BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Updated Tues., Aug. 22, 3:55 p.m.: Former East Village activist John Penley used to cover squatter evictions and clashes between anarchists and police in Alphabet City. Two weekends ago, he was in the middle of the fray in Charlottesville, Virginia, as hardcore alt-right members, neo-Nazis and the Klan clashed with anti-fascists over that city’s planned removal of a statue of Confederate hero General Robert E. Lee.
Penley, who now lives back in his native North Carolina, also photographed a Klan rally in Charlottesville for The Villager a month ago. At that time, he assured that last weekend’s “Unite the Right” rally would be far more incendiary and potentially violent.
Obviously, he was right, as on Sat., Aug. 12, an enraged alt-right member gunned his Dodge Challenger into members of the “anti-fa” crowd, injuring many and tragically killing Heather Heyer, 32.
Reached by phone the following Monday, Penley, said he was still recovering from injuries he got in the melee.
“I got run over by a herd of f—ing Nazis,” he said, “and I got a big cut on my knee. And I got teargassed and pepper-sprayed a bit. … I’m still in shock. It was kind of like going into a war zone.”
Penley blames the Charlottesville police for basically letting the situation spiral out of control.
“The cops stood down,” he said. “Dude, they just let it go. There were street battles for hours.
“They didn’t do anything until it was time for his rally to start,” he said, referring to Jason Kessler, the alt-right rally’s organizer. “Then they shut it down.”
Penley said that the alt-right group went into Emancipation Park — which was recently renamed from Lee Park — which is where the Lee statue is located and where they had been granted a permit for a rally. But then the white supremacists repeatedly forayed out of the park to skirmish with the anti-fa, while police did nothing about it.
It was during one of these charges by the racists that Penley got mowed down.
Basically, police felt things had gotten out of hand, at that point, and called off the event when Kessler was ready to start his rally around noon.
Governor Terry McAuliffe said there was concern over the heavily armed militia members and others among the alt-righters. In fact, he said, most of the alt-right group members were armed, which was behind the decision by police to hang back.
The night before, the alt-righters’ torch-lit march on the University of Virginia Campus was a sign of what was to come the next day, Penley said.
“The alt-right guys assaulted some kids at the college,” he said. “They threw tiki torches at ’em. They pepper-sprayed ’em. It was 200 against 20.”
Richard Spencer, the prominent alt-right leader, had led a demonstration on the campus in May, where they had rallied around a statue of Thomas Jefferson.
Student protesters didn’t want a repeat of that this time around.
“The students didn’t want them on their campus,” Penley said. “They were surrounding the statue. All they did was chant, ‘Black Lives Matter!’”
Both Spencer and Kessler are UVA alumni.
The torches’ symbolism was clear.
“It’s like a Klan thing — a Klan rally,” Penley said. “The Klan used to use torches. They were marching around town. They were denouncing Jews.”
The former East Village activist said that the violence on the Friday night by the alt-right faction only encouraged any anti-fa members who might have been itching for a fight to come out all riled up and ready for action the next day.
Penley said when James Fields subsequently rammed his car into the anti-racists it was after police had already shut down Kessler’s rally.
“That happened down by a mall,” he explained. “That was five minutes after we’d been there. We could have gotten hit. The Nazis were trying to go into a low-income black area, but were angry that they had been blocked by counterprotesters who were there. And Fields was angry about what happened at the park.
“They claimed that people had attacked his car. But you can see from the video, there’s no one near his car. He was just angry. … He just said, ‘F—, I’m gonna kill some people.’”
Penley stressed: “This was not conservatives. It was the most hardcore Nazi groups, Ku Klux Klan, alt-right people in the country.”
President Donald Trump commented the day after the deadly violence that there were some “very fine people” among the alt-right contingent. But Penley — like many horrified Americans and people all around the world — was having none of it.
“There were no good people among them,” he said, “that’s all I’ve got to say.”
Penley said he told some of the supremacists to their face: “ ‘My grandfather fought the Nazis’… . They wouldn’t say anything. They just stared at me like they wanted to kill me.”
Although a young counterprotester was killed, Penley said the alt-right were the ones who ultimately lost over the weekend, and badly — from public opinion to the skirmishes outside of the park.
“They really got beat there,” he said, “physically beat. … Honestly, they exposed what the alt-right is all about,” he added. “Everybody’s saying they’re conservative — they’re outright Nazis. The public’s opinion has been changed. And they got their asses kicked. And nobody likes a loser in a fight. I think anti-fa did the country a big favor.”
Following the Charlottesville tragedy, North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, two weeks ago declared he wants all Confederate monuments across his entire state removed. The news bowled over North Carolina native Penley.
“This is pretty much a declaration of war on the KKK, neo-Nazis, alt-right and Trump supporters in North Carolina,” Penley said. “The first shot has been fired, so to speak, by our governor, and I think this is something I never thought I would see here in my lifetime.
“The times they are a-changin’ and you don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing,” he said, quoting Dylan. “I hope Jesse Helms hears about this in hell.”
