The white supremacists and neo-Nazis whose rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August resulted in the death of a young woman want to mark the anniversary next year with another rally.
But on Monday, Charlottesville said no, denying permits to five organizers planning events on Aug. 11 and 12, 2018, including people who wanted to organize counterprotests.
In denial letters obtained by The Daily Progress, a newspaper in Charlottesville, the city manager wrote that the events would "present a danger to public safety" and "cannot be accommodated within a reasonable allocation of city funds and/or police resources."
Additionally, the manager, Maurice Jones, wrote in each of the five letters, "There is no person or legal entity willing to accept responsibility for the group's adherence" to city laws.
Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized this year's "Unite the Right" march, told his Twitter followers that the "Communist government of Charlottesville" had denied his application and vowed to sue "early next year." In a video posted Monday evening, he adopted the language of the Justice Department's civil rights investigations, claiming that city officials had a "pattern and practice" of granting permits for left-wing events but not right-wing ones.
However, the permit requests denied Monday included some filed by opponents of the right-wing marches.
In his video Monday, between drags on a cigar, Kessler cast himself and his supporters as victims -- going so far as to liken today's white nationalists to the African-American students who required the protection of U.S. marshals and National Guard members to enter the University of Mississippi in 1962.
He vowed to march in 2018 with or without a permit, and told his supporters they could not be violent because they had to "prove a point."
In his permit application, Kessler said the police had only to keep the two sides separate to prevent bloodshed. But Jones, the city manager, said that was not possible.
Charlottesville "does not have the ability to determine or sort individuals according to what 'side' they are on," Jones wrote in the denial letter, "and no reasonable allocation of city funds or resources can guarantee that event participants will be free of any 'threat of violence.'"
NW News on 12/13/2017