2,211 words
Deborah Baker
Charlottesville: An American Story
Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2025
I’d like to report that this hefty book (480pp but feels more like 840) offers some new findings and insights about the events leading up to the Charlottesville ruckus of August 12, 2017. [1] Which it does. But alas, the author is easily distracted, chasing down so many rabbit-holes she loses control of her material. She spends an entire chapter talking about “racism” in Virginia, which somehow leads her to T.S. Eliot (a “Yankee” from St. Louis and London, who found Virginia still pristine in the 1930s); then Eliot’s comrade Ezra Pound, who boosted such negro poets as Langston Hughes, yet somehow had a thing about the Jews; and then finally Baker caroms off into talking about Eustace Mullins and the Federal Reserve. Yes, seriously! It’s all new to her!
I believe you should assimilate such material before you are 25…or never touch it at all. In her 60s, Baker is far beyond the age of discernment.
But that wasn’t the point I wanted to make. Deborah Baker’s research doesn’t match up with the received narrative she’s trying to push. Repeatedly she comes up with facts that tell us the mainstream narrative was all out of kilter. But instead of giving an honestly revisionist view, Baker tells us the facts, but then forgets them…and recites the official opinion.
To give a few examples. Two weeks before that fatal date, August 12, 2017, the Virginia State Police, Governor Terry McAuliffe, and Mayor Mike Signer were fully apprised that Charlottesville was going to be invaded by gangs of “Antifa” and “black bloc” rioters. This happened at a briefing near Richmond at the Virginia Fusion Center (the intelligence agency of the state police):
Descriptions of anti-fascist tactics predominated, including reports of leftist subversives bringing fentanyl and cans filled with cement, and Antifa stashing caches of bricks in the area around Emancipation Park.[2]
The foreseen danger, then, was from big mobs of leftist rioters and protestors who were planning to descend on Charlottesville the morning of August 12. The intelligence officers were familiar with many of them, because they were largely the same individuals and groups who had shown up in Washington in January 2017 to disrupt President Trump’s first Inauguration. (#DisruptJ20 was their hashtag.) It was obvious enough what was going to happen.
Later on—once the August 12 shouting and violence were over—Gov. McAuliffe lied through his teeth about the briefing. He told public and press that the Fusion briefing had entirely focused on “armed neo-Nazis and white supremacists.” And by “armed neo-Nazis and white supremacists” he meant the speakers and audience arriving for an event called “Unite the Right.” Which was a confab scheduled for midday August 12, with the objective of protesting against the removal of the Robert E. Lee equestrian statue from Lee Park in downtown Charlottesville. It was a legal gathering. They had a permit and everything.
In other words, McAuliffe was saying that the rioters with Antifa, black bloc, BLM and whatever, were never considered a serious threat. The real danger came from the people who were assembling legally…the ones with a permit…the folks the leftists hoped to attack.
But forget McAuliffe. Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer remembered the July 27 Fusion Center briefing very differently. He said the intelligence experts at Fusion Center talked only about violent Antifa. Antifa were going to throw bombs and rocks and worse. The way to manage them (the state police people told Signer, and later the Charlottesville police) was to keep the two groups far apart. You had to cordon off the “Unite the Right” people from the Antifa mobs who were going to attack them. There was no talk about “Unite the Right” people being violent.
Mike Signer had many signal qualities. Tall, handsome and personable, he was the product of Princeton and Berkeley (where he got a PhD in political science), and UVA Law School. But he comes off badly in this book—a strutting, weak-kneed popinjay. And he took a lot of shellacking in the mainstream press. He got blamed for August 12. For not doing something. Or not doing enough. But seriously, “Charlottesville” was scarcely his fault. You see, like many mid-sized cities, Charlottesville has a “city manager” type of government. Mayor Signer was just a figurehead, not an executive. A nice, presentable guy for cutting ribbons and giving Arbor Day speeches, but not much else.
Furthermore he tried too hard: to please everyone, including militant leftists on the city council and among the town’s rainbow clergy. Signer opposed moving the Robert E. Lee statue from Lee Park (temporarily referred to as “Emancipation Park”). Yet at the same time he also tried to pander to the anti-Lee crowd, telling them he understood their feelings. Signer liked to give long, pompous, orations to city council members, and some of them considered him a windbag, Baker says. The city council really didn’t like him much.
