Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ trial set to begin four years after rally – By Ben Kesslen (NBC News) / Oct 22 2021
Nine plaintiffs injured at the 2017 rally in Virginia are seeking financial compensation from organizers. Jury selection begins Monday.
Before hundreds of neo-Nazis descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, for the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, they gathered in person and on Discord, meticulously planning the deadly event, which has since been seared into American history.
On Discord, attendees coordinated rides, planned chants, discussed Virginia laws and talked about what gear to take. Leaders and planners of the rally answered questions, laid out its philosophy and told participants to be ready to die for the cause.
“We are angry. … There is a atavistic rage in us, deep in us, that is ready to boil over. There is a craving to return to an age of violence. We want a war,” Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, wrote in anticipation of the rally.
As it got closer, the rally took on new meaning. Organizers like Anglin wrote that it was no longer just about fighting to stop the removal of the city’s Robert E. Lee statue. Now, it was “something much bigger”: “a rallying point and battle cry for the rising Alt-Right movement.”
