Podcasts about james alex fields jr

On August 12th 2017, during two days of protests and counterprotests surrounding the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a man named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a group of counterprotesters, severely injuring several of them and killing a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer. Fields was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison, plus 419 years. In public statements about the violence, then-President Donald Trump kicked off a political firestorm when he failed to immediately denounce the white nationalists, saying there were “...very fine people on both sides.” In the conclusion of the civil trial that arose in the aftermath of that bloody weekend, a jury this week ruled that the white nationalist organizers of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville must pay more than $26 million in damages. In this episode of Passing Judgment, Jessica and Joe discuss the civil trial and how the outcome may impact future activities by white supremacist organizations. This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

When hundreds of far-right activists gathered in Berlin earlier this month, banners and T-shirts bearing US President Donald Trump’s face could be clearly seen among the crowd. Many waved the American flag. The demonstrators, who later tried to storm the German parliament, had assembled to protest against the German government’s COVID-19 restrictions.Related: Is there a ‘Nazi emergency’ in the German city of Dresden?The US president is a popular figure among far-right groups in Europe. Patrik Hermansson went undercover with far-right groups in the US for one year. Credit: Courtesy of Patrik Hermansson  Patrik Hermansson, a researcher with Hope Not Hate, a British advocacy group that campaigns against racism and fascism, says far-right activists see Trump as an anti-establishment figure, someone who rallies against the elites. Swedish-born Hermansson spent a year undercover in 2017 as a member of alt-right movements in Europe and the US. Trump’s time in office “put the wind in the sails of far-right groups and populist parties in Europe,” he said.Just hours after TV networks announced that Trump had won the 2016 US election, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen took to the stage of her party headquarters in Paris and celebrated the result. “Americans have voted, they’ve rejected the status quo. What happened last night was not the end of the world, it was the end of a world,” Le Pen said. She wasn’t alone in her jubilation. In neighboring Germany, the then-leader of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party, Frauke Petry, tweeted "this night changes the USA, Europe and the world!"And in Britain, Nigel Farage, former leader of the populist UK Independence Party, compared Trump’s win to the passing of Brexit a few months earlier, saying 2016 was a year of “political revolutions.”Supporting an American president is highly unusual for far-right politicians in Europe.Related: Artists in Germany fear backlash after far-right party wins big A portrait of Sylvia Taschka Credit: Courtesy of Sylvia Taschka Sylvia Taschka, who teaches history at Wayne State University in Detroit, says US presidents usually represent everything European far-right parties oppose: “Unrestrained capitalism. In other words, you know, a globalized free-market economy and an interventionist, some would say imperialist foreign policy," she said. Trump challenged both of those stereotypes, Taschka says, and upended their long-held tradition of anti-Americanism. Taschka, who was born in Nuremberg, Germany, has witnessed the rise of the far-right in Germany with dismay. As a young child growing up in a city famed for its enormous Nazi party rallies in the 1920s and '30s and later the Nazi war trials, she was well aware that support for far-right views still existed. But those views were never openly celebrated."I was not blind when I lived in Germany.  Germany always had a far-right element — even when I grew up — but they were kept more under the lid.”In the last decade, Taschka says that has changed dramatically. But she doesn’t attribute the growing strength of the far-right AfD party to Trump. A changing political landscape and the refugee crisis in 2015 were key driving factors, she says.Related: With far-right topping Dutch polls, EU elections could see Eurosceptics take the leadDutch political scientist Cas Mudde agrees. Mudde, who’s a professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, says far-right parties like the National Front in France or the Freedom Party of Austria don’t need to look to Trump for ideological motivation. “They have a much more developed ideological frame than Trump will ever have,” he said.Mudde says President Trump takes little notice of Europe’s populist politicians — but that’s not the case for some of his diplomats. The US ambassadors to Germany and the Netherlands have both been guilty of normalizing Europe’s far-right parties, he says.“One can think of Richard Grenell, in Germany, who was criticized for normalizing the AFD and in the Netherlands, it's even stronger with US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra," Mudde said. It’s alleged that far-right Dutch party leaders met with Hoekstra at the US Embassy to discuss their plans for the future, Mudde says.Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has also been holding court with far-right parties in Europe over the last couple of years. Bannon plans to convert a monastery outside of Rome into a political academy for ultraconservatives and future populist leaders, a move that has met fierce resistance from Italy’s Culture Ministry. The former White House aide also helped establish a foundation in Brussels aimed at supporting Europe’s far-right parties. But so far, it has received little attention from the parties themselves.French political analyst Jean-Yves Camus, a specialist on the French and European radical right, says parties like the National Front in France have little interest in taking advice from an American. They were doing just fine before Bannon came on the scene, he says.“When Steve Bannon tried to present himself as the man who could unite the extreme right in Europe, he forgot a very important thing: The National Front was a very strong party well before Steve Bannon became known in Washington, DC. So, basically, they did not need him.”The policy of "America first" that Trump promotes has been a mantra of the far-right movement in France since the 1970s. Slogans like “France for the French” or “French first” have been around for some decades, Camus says.     While the rise of populist parties in Europe might seem like an anti-establishment vote, Hermansson says it’s important to recognize that many grassroots supporters believe violence is the only way to achieve their goals. In his first few months undercover with far-right groups, Hermansson was shocked at how openly they condoned the use of violence.“I think in the beginning, I was quite surprised over how openly supportive of violence they were, or at least how implicitly they gave credence to even mass shootings," Hermansson said. Hermansson was in Charlottesville the day of the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in August 2017. He was standing just yards away from Heather Heyer when she was killed by James Alex Fields Jr., an alt-right supporter who plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring 19 people and killing Heyer. Screenshot of video footage of a white power rally in Chartlottesville, Virginia, taken by Patrik Hermansson, who went undercover with far-right groups in the US for one year.  Credit: Courtesy of Patrik Hermansson Hermansson says the incident was hugely traumatic and although he never expected someone would get killed that day, he had become increasingly concerned that things would turn violent. After Hermansson revealed his cover, he received threats from far-right groups for months afterward. Today, he says he feels relatively safe. The alt-right supporters Hermansson met in Europe would most definitely support a second Trump term, he says. In the last year, populist politicians in Europe have also been tweeting their support for another Trump win in November. Political scientist Mudde says their support hinges on the fact that they share a number of common enemies with the US president. They don’t believe a Trump victory will boost their standing in the polls, he says, but it’s better than seeing Biden get into office.Biden is no friend of the far-right, Mudde says. 

