chronicle.com

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In Charlottesville, UVa Grapples With Its History and the Alt-Right - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Wolfenstein II, a video game set in an alternate, Nazi-ruled 1960s America, has severely pissed off the white nationalist alt-right, and its not even out yet. After seeing the trailer, racists have decried the game as anti-Whitepropaganda with Black Lives Matter overtones. Well, wait until they get a load of this scene, shared on Twitter by Polygons Nick Robinson:

Robinson describes the conversation, which the player can overhear before stealthily executing two Nazi guards, as a so much for the tolerant left convo. Hes referring to a meme where various flavors of bigots, when called out on their bigotry, accuse critics of being intolerant. The Nazis in this scene deliver a blatant parody of this ubiquitous part of 2017sinternetpolitical discourse.

How can they promote violence toward us just because we have a different point of view? wonders one of the characters, an actualNazi. In a societywhere many people believe calling someone racist is worse than actuallybeing racist, this is trenchant stuff.

Robinson calls it my favorite video game thing Ive seen in a long time.

The replies to him, from people who didnt find the dialogue particularly funny, add another layer of entertainment. Theres some irony being missed, here.

This might be the mostdivisive scene in the game, though. Its developers told The Verge it was meant to be timeless, not a commentary on current U.S. politics. Still, said creative director Jens Matthies, Every once in a while, you cant resist slipping a joke or two about the state of the world.

Continue reading here:
The alt-right is upset about a conversation between Nazis in 'Wolfenstein 2' - The Daily Dot

The alt-rights presence seemingly pervades every corner of the Donald Trump administration, so perhaps its no surprise that key players in the extremist white nationalist movement are turning out to be involved in the presidents scandals as well namely, the ongoing investigation into potential collusion between Russian intelligence and members of the Trump campaign.

Charles C. Johnson/Twitter

Two major alt-right figures Charles C. Johnson, the white nationalist Trumps Troll who reportedly acted as an adviser to the administrations transition team, and notorious neo-Nazi hacker Andrew weev Auernheimer have been implicated in the Russia investigation, according to a recent piece by Ben Schreckinger in Politico.

Their role became public whena Republican activist named Peter Smith, 81, committed suicide shortly after detailing for the Wall Street Journal his attempts to track down hackers he believed might possess the 33,000emails Hillary Clinton deleted from her private servers, the controversy over which wasa major campaign issue raised by Trump during the election. Smiths involvement could be a key to the investigation if evidence can be found that he acted as a conduit between Russian intelligence operatives seeking to affect the 2016 election outcome and Trump adviser Michael Flynn, Sr., the onetime National Security Adviser who resigned over his meetings with key Russian officials.

Johnson, a onetime Breitbart News writer who told Schreckinger he met Smith in 2013 while conducting opposition research on President Obama, had been in touch with Smith throughout the 2016 campaign, discussing tactics and research, including Smiths efforts in tracking down Clintons emails.

He wanted me to introduce him to [Trumps chief adviser, Stephen] Bannon, to a few others, and I sort of demurred on some of that, Johnson said. I didnt think his operation was as sophisticated as it needed to be, and I thought it was good to keep the campaign as insulated as possible.

Schreckinger reported that Johnson instead contacted a hidden oppo network of alt-right researchers (who he declined to identify) and urged them to back Smiths efforts. Moreover, he suggested to Smith that he get in touch with Auernheimer.

Andrew Auernheimer/Daily Stormer

Auernheimer, claiming he is contractually prohibited from speaking to reporters, would not confirm to Schreckinger that Smith had contacted him.

Smiths confession to the Journal corroborated other aspects of the Russia investigation that have been uncovered by reporters. It explained: The operation Mr. Smith described is consistent with information that has been examined by U.S. investigators probing Russian interference in the elections. Those investigators have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clintons server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence.

Smith killed himself in a Minnesota hotel room on May 14, days after talking to the Journal reporters. He left behind a carefully arranged stack of documents explaining his suicide and a note exclaiming, NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER.

