Confessions of a Free Speech Lawyer: Charlottesville and the Politics of Hate

by Rodney A. Smolla

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, where I represented and argued on behalf of the racist cross-burners, asserting that the First Amendment protected their right to brandish symbols of racism, though it did not protect actual incitement to violence, or true threats intended to intimidate victims.

Not so much with the rest of the nation, however, I felt special pangs of guilt, doubt, and remorse over the violence that engulfed Charlottesville, and the death of Heyer. For I had personally argued the Supreme Court case fighting for the rights of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and American neo-Nazis to spread their bile on the streets and parks of Virginia. What had my advocacy wrought? I felt vaguely complicit in the hate speech, in the violence, in the carnage and the death.

Charlottesville and the University of Virginia were also, by 2017, among the American bastions of left-wing progressive liberal activist opposition to racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia. Charlottesville and the University of Virginia were claiming a seat next to other famous American campuses, like the University of California at Berkeley, or Yale, as ardently active beacons of the rights of the oppressed and dispossessed. The mayor of Charlottesville declared the city the capital of the progressive resistance. It stood for the rights of people of color, religious minorities, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons—the champion of all colors and causes that the supremacists of the alt-right despised. Here were fear and loathing in Charlottesville, fueled from the right and the left, isobar highs and lows of love and hate, generating a perfect storm. If Charlottesville may be defined as a crossroads for politics, it has also proven a ripe environment for creativity. It has been home to musicians, actors, and writers, from Dave Matthews to Sissy Spacek, Edgar Allan Poe to William Faulkner to John Grisham.

The chant “Blood and Soil,” popular among alt-right American supremacists, conjured an idealized German past. “Blood and Soil,” or Blut und Boden in German, paid homage to idealized pure German “blood” and the organic connection of pure German blood to the physical German landscape. Blut und Boden was appropriated by the Nazis and used to conjure an almost mystical union between the authentic German-Nordic race and the territorial state of Germany. The phrase contemplated those who were not of pure German blood as invading nomadic races. Jews were the worst of the invaders. In a book published in 1930 titled Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (A new nobility based on blood and soil), writer Richard Walther Darré argued that Germany should pursue a systematic eugenics program to purify the German race and strengthen the nation. Nazi Germany did indeed embark on a radical eugenics program to purify the human race. Remarkably, the German eugenics experiment had its roots in Virginia. The story of that Virginia experiment in eugenics, an experiment that would be followed by Hitler and the Third Reich, is best told through the saga of a Virginia woman, Carrie Elizabeth Buck, who lived a large part of her life in Charlottesville.

Charlottesville became the epicenter of the national debate over Confederate monuments. The debate in Charlottesville was colored by a personal sideshow battle between Wes Bellamy, a local African American teacher, activist, and political leader, and Jason Kessler, Charlottesville’s emerging alt-right supremacist man-on-the-scene.