The first female Dalia Lama; Pride; James Alex Fields Jr. gets life in prison for killing Heather Heyer at Unite the Right; the solar eclipse; Yesterday, Child’s Play, Anna, and the weekend’s top movies; The Sixth Sense and Keith sleeping over at his new family’s home; how the Reagan administration took away Keith’s silver spoon

James Alex Fields Jr., who used a car to attack counterprotesters, is guilty of first-degree murder. The avowed supporter of neo-Nazi beliefs who took part in the violent and chaotic white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year was found guilty Friday of first-degree murder for killing Heather Heyer by ramming his car through a crowd of counterprotesters. A jury of seven women and five men began deliberating this morning and took just over seven hours to reach its decision that Fields, 21, of Maumee, Ohio, acted with premeditation when he backed up his 2010 Dodge Challenger and then roared it down a narrow downtown street crowded with marchers, slamming into them and another car. Heyer, 32, was killed and 35 others injured, many grievously.Republicans have spent years warning us that voter fraud is rampant, despite having no evidence that this is the case -- election fraud in the United States is in fact rare. President Donald Trump has warned us repeatedly about hordes of Mexicans and other illegals attacking this pillar of our democracy, and the GOP has put legislation into place in states across the country to make it harder to vote, arguing that it's necessary to protect the sanctity of elections. They take voter fraud seriously, they say. It's become one of their core issues. So, we would expect that faced with a rare case of potentially serious and pervasive electoral fraud, they would jump on it -- insist on an investigation, figure out exactly what happened, punish wrongdoers and close whatever holes in the system led to the abuses. So, here's their chance. Allegations of flagrant absentee ballot fraud in a North Carolina district have thrown the Election Day results of one of the nation's last unresolved midterm congressional races into question. Will North Carolina do what's right?Michael Cohen, President Trump's former lawyer, should receive a “substantial” prison term of roughly four years, despite his cooperation, federal prosecutors in New York said on Friday. Mr. Cohen, 52, is to be sentenced in Manhattan next week for two separate guilty pleas: one for campaign finance violations and financial crimes charged by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, and the other for lying to Congress in the Russia inquiry, filed by the Office of the Special Counsel in Washington. Prosecutors in Manhattan said the crimes Mr. Cohen had committed “marked a pattern of deception that permeated his professional life,” and though he was seeking a reduced sentence for providing assistance to the government, he did not deserve much leniency. “He was motivated to do so by personal greed, and repeatedly used his power and influence for deceptive ends,” the prosecutors said in a lengthy memo to the judge, William H. Pauley III.Mourners from across the nation gathered in Washington and Texas to pay their respects and celebrate the life of former president George H.W. Bush. He was America's 41st president. He was eulogized as a patriot, statesman, father, loyal friend, husband and grandfather.These can be complex discussions. Accuracy and context are very important to me. There's an interesting piece in The Nation: "George H.W. Bush, Icon of the WASP Establishment—and of Brutal US Repression in the Third World," by Greg Grandin. He says, "George Herbert Walker Bush represented a ruling class in decay. The single most important through-line in Bush's life is the way the extension of the national-security state, and easy recourse to political violence in the world's poorer, darker precincts, allowed Anglo-Saxon men like Bush to stem the decomposition and to sharpen their class and status consciousness." He voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He refused to cooperate with a special counsel. The Iran-Contra affair, in which the United States traded missiles for Americans hostages in Iran, and used the proceeds of those arms sales to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, did much to undermine the