Johnson rose to notoriety in 2014 as an alt-right troll who led social-media harassment campaigns against people who were involved in mainstream news stories, including journalists, publishing their home and private information online and leading to threats at their residences. He also was notorious for using overtly racist language on his Twitter account, though he was permanently exiled from Twitter in 2015 for using threatening language.

In July 2016, Johnson was a guest on the racist radio show Fash the Nation, in which he claimed that he got interested in race realism a phrase white nationalists use to refer to their racist ideology at a young age. On the show, he maintained that ethnic and racial stereotypes are largely true and he admitted to factoring them into hiring practices, predicated on the principle that blacks are dumber than whites.

And at a certain point you If were all the same, you would have statistically expected that if blacks are 15% of the population, they would make up, you know, 15%of honors winners, you know, honor students or whatever. And yet thats never the case. And so you have to sit You have to believe that every single school on the planet, and in every single environment thats run by white people that theyre systematically discriminating against blacks for some reason. Or you have to believe the more obvious thing which is that theyre dumber. And enough experience with them kind of persuades you that the dumber thing is probably true.

He claimed in December that he had been doing a lot of the vetting for the administration, and the Trump transition. Forbes reported that Johnson didnt have an official position, but was working behind the scenes with members of the transition teams executive committee.

Auernheimer, who became famous in 2010 for exposing a hole in AT&Ts security system and wound up serving prison time for it beforeconverting to outright neo-Nazi ideology, has been closely involved in the activities of the overtly racist 1488 segment of the alt-right. He helped Andrew Anglin set up his bulletin-board system for the neo-Nazi outlet Daily Stormer, and has been involved in sending threatening fliers out to Jewish community centers and colleges.

Johnson and Auernheimer had previously teamed up in 2015 in an effort to release hours of covertly filmed interviews with Planned Parenthood officials.

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Two Notorious 'Alt-Right' Figures May Play Key Roles in Russia Investigation - Southern Poverty Law Center

Mashable

A Congressional resolution was written with the help of an alt-right ... Mashable A recent congressional resolution was apparently sourced from an alt-right conspiracy subreddit called r/The_Donald. and more »

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A Congressional resolution was written with the help of an alt-right ... - Mashable

Early scenes following a gorgeous animated prologue that uses Jacob Lawrence paintings to evoke the decades of job discrimination, residential segregation and heavy-handed law enforcement that preceded the 1967 riots in Detroit and other Northern cities zero in on the rebellions immediate cause: a late-night police raid on an unlicensed saloon.

The opening 20 minutes register Ms. Bigelows virtuosity as a choreographer of chaos. She illuminates volatile and unpredictable circumstances with amazing poise and precision, producing an intuitive understanding of events that quickly spiral beyond the control or comprehension of their participants. Her combination of efficiency and expressiveness is matched by the actors a formidable, mostly youthful ensemble including John Boyega, Will Poulter, Algee Smith and Jason Mitchell even though the script at times inhibits their range, locking them into simple stances of aggression and fear.

Amid the fire and looting and the audio and video clips of the Michigan governor George W. Romney and President Lyndon B. Johnson, a narrower plot takes shape, a real-life horror movie folded into a baggier film that feels, by turns, like a combat picture, a cavalry western, a police procedural and a courtroom drama.

A preview of the film.

The fates of a collection of black and white Detroiters (as well as two unlucky visitors from Ohio) converge at a motel on the west side of the city. Two friends, Fred (Jacob Latimore) and Larry (Mr. Smith), are looking for a little fun after a disappointing evening at the Fox Theater downtown. They flirt with Karen (Kaitlyn Dever) and Julie (Hannah Murray), two white women, and join a makeshift party in a room belonging to Carl Cooper (Mr. Mitchell).

