Tag: New York Light Foot Militia

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In brief: The militia won’t come back, a free speech controversy and more

Militia members on August 12. Photo by Eze Amos

And stay out!

Six militia groups and their leaders named in a lawsuit aimed at preventing white supremacist and paramilitary organizations from showing their mugs around Charlottesville again have settled, agreeing they won’t engage in coordinated armed activity in any of the city’s future rallies or protests.

The latest round of defendants to bow out includes the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia, New York Light Foot Militia, III% People’s Militia of Maryland, and their commanding officers: Christian Yingling, George Curbelo and Gary Sigler.

Militia groups were confused with the National Guard on August 12 when both groups showed up strapped with assault rifles and wearing camouflage tactical gear, but the former have maintained that they independently attended the rally to serve as a buffer between the increasingly violent alt-right and counterprotest groups.

“It became so overwhelming that the only thing we could do was pick people up off the floor,” Curbelo told C-VILLE after the suit was filed last October.

The lawsuit, which names 25 groups and individuals, was filed by Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection last October on behalf of the city and several local businesses and neighborhood associations.

At this point, Jason Kessler, Elliott Kline—aka Eli Mosley—Matthew Heimbach, the Traditionalist Worker Party, Vanguard America and Redneck Revolt are the only defendants actively litigating the case, according to the law group. Others are in default or haven’t been served yet.

The League of the South, its leaders, Michael Tubbs and Spencer Borum, and the swastika-loving National Socialist Movement and its leader, Jeff Schoep, have also settled.

So with the literal neo-Nazis officially agreeing to stay away, it begs the question: Who will come to Kessler’s anniversary rally (for which the city has denied a permit) this summer?

Rotunda Bible reader silenced

UVA alum Bruce Kothmann decided to challenge the university’s new speech policies when he read from the Bible on the steps of the Rotunda in early May. University police told Kothmann that was not allowed because he needed permission a week in advance and, in any case, the Rotunda is not one of UVA’s designated free speech zones for unaffiliated people—including alums.

Sex reassignment pioneer

Dr. Milton Edgerton, a plastic surgeon who performed some of the first genital reconfigurations in the country in the 1960s at Johns Hopkins University and then in 1970 at the University of Virginia, died May 17 at age 96.

Tweet of the week

Big bucks

The city’s FY 2019 budget provides $225,000 for City Council’s own staff, including a researcher and spokesperson. A recent job listing on Indeed.com for the latter, officially called the “council outreach coordinator,” offers a starting pay between $21.36 and $31.25 per hour to “develop, implement and champion council community engagement initiatives,” among other tasks.

 ’Hoo at Windsor

UVA alum and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian attended the nuptials of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with his bride, Serena Williams, who’s a pal of the new Duchess of Sussex.

Ryan Kelly

Ryan’s redo

Pulitzer Prize-winning former Daily Progress photographer Ryan Kelly, who last captured Marcus Martin flying in the air August 12 after being struck by a car that plowed into a crowd on Fourth Street, took photos of Martin and Marissa Blair’s wedding for the New York Times. Pop soul musician Major sang at the event, and the purple theme was in honor of the couple’s friend, Heather Heyer.

Pole-sitter lawsuit

The Rutherford Institute has filed suit on behalf of Dr. Greg Gelburd to demand that one Mountain Valley Pipeline protester named Nutty, who’s perched on a 45-foot pole in the Jefferson National Forest, be allowed food, water and examination by the doctor, whose conscience and religious beliefs have led him to offer services to poor and disadvantaged people across the world.

A big nope

A federal appeals court has ruled that Sharon Love, the mother of Yeardley Love, will not have access to George Huguely’s family’s $6 million insurance policy in her wrongful death lawsuit against her daughter’s convicted killer. The Chartis Property Casualty Company policy has an exclusion for criminal activity.

Ew, gross

The exotic East Asian tick, aka  longhorned tick, was found on an orphaned calf in Albemarle last week, after initially being spotted on a sheep farm in New Jersey in 2017. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is still determining the significance. And in other gross news, the invasive emerald ash borer is on its way to Charlottesville and expected to kill all untreated ash trees within three years.

Quote of the Week

Nikuyah Walker. Photo by Eze Amos

“Most of the stuff I’ve been dealing with is complete nonsense.” —Mayor Nikuyah Walker on Facebook Live May 16

 

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Keeping out the militia: Law group says legal remedies exist to prevent another August 12

Georgetown Law School’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection says all states have the power to prevent militia-like activity. Photo by Eze Amos

New research shows that all 50 states can legally restrict private militia and paramilitary activity at events such as the summer’s deadly Unite the Right rally, according to the University of Georgetown Law School’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.

The legal organization, which filed a lawsuit on behalf of the city last October against 25 groups and individuals that allegedly engaged in unlawful militia-like activity on August 12, claims the independent militiamen and women, many with AR-15s slung over their shoulders, made tensions boil at the rally.

