Today, Explained - "These bastards tried to kill me"

Episode Date: August 10, 2018

Aubtin Heydari tells the story of how he was almost murdered by a white supremacist at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this here episode of Today Explained comes from Squarespace, a company that wants to help you build your website or secure you your dream domain. You can go to squarespace.com to find out how that all works and use the code EXPLAINED to get 10% off your first purchase. It's a beautiful, sunny summer Friday in Washington, which should feel great, but the tension in D.C. right now is palpable because actual Nazis are coming to town this weekend. It's hard to believe, but it's a little less hard because of what went down exactly one year ago this weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia. Abtin Haidari was there, protesting against the white supremacists. My background is Iranian-American, and I grew up Muslim. And for me, growing up in the South, particularly, I had always been sort of around these experiences of racism, either directly or indirectly.

Obton's from Harrisonburg, Virginia, about an hour northwest of Charlottesville, and he spoke to us from a summer camp where he's a debate coach. I was at the torchlight rally the night before, and that's when I understood how real this was about to be. We were just completely swarmed by white nationalists. Surrounded with white TV torches, they were hurling slurs at us, they were throwing lighter fluid and torches at us. I saw fights break out next to me.

White nationalists were beating up somebody, and as I'm trying to help protect another person, I feel a burning sensation across my face, and it's pepper spray. So I'm blind for about an hour, and they have to form a human shield around us to protect us from neo-Nazis coming up to us, harassing us, trying to take photos of us. And I was just holding the hands of another person who was also maced and also screaming in pain. And around the point when I started to see again, police finally declared the Torchlight Rally unlawful assembly.

But at that point, the crowd was already dispersed. The neo-Nazis and white nationalists were already in the town and spread out everywhere. I was just walking down the street, and I just saw a car drive by of three white guys, sigheeling out the window and shouting white power. And it was tense. Once you see with your own eyes, once you see hundreds of neo-Nazis surrounding you, screaming white power, screaming the Jews will not replace us, holding tiki torches, and seeing like the ages of them. I mean, not just these old white guys from the South who were in the Klan and still love the Confederacy, but I mean young kids,

like kids my age and younger. I saw families there. I saw fathers and sons. August 12th, the day of the United Right Rally. I'm just preparing myself mentally and emotionally, I guess. I have been in tense protest scenarios before, but the gravity of what was about to happen was starting to really hit me. Marching to the rally, I saw entire family units, mothers and daughters as well,

all these family units marching for this really insidious and really dangerous and dark way. Obviously, it could never prepare me for what was about to happen. I mean, the first thing you see are just hundreds and hundreds, way more white nationalists than before. Confederate flags on their Kevlar vests.

I saw people with SS patches. And these people are armed tooth and nail. I mean, full assault rifles, multiple weapons, knives, chanting hateful things, throwing water bottles into the crowds so that they knock people out. And the violence was clearly escalating. Fights were beginning to break out more. And police were starting to throw tear gas into the crowd. What I was doing was trying to find people who were injured and get them to medics.

And when the police declare the Unite the Right rally an unlawful offence, they're forcing the crowd to disperse. But one contingent of them decides to keep marching. And they're actually kind of boxing us in, blocking certain parts of the street, controlling our movements. And this is around when my memory starts to blur. That's when the car rams into the crowd. I don't remember about eight minutes before them, but my next memory is just waking up in the hospital about

eight hours later that night. In some ways, it's probably better that I don't remember. It would probably have made all the trauma even worse, but there's still something surreal about it that I can't actually grasp. My first thing I see is just the TV's on at CNN, and it's just replaying the video of us getting hit. And I'm like, yes, wait, that's what happened. I see in videos me flip over the hood of the car, me sitting on the side of the road bleeding, a street medic holding my head up and making sure I didn't fall asleep and making sure my head was straight. The top part of my tibia, right below my kneecap, was badly fractured and I had wounds and gashes

all over my body, a giant gash on my head from where my head hit the pavement and obviously a very severe concussion. I don't regret my decision to go to Charlottesville, but the big personal lesson for me is I learned that even if I'm comfortable putting myself in harm's way, there are other people around me who are affected by that. Not only my parents, who I put in a state of fear and anguish over what happened to me, but friends that I was very close to and haven't been that closely deaf, how you have to think about the people around you when you make these decisions. And that's what makes it hard for a lot of people to show up and counter-protest.

These bastards tried to kill me and created a state of, like, terror and sadness that people in the community still feel. I still deal with the repercussions of Charlottesville, all the way down to just the pain in my leg. We should be serious about what happened to Charlottesville. I don't personally have a website, but I have a few favorites I could tell you about. One of them is isitchristmas.com. It's a website you can go to to find out whether or not it's Christmas. I just went there this morning. It's a website you can go to to find out whether or not it's Christmas. I just went there this morning. It's not.