Down the hall is Greene (Anthony Mackie), a soldier just back from Vietnam. A few blocks away, Melvin Dismukes (Mr. Boyega), a black security guard protecting a grocery store, brings coffee to a group of National Guardsmen, a gesture of diplomacy as well as self-protection. I dont want those boys shooting at us, he tells his co-worker. Meanwhile, three patrolmen cruise the city. One of them, Krauss (Mr. Poulter), is still on the job after fatally shooting an unarmed looting suspect in the back.

The nightmare that brought them all together is remembered as the Algiers Motel incident. Its a notably ugly chapter in the annals of late-60s urban violence, and one that has an especially grim resonance in our own time. Three black men were shot to death nine other people were terrorized and beaten after the police and guardsmen arrived at the motel, responding to reports of sniper fire.

Real events depicted in movies cant exactly be given away, and this episode, while not as notorious as some other race-related murders of its era, isnt all that obscure. (It is the subject of a book by John Hersey, a writer for The New Yorker, published a year after the riots and reissued in 1997 with an informative introduction by the historian Thomas J. Sugrue.) The basic arc of the story the killing of unarmed black men, the spasm of outrage, the impunity ultimately bestowed on the perpetrators is always shocking and rarely surprising. Im sorry if thats a spoiler.

What matters more to Ms. Bigelow and Mr. Boal than plot twists or surprises and to an audience torn between the urge to lean in and the desire to look away is the minute-by-minute unspooling of accident, error and intentional evil that produced a tragic result. The important thing is not the literal accuracy of the overall account (though Mr. Boal, a former journalist, has been diligent in his research) but its plausibility. Is this what could have happened? Does it feel true?

The answers, of course, can hardly be objective. The language of cinematic action which Ms. Bigelow speaks as fluently and inventively as any living American director is an idiom of feeling and visceral response. There are parts of Detroit that have a raw, unsettled authenticity, and others that sink in a welter of screaming and cursing.

The Algiers becomes a trap, not only for the characters, who are stuck inside at the mercy of a maniac, but for the film itself, which loses its political and psychological coherence as the night drags on. Krauss, with his disconcertingly boyish looks and his sophomoric attempts to seem thoughtful, is a callow sociopath. His fellow officers Flynn (Ben OToole) and Demens (Jack Reynor) contribute sexual hysteria (when they see white women in the company of black men) and sheer idiocy. They are terrifying and contemptible dismayingly believable figures from the prehistory of what is now called the alt-right.

But as their villainy comes into relief, the humanity of their hostages begins to blur. In a horror movie, the monster is inevitably the center of interest, and once the first body in the motel falls, Detroit begins to trade its vivid sense of nuance especially present in its delicate observation of Fred and Larrys friendship for bluntness and sensationalism. A complex, dreadful piece of history becomes an undialectical ordeal of viciousness and victimhood.

The film opens with the assertion that in Detroit and elsewhere in the mid-1960s, change had to come and the question was when and how. But the promise implied in that how is one that Detroit, for all its impressive craft and unimpeachable intention, proves unable to fulfill. It is curious that a movie set against a backdrop of black resistance and rebellion however inchoate and self-destructive its expression may have been should become a tale of black helplessness and passivity. The white men, the decent ones as much as the brutes, have the answers, the power, the agency.

The filmmakers seem aware of this problem. They try toward the end to give the movie back, in effect, to its African-American characters, to refuse to let racism have the final word and to free themselves of storytelling conventions that insist on comfort and consensus. It doesnt quite work. American movies have a hard time with division and with real-world problems that have yet to be solved. American politics does, too. The great virtue of Detroit is that it recognizes this difficulty. The failure to overcome it is hardly the films alone.

Director Kathryn Bigelow

Stars John Boyega, Anthony Mackie, Algee Smith, Jacob Latimore, Will Poulter

Rating R

Running Time 2h 23m

Genres Crime, Drama, History, Thriller

Detroit Rated R for violence and viciousness. Running time: 2 hours 23 minutes.

A version of this review appears in print on July 28, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Us vs. Them in a City on Fire.

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Review: In 'Detroit,' Black Lives Caught in a Prehistory of the Alt-Right - New York Times