Most have probably heard of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. You've probably also heard the ruling class's version of events: a bunch of violent Nazis descended on a peaceful college town and attacked and killed innocent people, especially the heroes standing up for racial justice.
If you're here, you probably know better than to believe this. Still, the book Charlottesville Untold by Anne Wilson Smith is worth reading. It lays the whole story out in a series of gripping chapters.
Smith is the daughter of University of South Carolina pro-Southern historian Clyde N. Wilson, so you could say scholarship is in her blood. Her book is based on interviews wtih participants, legal cases, and official documents, including the after-action Heaphy Report.
The short version is that a diverse group of activists planned a peaceful park rally to defend the Robert E. Lee statue, and were violently attacked by crazed Antifa/BLM fanatics while police did nothing. They went there expecting a fun, joyous event (which it was at first, meeting online allies in person), and a couple of hours of speeches in a park, then some local tourism. There would've been no violence but for the "counter-protesters".
The book's chapters detail what the pro-statue protesters were subjected to. BLM/Antifa made ample use of violence, chemicals, and lots of human waste; there were barrages of urine, feces, and used tampons. To protect the more vulnerable, young men would form perimeter shields, and women became on-the-spot nurses treating injuries. Antifa would still find ways of punching and pepper-spraying women and the elderly.
She covers the law enforcement failures, which were both individual and systemic. She covers the media portrayal; participants interviewed said they could not believe how flagrantly the news lied about and twisted what had happened.
She discusses in detail the massively lopsided prosecutions. For example, one BLM member had an improvised flamethrower he was attacking pro-statue protesters with (which the media cheered, while calling BLM "peaceful"). One panicked would-be victim fired a single warning shot to ward him off, for fear of being burned alive. For this single, defensive discharge he was sentenced to four years in prison. The flamethrower wielder, for trying to burn people, got 20 days for disorderly conduct. Even that was unusual; most counter-protester violence was not prosecuted at all.
She devotes a chapter to the car crash that the media made the centerpiece of the event, though it was well after the protest had broken up. She refrains from taking a position, but provides abundant evidence that Fields indeed feared for his life and had no violent intent.
There are also the civil cases. The organizers of UTR are being sued to oblivion for holding a rally, on the grounds that by existing they were responsible for the violence. The goal of course is to make it de facto illegal to hold right-wing protests. Smith said she rushed to finish the book in advance of the current trial.
Charlottesville may seem old news, but it was a template for what was to come. Today, left-wing violence and destruction is routine and tolerated, and anyone who resists it is mercilessly prosecuted. Right-wing groups can barely assemble anywhere without being attacked while the authorities smile on. Conservatives who failed to stand up for UTR against the lies are now 4 years later banned from all social media, up to and including the former president.
Smith does give Trump credit for somewhat defending the protests, but says he didn't do nearly enough while his departments ran wild.
tl;dr: The e-book is only five dollars, get it.