If you'd like to build your own website, Squarespace can help. They've got lots of different templates from world-class designers, and you can customize just about all of them. Go to Squarespace.com to find out more and get 10% off your purchase of a website or a domain using the code EXPLAINED. Jane Koston, you're a senior politics reporter at Vox. How big a deal was this Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last year for white supremacy in America? It was a big deal for Americans observing white supremacy because I think that that was the moment where you're like, oh, this is a thing that's happening. It's bad. But Charlottesville was the moment where that kind of broke into mainstream parlance. But for the white supremacists themselves, it was bad.

Breaking news, a horrific scene in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white nationalist rally that descended into deadly violence and chaos. You know, Charlottesville was supposed to be this moment of kind of celebrating their ascension to real political visibility. And instead, it made them look like murderous white supremacists. And the fallout from everything that happened that weekend is still reverberating for them and for the people who were affected by Unite the Right. Who organized Unite the Right last year in Charlottesville? A white nationalist named Jason Kessler. He is from Charlottesville, Virginia.

In mainstream parlance, he tries to sound not racist. Right now, we are in a civil rights struggle to save white people from ethnic cleansing, which is happening across the Western world. There is a platform that's supposed to be a challenger to Twitter called Gab. And on Gab, you know, he's talking about shipping every non-white person out of the country. Africans and Europeans sharing a country together is a disaster. Oh, and he's also a Holocaust denier. So was Kessler alone in organizing the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville? He was not. Richard Spencer, a white supremacist of sorts who also believes that because he went to Duke, he has interesting things to say.

I would say wherever Europeans are on the earth, it's better. We bring a level of civilization and we bring also something that's unique to us. He was one of the organizers, as was Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Workers Party. Of course we look up to men like Adolf Hitler. We look up to him as inspirations for what we can achieve. And there were a couple of other groups and entities that were involved in planning Unite the Right. And why did all these turkeys come together at this particular moment for this rally last year? The election of Donald Trump kind of marked their ascendancy into real politics.

You know, the night before the inauguration, there was something called the Deplora Ball, which took place in D.C. And a lot of alt-right figures attended. We're not funny-ditty conservatives who go to sleep at 9 p.m. All right, all right. You know, and get their mom to tuck them in at night. Like, we go out and have fun. And Richard Spencer was there, and he chanted, Hail Victory. And everyone was kind of like, oh, that's a weird thing to do.

But, you know, this moment that Richard Spencer would be interviewed on CNN. Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity. Or they came to colleges to talk. Now, granted, you know, those college conversations did not go well. Richard Spencer notably went to Auburn University and said that they should ban football because that's how black people were getting into college. And if you know anything about Auburn, that did not go over well.

There is something truly sick, I have to say, about bringing in to a school, a school like Auburn that has a history of white identity, to bring in people who, let's be frank, are not the greatest exemplars of the African race. They kept showing up in kind of mainstream outlets. You know, you saw a lot of profiles of Richard Spencer, which tried to make him seem like he's like white nationalists. You know, this idea that this is something that we should take seriously as like a real thing.

How did the Unite the Right rally go so badly for these groups that gather in Charlottesville? They thought that this would make them look powerful and strong and like a real political movement. And instead, it made them look terrifying at best and kind of shambolic at worst. And I think that from the white nationalist perspective, this urge to be respected, that was thrown out the window by Charlottesville. When you have people chanting, carrying tiki torches and chanting Jews will not replace us. That's something that, you know, for the vast majority of Americans, thankfully, people don't want to get behind that. But at the same time, that march one year ago got so much attention and so much coverage and video of it was viewed millions upon millions and millions of times.

Right. Did that help in any way because any publicity is good publicity? I don't think so. I think a lot of the people involved either did not recognize that other people would not be as friendly to their membership in these groups or just didn't recognize how deeply offensive most people found what happened in Charlottesville. And so because of all the media coverage, you know, if you if you're in a Getty photograph that, you know, the caption lists your name. And then someone can Google your name and be like,

hey, that guy's running College Republicans at Washington State University. Huh, that's interesting. Now, former President James Alsup sent an email to the College Republicans executive board that he would be stepping down. Even officials at Washington State University confirmed with me it's reviewing feedback from students and alums about Alstom's future attendance at the university. Or, you know, these are the people who beat up someone in Charlottesville. Let's crowdsource and find their faces.