Perhaps the most cringeworthy thing about Signer is that once, in full rhetorical flight, he claimed to be Jewish…only he wasn’t. It seems he had a Jewish stepfather, and now wanted to appropriate that identity. Author Baker says this all came as a big surprise to the local Jews.
But to get back to the story. Signer learned that a thousand or maybe 1500 Antifa types were getting ready to riot in his town, and he didn’t have the authority to evict them. What could he do? He was just the figurehead mayor. So what happened instead? The governor, the execrable and dishonest Terry McAuliffe, called it all off the morning of August 12, declaring an emergency. The local police told the groups they had to disperse, and so they did.
At least the “Unite the Right” people did. Meanwhile the Antifa rioters continued to carry on for a bit, throwing bottles of piss, and blocking motorists who were trying to escape.
One of those motorists was James Alex Fields from Ohio, driving down Fourth Street in his black Dodge Challenger. An Antifa mob, with placards and pipes and bats, tried to stop him, whereupon he revved up and tried to blast his way through. And then somehow an obese 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, died, because she collided with the vehicle she was trying to block. She died of a blunt-force trauma, or a heart attack, or perhaps both.
Around the same time, a few miles out of town, two state cops crashed while riding their Bell helicopter. It appears they were buzzing motorists on the highway…and perhaps attempting a deep bank while 50 or 100 feet up. (Something you shouldn’t do at that altitude in a helicopter.)
Baker gives us no details on how the state cops died, in their helicopter joyride, and tells us next to nothing about the background of James Fields and Heather Heyer. But what could prevail upon someone to join in a violent demonstration on Fourth Street, waving signs and poles and halting traffic? I’m sure it seemed a great social occasion, a big party for Heather Heyer, who held part-time jobs as a waitress and law-firm file clerk, and probably didn’t get invited to many top-drawer affairs.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
James Alex Fields is a more mystifying creature. Unlike Heather, who was a local, James seemingly came out of nowhere. As in Nowhere, Ohio, where he supposedly had a paraplegic mother and a father who died before James was born.
A high school teacher has told reporters that James was a diagnosed schizophrenic and on daily medication, and apparently our mad James came to Charlottesville, drove to Charlottesville in his Challenger, all alone.
James Fields comes to an event where he knows no one. None of the Unite the Right participants know him. Fortuitously, he is dressed in the white polo shirt and khaki trousers of the group calling itself Vanguard America. (Gosh, how did that happen?) The Vanguard America folks let him hold a shield and be photographed a few times with them. Although, again, nobody knows him.
When James Fields is arrested and swiftly sentenced for life imprisonment for an auto accident, nobody seems to raise the defense that he is diagnosed as mentally ill. And not garden-variety mentally ill, as with a mood disorder, but actually the sufferer of a biochemically based psychosis, schizophrenia.
In a significant omission, Deborah Baker makes no effort at all to look up and interview Fields. In theory that should be easy to do so. Besides, she might have got a nice Rolling Stone cover out of it. Bigger than Charlie Manson.
Similarly, she makes no effort to interview Jason Kessler (ostensible showrunner for the “Unite the Right” confab) or Richard Spencer, or any of the other gadflies and podcasters who were due to speak at his August 12, 2017 confab. Baker gives us a lot of vague commentary from lesbian clergy and stoner activists in Charlottesville, but generally avoids the major figures.
One exception here is an individual who may have been the most central of all, although she’s generally written off as just another Charlottesville weirdo. That is Emily Gorcenski. According to author Baker’s telling, Emily was basically the hub, the linchpin, of the whole Antifa inundation of Charlottesville in August 2017.
I first heard of her through an Identity Evropa friend who on social media was challenging her to a throwdown once he got to Virginia. I think he posted this note around August 10. The implication was that Emily was leader of the Charlottesville lefty activists, and much more than that. Since at least May she had been haranguing all the Antifa kingpins to round up their troops and “Come on down!” (As Ed Reimer used to say in the Northeast Airlines commercials.)
And so they did. And the generous amount of ink that Deborah Baker gives Emily Gorcenski is well earned. At least, Emily’s the only interviewee Baker goes into any sort of depth with.