In its litigation, ICAP aims to prohibit the defendants from returning to Virginia to engage in the type of behavior seen over the summer, and during a February 8 press conference, senior litigator Mary McCord announced a set of new tools every state can use.

“Violent conduct is not protected by the First Amendment,” she said.

Aside from independent groups such as the Pennsylvania and New York light foot militias present at Unite the Right, McCord says several of the white supremacist groups also fall into that category because of their “militaristic battle behavior,” combat-type helmets and reliance on bats, batons, clubs, sticks and reinforced flag poles for protection.

But perhaps this could have been prevented due to already existing clauses, statutes and prohibitions, which could be used proactively to impose restrictions during an event’s permitting process to reduce the possibility of violence while protecting the right to free speech and peaceable assembly.

“All in all, what this research found is that all 50 states have one of these,” McCord said.

On October 28, the League of the South —a white nationalist group named in ICAP’s lawsuit—planned two White Lives Matter rallies in Shelbyville and Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Adam Tucker, an assistant city attorney for Murfreesboro, said the folks at ICAP immediately reached out with suggestions for restrictions the locality could impose to prohibit violent paramilitary activity like that seen in Charlottesville.

Tucker said city officials were able to write a prohibition of paramilitary activity into the rally’s permit, and on the day of the planned rallies, though members of the league showed up at their first planned rally in Shelbyville, they canceled the second one, calling it a “lawsuit trap” on Twitter.

Legal remedies

Paramilitary activity prohibitions: 25 states (including Virginia, where it’s a Class 5 felony) criminalize assem-
bling a group to train or practice with firearms or techniques that could hurt or kill someone, and intending to use those practices in a civil disorder.

False assumption statutes: 12 states (including Virginia) bar acting like a cop or the unauthorized wearing of military-like uniforms.

—University of Georgetown Law School’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection

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Militia men: American patriot groups say they don’t condone violence

George Curbelo (right), commanding officer of the New York Light Foot Militia, says his group wanted to come back to Charlottesville to check in with community members after August 12 and explain their presence. Photo by Eze Amos

On Saturday afternoon, Tanesha Hudson set up a lunch buffet in a conference room on the top floor of the Central Library on Market Street. A few dozen people spooned mac ’n’ cheese and other dishes onto disposable plates and sat at folding tables to eat.

Hudson planned the meeting, a sort of citizens committee, she says, for the Charlottesville community to discuss how to “start holding the city more accountable for the way things turned out” the weekend of August 12. But only a handful of community members were in attendance—they were outnumbered by members of independent militia and other Three Percent and American patriot movement groups, who drove in from out of town to attend the meeting.

Hudson began by talking about her gratitude for the militia’s presence on August 12, noting that at one point, when white supremacists were beating counterprotesters with flag poles, it was the militia, not the police, who stepped in to help. She said she was skeptical of the militia at first, cussed them out, even, but since that weekend, she’s been in touch with George Curbelo, commanding officer of the New York Light Foot Militia, and better understands his group’s intentions. When Curbelo heard about this meeting, Hudson says, he asked if he and other militia members could attend.

One community member stood to echo Hudson’s gratitude for protection on that day. A second community member voiced his skepticism over the militia groups’ defense of free speech and said he figured that they were here to defend Richard Spencer’s right to speak, too. A third community member asked the militia groups to understand why Charlottesville is frightened by them and their presence in town.

Curbelo’s New York Light Foot Militia is one of the private military groups named in a lawsuit filed on October 12 by the University of Georgetown law school’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection on behalf of the city, several downtown businesses and neighborhood associations. The lawsuit asserts, among other things, that the presence of private armies significantly heightens the possibility of violence; that the rally organizers solicited private militias to attend the rally, held group-wide planning calls and circulated an instructional document called General Orders.

Because of the lawsuit, Curbelo and others are not allowed to discuss the details of the pre-planning or their own experiences of the day. But on Saturday, they sought to explain what the militias and American patriot groups stand for.

In a prepared statement, Anthony Hitchcock of the Virginia Minutemen Militia said free speech stops at violence. “We worked to keep the peace between the right and the left. We did everything within the parameters of the law to keep it peaceful…our only regret is not better keeping the peace,” he said, adding that members of his group are not white supremacists and do not condone racism or white supremacy.

In a phone interview Monday, Curbelo explained that his group and others are part of the American patriot movement, which seeks to uphold citizens’ Constitutional rights, including the right to assemble, the right to free speech and the right to bear arms. Militia groups, Curbelo says, are a subcategory of that movement.

Curbelo says his group’s intention is to facilitate conversations within communities, and sometimes that means creating a physical buffer between two opposing groups until initial friction dissipates and people start talking. That’s what these militia groups were in Charlottesville to do on August 12, but “it became so overwhelming that the only thing we could do was pick people up off the floor,” Curbelo says.