Oh, we identified them within like two days. So what happened to all the people who organized this rally? What have they done since? Jason Kessler, immediately after what happened in Charlottesville, first insulted Heather Heyer, who's the woman who was murdered, and then said that his insults online were the result of him taking Xanax and Vicodin and not being able to sleep. And he attempted to argue that, you know, the violence hadn't been from them. It had been from these counter protesters to which people said, like, we, you know, it was on video. And who other than me

has refused to back down on the issue of Charlottesville and the fact that we did not do anything wrong? Now I'm banned from Facebook for what? For nothing. I should also note that he was already in trouble for misdemeanor assault. And since Unite the Right, there has been continued legal trouble for him. He tried to get a permit to do Unite the Right again in Charlottesville and then was denied. And then he withdrew that petition and gave up. And that's why they're focusing on the D.C. rally. And then there's Richard Spencer.

After Charlottesville, 26 European countries banned Richard Spencer from entering, including France, Germany, Spain, and Poland. And they basically were like, you got to go home, which is a hilarious thing to say to Richard Spencer, who considers himself, you know, he has talked a lot about how he's like a European white nationalist and all these European countries were like, we'd rather not have you. Hi, everyone. This is Richard Spencer. And he is begging for money to help pay his legal fees. I am under attack and I need your help. Some of the biggest and baddest law firms in the United States are suing me, along with some other prominent figures, in civil court.

Also, you know, he was doing all these college tours, and now he's saying, like, I can't do this anymore. Another one, Christopher Cantwell, who people may remember from Vice's documentary about Charlottesville, who started, you know, kept talking about guns and needing to bring violence to the movement. All right, so I came pretty well prepared for this thing today. Kel-Tec P3AT, Glock 19, 9mm, and there's a knife. Well, I actually have another AK in that bag over there.

You get loose track of your fucking guns, huh? And then when he was faced with imminent arrest, posted a video of himself sobbing uncontrollably on the internet. I'm armed. I do not want violence with you. All right. I'm terrified. I'm afraid you're going to kill me. I really am. All right. So if I if I got to go to jail today, you know, it won't be the fucking first time. He has been banned from the state of Virginia for five years.

Wow. That can happen. Yes, it can happen. I mean, it sounds like basically since the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, all of its organizers have just been facing a bunch of legal trouble. Yep. That's pretty much it. And I think one of the biggest and most notable lawsuits is an action that was brought forward by 10 Virginia residents who say they suffered severe physical and emotional injuries. They are arguing in their lawsuit that, you know, Unite the Right was not just an expression of free speech that got out of control, but a direct conspiracy to commit violence. We have extensive evidence before what happened, of their planning of the events that happened.

We have extensive evidence on videotape and everything else of what they did, their pictures and the complaint of them punching people and macing people. And then, as you put it, we have extensive evidence afterwards bragging about what they did and taking delight in the fact that someone was killed and that people were hurt. Can these white supremacists hide behind the First Amendment, behind free speech? That is generally, yes. Inflammatory speech is generally protected speech, even in a rally setting. But the exception is that when that speech is directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action or likely to incite or produce such an action, that's not the same thing. Or KKK or white supremacists just want to stand peacefully on a street corner and hold up a sign saying they hate Jews or they hate black people. Or as one of them said, they want Auschwitz to happen again. That is protected speech. I have no issue with that.

But that's not what happened here. It's about people who are being hurt. What's the possible outcome of the lawsuit? They know that they're not really going to get money out of this, really. That Richard Spencer is broke. We know that Jason and Kessler is broke. But it's more about the fact that they want a judgment that what these people did was not just illegal, but wrong.

And to make it clear that, you know, if you want to do this, you need to know that the same thing might happen to you. There were so many counter protesters out there in Charlottesville last year. Did they coalesce in some way since? I think that that was a really important blossoming point for the counter protest movement. People who were horrified by what happened did what you do when you are on social media and something happens.

You try to help in your own way. And one of those was by identifying the people involved. Because when you show your face chanting, Jews will not replace us, and people can see your face, people will be like, huh, that looks like this guy I work with. So despite this being what sounds like a complete and utter failure for Unite the Right, and if anything, something that further motivated the left to unite. Right. There is another march this weekend.

Yeah. In Washington, D.C. Across from the White House. I mean, with all this security out there, Secret Service, Park Service, D.C. police, it sounds like it could be safer. Do you think it's safe enough for someone like you or for someone like me to go out there? People who are brown? Black?

Nope. Nope. Nope. If I wanted to get yelled at about my purported racial inferiority, I would just, you know, check my email more often.

Jane Koston covers politics at Vox. And thanks today to Vox's Zach Beecham for sharing his conversation with Abdin Haidari with us. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. This is Today Explained. Thanks to Squarespace for supporting the show this week. Squarespace has 24-7, 365 customer support. It's award-winning. We could all use a little support. Thanks.