presidency of Ronald Reagan. He escalated the racist War on Drugs. In September 1989, in a televised address to the nation from the Oval Office, Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine, which he said had been “seized a few days ago in a park across the street from the White House … It could easily have been heroin or PCP.” Bush cynically used the bag as a prop to call for a $1.5 billion increase in spending on the drug war, declaiming: “We need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors.” The result? Millions of Americans were incarcerated, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted. He gave us Clarence Thomas. Need I say more?Canadian authorities said Friday that the US government believes a senior executive of a Chinese telecom giant lied about her ties to a Hong Kong company that tried to circumvent trade sanctions against Iran. The revelation came during a bail hearing for Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, who was arrested in the Vancouver airport Saturday at the behest of US officials who seek her extradition to New York. At the G20 summit we were told that Trump and President Xi Jinping of China were on their way to a trade agreement, and a 90-day truce was called. Then China's response was different from the US response. While Xi and Trump are at dinner, Meng Wanzhou is being arrested. What's going on here? There is some question about who ordered arrest?There's a discussion that the US is headed into a recession. The impetus from the tax cuts and spending is waning. US lawmakers have brought General Motors GM CEO Mary Barra to Capitol Hill for a series of private meetings this week as the company comes under fire after announcing up to 14,000 job cuts. Barra isn't publicly testifying this week. She's meeting behind closed doors with several lawmakers representing regions that will be hit hard by the cuts. What's really behind these discussions?GUESTS: Alex Rubenstein — Sputnik News analyst and journalist.Barbara Arnwine — President and founder of Transformative Justice Coalition, internationally renowned for contributions on critical justice issues including the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the 2006 reauthorization of provisions of the Voting Rights Act.Wes Bellamy — Charlottesville city councilor, former vice mayor of CharlottesvilleCaleb Maupin — Journalist and political analyst who focuses his coverage on US foreign policy and the global system of monopoly capitalism and imperialism.

On this episode of The Critical Hour with Dr. Wilmer Leon, the U.S. Agriculture Department announced today a $12 billion package of emergency aid for some of the victims of President Trump's escalating trade war. This is clear evidence that Trump failed to really think this one through and it's an additional tax on American citizens since it's tax payers dollars that are being used to fund it.As others have reported, a Missouri nail factory is laying off people because of tariffs on imported steel; Harley-Davidson plans to move some production to Europe in response to retaliatory tariffs; soybean farmers face a loss of income resulting from new Chinese import taxes and have come to Washington to lobby for relief. Are the trade war and the jingoistic saber-rattling rhetoric of the Trump administration tied together?Later in the show, all eyes are on Charlottesville, VA. It's been a year since hundreds of white nationalists and neo-Nazis, turned violent and left one counter-protester Charlottesville resident Heather Heyer dead after James Alex Fields Jr. who has ties to white supremacist groups drove into a crowd of counter-protesters and injuring 19. The organizer behind last year's deadly Charlottesville rally Jason Kessler has withdrawn his petition to hold a "Unite the Right" anniversary event next month after the city of Charlottesville denied his request to hold a rally on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12, according to local news outlet WCAV. With that year-long view, is Trump's drawing a moral equivalence between the neo-Nazis who planned the rally and the counter-protesters continuing to resonate within our politics? Dr. Gerald Horne - Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies. Wes Bellamy - Charlottesville City Councilor, Former Vice Mayor of Charlottesville.

