Lost amidst all the mainstream media furor over what President Trump said about the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he said it, and who he condemned is any real analysis on their part about why that violence occurred in the first place. Specifically why were the state and local police ordered to stand down, allowing the white nationalists and Antifa groups to clash.
Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe claimed that the state police were ordered to stand down because of stashed weapons caches around Charlottesville and because militiamen on the scene were better armed than the police. An investigation (something the MSM has failed to do) by C.J. Ciaramella of Reason magazine reveals that not only were these flat out falsehoods but that the New York Times actually edited out some McAuliffe quotes on this after initially publishing them.
Contradicting statements by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Virginia State Police say they did not find caches of weapons stashed around Charlottesville in advance of last Saturday's deadly white nationalist rally.
In an interview Monday on the Pod Save the People podcast, hosted by Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, McAuliffe claimed the white nationalists who streamed into Charlottesville that weekend hid weapons throughout the town.
"They had battering rams and we had picked up different weapons that they had stashed around the city," McAuliffe told Mckesson.
McAuliffe's comments were picked up by other news outlets and spread through social media. But Corinne Geller, a spokesperson for the Virginia State Police, says that no such stashes were found.
"The governor was referring to the briefing provided him in advance of Saturday's rally and the extra security measures being taken by local and state police," Geller tells Reason. "As a safety precaution in advance of August 12, such searches were conducted in and around Emancipation and McIntire Parks. No weapons were located as a result of those searches."
Got that? So basically McAuliffe lied about weapons being stashed around Charlottesville as an excuse to order the state police to stand down...which led to the violence of the two sides clashing.
The Virginia State Police also disputed McAuliffe's claims that Virginia State Police were underequipped to deal with the heavily armed militia members at Saturday's rally.
"The governor was referencing the weapons and tactical gear the members of various groups attending the rally had on their persons," Geller says. "I can assure you that the Virginia State Police personnel were equipped with more-than-adequate specialized tactical and protective gear for the purpose of fulfilling their duties to serve and protect those in attendance of the August 12 event in Charlottesville."
McAuliffe claimed in an interview with The New York Times that law enforcement arrived to find a line of militia members who "had better equipment than our State Police had." In longer comments that were later edited out of the Times' story, McAuliffe said that up to 80 percent of the rally attendees were carrying semi-automatic weapons. "You saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army," he said.
Ah, yes. Our old friends at the New York Times which currently devotes huge amounts of effort microanalyzing what Trump said, when he said it, and how he said it about Charlottesville to the exclusion of investigating how the violence happened in that city in the first place. Let us now see at Twitter what was subsequently edited out of the August 13 Times story by Sheryl Gay Stolberg.
FYI, these striking quotes from McAuliffe disappeared in the NYT's write-thru without explanation. https://t.co/nM9Td2j8rf pic.twitter.com/n5XVNqF2ok
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) August 14, 2017
Gone in the rewritten version was any reference by McAuliffe to 80 percent of the people having semiautomatic weapons, his claim that the state police told him that the militia had better equipment, and bragging about "zero property damage."
Isn't it nice to know that MSM outlets such as the New York Times, while throwing up a wall of harsh Trump critiques about what he said and when and how, are at the same time providing news suppression protection for the one who utterly failed in his duty to prevent violence in Charlottesville.
