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James Fields Jr., the white supremacist who murdered a woman two summers ago when he steered a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va., was sentenced Friday to life in federal prison. Lawyers for Mr. Fields, 22, had pleaded for mercy, citing his difficult childhood and mental health problems. Prosecutors had sought the life sentence, arguing that Mr. Fields’s racist, anti-Semitic beliefs motivated the decision to attend the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and to attack counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others. “The defendant’s crimes were so horrendous — and the maiming of...

The avowed white supremacist who plowed his car into counterdemonstrators opposing a white nationalist rally in Virginia two years ago, killing one person and injuring dozens, has asked a judge for mercy and a sentence shorter than life in prison. Lawyers for James Alex Fields Jr., 22, said in a sentencing memo submitted in court documents Friday that the defendant should not spend his entire life in prison because of his age, a traumatic childhood and a history of mental illness. Fields pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes in March and is set to be sentenced on June 28. “No...

Lawyers for the man convicted for ramming a crowd of protesters with his car in Charlottesville, Va., injuring dozens and killing activist Heather Heyer, asked for "mercy" for their client in a memo, arguing that he should not spend the rest of his life in prison. The Associated Press reported Saturday that lawyers for 22-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. argued that Fields' age and history of mental illness, along with a traumatic childhood, should factor into a court's decision that they hoped would amount to less than a life sentence. “No amount of punishment imposed on James can repair the...

Last week, Charlottesville, Virginia Mayor Nikuyah Walker proposed ending recognition of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday as an official city holiday. Instead, she wants the city to celebrate the emancipation of local slaves a month earlier, as “Liberation and Freedom Day.” The proposal will be brought before the city council at either its June 17 or July 1 meeting, reports The Daily Progress, a local newspaper.Charlottesville is the home to the University of Virginia, one of the United States’s premiere research and educational institutions, which Jefferson personally designed, founded, and led after serving as the U.S. president. It is Jefferson who...

Joe Biden Misses His Chance Along with every other Democrat, he surrendered his advantage when he lied about Donald Trump. By  Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. May 3, 2019 5:58 p.m. ET   When he kicked off his presidential campaign last week, Joe Biden centered his rationale for running on a claim that Donald Trump referred to racists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as very fine people.Mr. Biden probably is not connected enough to social media to know it, but this claim has been thoroughly defeated by online pushback, led by Dilbert creator Scott Adams and others. Wikipedia’s account of the...

Charlottesville is an enchanting Virginia college town graced by the neoclassical architecture of the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. I flew there with two friends, the talented photographer Jonathan Becker and the Vietnam Special Forces Silver Star winner Chuck Pfeifer, all of us close buddies of the deceased. It was the memorial service for Willy von Raab, scourge of drug dealers and illegal immigrants while commissioner of customs for eight years under Reagan. The humorist P.J. O’Rourke and I were the two speakers, and after a rousing ‘America the Beautiful’ we retired for an afternoon of southern hospitality and University of...

President Trump sent certain segments of population into outraged spasms on Friday when he described Robert E. Lee as a "great general." Trying to lend context to his infamous "very fine people" remark about the 2017 Charlottesville protests, Trump said this: “I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general. Whether you like it or not, he was one of the great generals. I have spoken to many generals here, right at the White House, and many people thought — of the generals, they think that he...

In a ruling that is sure to make Left-wing haters’ heads explode — again — a local judge in Charlottesville, N.C., has ruled that Confederate monuments there are protected by state law and thus cannot be removed. According to local CBS affiliate WCAV, the ruling by Circuit Judge Richard Moore flies in the face of a trend by city councils, schools, and other political subdivisions in removing Confederate historical symbols and markers under pressure from Leftists who claim they are monuments to slavery and ‘white supremacy.’

[snip] No fewer than eight times on his State of the Union CNN show today, Jake Tapper asked Kellyanne Conway whether President Trump's response to Charlottesville was, as he has said, perfect. Conway forcefully made the case that the President's "very fine people on both sides" comment was clearly in reference to people peacefully opposing the removal of Confederate statues, not to the neo-Nazis. And she pointed out that Trump had unequivocally condemned racism, bigotry, evil, violence, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the KKK. She called Trump's response "darn near perfection." When Tapper still wouldn't drop his hair-splitting over "perfect," Conway...