On Saturday, after a 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., killing Heather Heyer, age 32, and injuring 19 others, President Donald Trump addressed the nation from his Bedminster, N.J. golf course. His statement that blame was shared by "many sides" was immediately called out for being insufficient by politicians of both parties, leading the President to call the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists "repugnant" in a revised statement on the issue on Monday. But the following day, Trump appeared to double down on his original comments that there was blame on both sides. On this week's "TrumpWatch," host Jesse Lent talks to Scott Marzano, a former U.S. Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq and participated in the counter-protest in Charlottesville on Saturday. Scott was standing in the same crowd of counter-protesters as Heather Heyer when she was killed. Beyond sharing his first-hand account of the tragic event, the ex-Marine's former offers his own impression of President Trump's response to the attack in his hometown.

On a topical and monumental edition of After Hours AM/The Criminal Code — with hosts Joel Sturgis, Eric Olsen, and secret weapon, forensic psychologist Dr. Clarissa Cole — we examine the tumultuous, tragic, and tectonic events of Charlottesville, VA this past weekend and the ongoing aftermath with well-known author and journalist Jackson Landers, a resident of Charlottesville and observer of events on the ground. Jackson joins Top of Hour 2; Hour 1 Clarissa leads us through the week’s other True Crime highlights. White nationalists gathered on Saturday for a “Unite the Right” march in the relatively progressive town of Charlottesville, VA, home of the University of Virginia. The rally was organized in opposition to a plan by local officials to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s top general, from Emancipation Park in Charlottesville. That plan prompted a similar protest in May, led by the white nationalist Richard B. Spencer, as well as a Ku Klux Klan rally in July. The tectonic forces behind the rally run much deeper than the removal of statues. Right-wing extremism, including white nationalism and white supremacy, is on the rise, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many feel this extremism and attendant violence have been exacerbated by attitudes and policies of President Trump. Around 1:45 p.m., a car plowed into a group of counterprotesters and another car. One person was killed: Heather Heyer, 32, a paralegal from Charlottesville who was “a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised and was often moved to tears by the world’s injustices.” The driver of the car was James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Maumee, Ohio, a city near Toledo, officials said. He faces an array of charges, including second-degree murder. Two state troopers also died on Saturday. Lt. H. Jay Cullen and Trooper Berke M. M. Bates were in a helicopter monitoring the

On Saturday, after a 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others, President Donald Trump addressed the nation from his Bedminster, N.J. golf course. His statement that blame was shared by "many sides" was immediately called out for being insufficient by politicians of both parties, leading the President to call the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists "repugnant" in a revised statement on the issue on Monday. But the following day, Trump appeared to double down on his original comments that there was blame on both sides. On this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent talks to Scott Marzano, a former U.S. Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq and participated in the counter-protest in Charlottesville on Saturday. Scott was standing in the same crowd of counter-protesters as Heather Heyer when she was killed. Beyond sharing his first-hand account of the tragic event, the ex-Marine's offers his own impression of President Trump's response to the attack.

On Saturday, after a 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others, President Donald Trump addressed the nation from his Bedminster, N.J. golf course. His statement that blame was shared by "many sides" was immediately called out for being insufficient by politicians of both parties, leading the President to call the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists "repugnant" in a revised statement on the issue on Monday. But the following day, Trump appeared to double down on his original comments that there was blame on both sides. On this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent talks to Scott Marzano, a former U.S. Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq and participated in the counter-protest in Charlottesville on Saturday. Scott was standing in the same crowd of counter-protesters as Heather Heyer when she was killed. Beyond sharing his first-hand account of the tragic event, the ex-Marine's offers his own impression of President Trump's response to the attack.

Charlottesville, Virginia Rally, James Alex Fields Jr., Racism in America, Slavery, Have You Ever Been Called A N*gger?, The NFL and the Colin Kaepernick controversy, The Forefathers of the USA and more.