Officially a “data scientist,” who of late has mainly been working and living in Berlin (presumably because of her complicity in the 2017 excitement) Gorcenski has a life story that I found unbelievable on the face of it. Per Baker, she was born of a Polish-American family in the Connecticut River valley of northern Connecticut. She does not look a bit Polish; rather, pure South Chinese, if anything. Thus I assumed, when I first saw her on social media, that she was adopted. You know, like those Korean War Orphans we used to see around. Except Emily is clearly not Korean, and also about thirty years too young to have been a Korean War Orphan.
According to Emily’s story (as related by Baker) when she was twelve years old she was told by her father (her legal “father”; her birth parents were now divorced) that “I am not your real father.” No, the real father was some Oriental that Emily’s mother got it on with. And that’s why Emily did not look like her blond-haired, blue-eyed Balto-Slav brothers and sisters in the Gorcenski family. Emily apparently never questioned any of this before she was 12, and never tried to look up her real father.
The rest of her personal saga is too outré for a family publication such as this, but by August 11, 2017, she was in Charlottesville, strapping on a SIG Sauer 9mm into her waist holster. She tweeted this in photos. This was the night of the “tiki torch march,” an impromptu preliminary event the night before the Unite the Right gathering. 400 or 500 early arrivals—mostly young men, and a few young women, all in polo shirts and khakis—were parading through town, around the University.
And Emily was armed for bear. She went out to Nameless Park in Charlottesville and joined fifteen or twenty other lefties holding hands around the statue of Mister Thomas Jefferson. Now Emily livestreamed her experience, showing the tiki torchers parading into the park, circling the statue. It was magnificent choreography—like the Roman legions snaking down the hillside, before the final battle in Spartacus! And Emily rose to the occasion. She wept and screamed and cried into her smartphone as she livestreamed the story. “Where ARE you? Where are the REST of you? Only twenty of us! We are f***ed!”
Notes
[1] A recap, for the young at heart: There were a series of “Alt Right” and identitarian demonstrations in America in early 2017, mainly in New York, Washington, Boston, and Charlottesville. On Mother’s Day, May 2017, a small gathering in Charlottesville, led by Richard Spencer, protested the city council’s intention to move the Robert E. Lee statue out of Lee Park. Activist Jason Kessler proposed a grand, all-inclusive gathering of all rightist groups in America, to descend upon Charlottesville on August the 12th, the day grouse shooting opens. It was so widely publicized that leftist activists jumped on it and made it their own. The rightist gathering itself, Unite the Right, never took place, although there was a torchlight procession the night before. Several deaths were attributed to the protests and riots.
[2] Lee Park, north of downtown, had temporarily been renamed Emancipation Park. The statue of General Lee and Traveller was later removed and melted down. The park is now given the uncontroversial label of Market Street Park. (East Market Street and 1st Street, near the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville.)
32 comments
I’ve noticed that many of these core American Antifa protestors are setting up camp in European cities. Does the CIA have some trick up their sleeves for the coming years?
My quick-take answer is that it’s not the CIA. They are just moving far away for their own protection, and there are all kinds of simple, superficial pretexts (“Orange Man Bad”) that sound plausible to sympathetic ears. Europe rather than Canada because if someone’s hunting you down, Vancouver BC is as easy to get to as Vancouver WA. And besides, it is feared that the great snowy Dominion will go down the road of Trumpy Fascism very soon. Finally: Canada extradites, which is something to consider if you’re a suspect in some black-bloc bombing.
In the case of Emily Gorcenski, I’m pretty sure she moved to Berlin post-Charlottesville because she’d spent a lot of time there, her German was getting better, and she was able to find work in her field. Ostensibly she moved away for her own safety, fearing reprisals. But she was also likely to be subpoenaed as witness in some trials, and might have found herself under indictment as well. On Bluesky she’s now talking about moving back.
Significantly she was in Berlin in May 2017 when she watched the first tiki-torch parade (“Charlottesville I”) online. That’s what fired her up to get back to Cville and beat the war drum for August. You might say “Charlottesville” was Born in Berlin.
Do you know what has happened to Jason Kessler, who also wrote a book about Charlottesville? He seems to have disappeared.
Yeah, Jason hasn’t been on in a while. Or Lord Shang or Jim Goad. Who the hell knows. Rest in power, Alex Linder.
Uncle Semantic: August 13, 2025 … Rest in power, Alex Linder.
—
Power? You’re kidding, right, Unc?