VIDEO Joe Biden is so obsessed with Charlottesville that he has announced that he is running for president of Charlottesville. Over and over and over again, he obsesses about Charlottesville. He might never have been there but Biden is thinking about Charlottesville 24/7. Every campaign speech he gives is expected to have at least three Charlottesville references per paragraph. He might even go for three Charlottesville references per sentence.

..This keeps getting better, and better. Jericho Green

During a 2008 interview with then-Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, ABC's Charlie Gibson asked whether Alaska's proximity to Russia offered Palin unique "insight." Palin responded, "They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska." In a Saturday Night Live skit, comic Tiny Fey mocked in this exchange with comic Amy Poehler, who portrayed Hillary Clinton. Fey as Palin: "You know, Hillary and I don't agree on everything ..." Poehler as Clinton: "Anything. I believe that diplomacy should be the cornerstone of any foreign policy." Fey as Palin: "And...

CNN political commentator Steve Cortes has taken his own network to task for perpetuating the lie that President Donald Trump referred to neo-Nazis in the Charlottesville, Virginia, riot as “very fine people.” As Breitbart News has noted repeatedly, CNN’s own contemporaneous reporting showed that Trump was referring to peaceful protesters over the issue of the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and specifically excluding neo-Nazis, whom he said should be “condemned totally.” Yet the network’s anchors, reporters, and contributors have claimed, over and over again, that Trump referred to the neo-Nazis as “very fine people” —...

News anchors and pundits have repeated lies about Donald Trump and race so often that some of these narratives seem true, even to Americans who embrace the fruits of the president’s policies. The most pernicious and pervasive of these lies is the “Charlottesville Hoax,” the fake-news fabrication that he described the neo-Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 as “fine people.”

President Trump: “Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.” Trump became even more explicit: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white...

Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Joel Pollak dismantled the lie that President Donald Trump described white supremacists and neo-Nazis as “very fine people” following 2017’s demonstrations and riots in Charlottesville, VA. He offered his analysis during an introductory monologue on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with co-host Rebecca Mansour. Pollak began, “First we have to acknowledge that the terror attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, were absolutely horrific independent of whatever political or philosophical arguments we might be getting into about them, now, especially with the media coverage. I thought it would be appropriate to quote George Orwell who wrote...

From an op-ed piece in Monday’s Roanoke (Virginia) Times: Last month, federal agents in Maryland arrested a United States Coast Guard officer and said he was plotting to assassinate Democratic members of Congress, prominent television journalists and others. The officer, Lt. Christopher Hasson, apparently inspired by a right-wing Norwegian terrorist who slaughtered 77 people in 2011, stockpiled firearms and ammunition and researched locations around Washington to launch his attacks, according to investigators. Fortunately, the F.B.I. arrested him before he could act.When news came of Hasson’s arrest, President Trump– who has no problems expressing the fiercest outrage at Democrats and even...

President Trump on Friday blasted Michael Cohen over a newly reported book proposal that apparently painted the president in a positive light, saying his former lawyer's pitch contradicts this week's congressional testimony and renders him “totally discredited.” “Wow, just revealed that Michael Cohen wrote ‘a love letter to Trump’ manuscript for a new book that he was pushing. Written and submitted long after Charlottesville and Helsinki, his phony reasons for going rogue. Book is exact opposite of his fake testimony, which is now a lie!” Trump tweeted Friday.“Congress must demand the transcript of Michael Cohen’s new book, given to publishers a short...

Allow me a moment of pride: The hot new criticism of my fellow Jews is that we don’t complain enough. Really. A host of pundits, concerned about President Trump’s baffling unwillingness to single out neo-Nazis for criticism, are turning to the American Jewish community and pleading: Would it kill you to maybe kvetch a bit? The idea we haven’t protested is bonkers, but more important, the left’s campaign to get all Jews to publicly denounce Trump has taken a profoundly dangerous and ugly turn. And it needs to stop. On Tuesday, the Washington Examiner reported that a coalition of left-leaning...

One of the nation's largest neo-Nazi groups appears to have an unlikely new leader: a black activist who has vowed to dismantle it. Court documents filed Thursday suggest James Hart Stern wants to use his new position as director and president of the National Socialist Movement to undermine the Detroit-based group's defense against a lawsuit. The NSM is one of several extremist groups sued over bloodshed at a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Stern's filing asks a federal court in Virginia to issue a judgment against the group before one of the lawsuits goes to trial. Stern replaced...