The thief Linder set the cause back years with his foul mouth and disposition. His top moderator at VNN in its heyday, a fine attorney, and I, resigned from his playpen the same day after Linder posted something particularly gross.
That attorney friend called me yesterday. Neither of us remembered the particular filth Linder had written that had us both to finally throw in the towel, but he did recall something Linder once wrote, describing his own site:
The Internet is a competition for attention. The bad part is it attracts bad eyeballs.
C-C should be careful to not attract bad eyeballs.
With respect to Lord Shang, he was chastised by Dr. Johnson for being a high-count commenter but not purchasing a Counter-Currents membership, and I haven’t seen another post from him since, which is unfortunate.
I know this was broached once before without resolution (and I have no idea why exactly) but I would be willing to buy Lord Shang an annual membership to C-C, one incorrigible Boomer to another.
Others made that offer to him long before me and it went nowhere ─ maybe the Lord was embarassed by being poor and just did not accept the offer. Well, most of us these days are poor. No judgement. Join the club. A lot of Boomers my age lost their jobs after Covid (unlike me) and are neither hirable now nor can they afford to retire.
🙂
Shannon: August 13, 2025 Do you know what has happened to Jason Kessler, who also wrote a book about Charlottesville?
—
Hopefully he got a life besides reliving C’ville eight years after the fact.
I was thinking that too. Usa 🇺🇸 professors are too craven to create such a network. Data scientist sounds like a B.S. discipline, created for revenue streams and likely doesn’t even exist in Europe.
the real mystery is how does one work in Europe? Americans try for years to live there. You just don’t waltz in to a more advanced society, much less an academic position.
“Usa professors”? Usable professors?
Excellent essay, by now even the laggards in the back of the class should know that the fix was in. But the brand name Charlottesville is far too important for them to let the truth get in the way of their story.
“Where ARE you? Where are the REST of you? Only twenty of us! We are f***ed!”
Can someone post the clip of that ?
I thought EG had wiped all her Cville videos and social media from the ‘net…but this miraculously remains, fresh as a daisy.
https://youtu.be/GPXhu1SPHTY?si=UKTclZ3BuX8W8BHb
Good article. She looks like a jew to me. 🙃
“She” is a tranny. That may be what was meant by “The rest of her personal saga is too outré for a family publication such as this…”
LOL! Good one! I love the part where she’s sweating. The Pinochet helicopter at the end was something else.
“The statue of General Lee and Traveller was later removed and melted down.”
And soon the ghouls will transform the material of Lee and his horse into, presumably, some Lovecraftian Black Icon
“The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (JSAAHC), a Black-led public research nonprofit in Charlottesville, Virginia, is looking for artists to transform the melted remains of the city’s Robert E. Lee statue into a new public work. Earlier this month, the organization opened the application for interested artists as part of the second phase of its Swords Into Plowshares initiative (March 3 2025).”
I’m thinking earrings. Lots of tiny Mjolnir and Labrys drop-earrings.
Very evocative, perhaps it can be a group tableau with the horrific figures huddled around a cannibal’s pot full of albino bones, with that little demented Oracle Boy from NYC presiding over the dark rite to chill the viewers’ blood.
Hmmm, I understand that bronze can be cast or milled into excellent armor-piercing bullets.
🙂
“She spends an entire chapter talking about “racism” in Virginia, which somehow leads her to T.S. Eliot (a “Yankee” from St. Louis and London, who found Virginia still pristine in the 1930s).”
In 1931 Eliot gave a speech in Virginia saying that for reasons of culture and religion a society should never have too many freethinking Jews. Wise words if there ever were any.
Deborah Baker has written biographies of several lesser poets, and Eliot is not unfamiliar territory. One reason why she splashes out so eagerly when she has a chance to talk about Tom and Ez and their disciples. The most worthwhile chapter in the book; she dovetails their influence into the Citizens’ Councils and “massive resistance” of the 1950s and 60s.
Baker tells us that the “presence of freethinking Jews” statement was an emendation to his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and it was from his time in Virginia.
P.J.: thanks for that information
Thousands of English grad students have clutched their pearls over this from Eliot:
And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
“ The most worthwhile chapter in the book; she dovetails their influence into the Citizens’ Councils and “massive resistance” of the 1950s and 60s.”
I don’t know if Pound had a direct influence on “massive resistance” but he sure was Jew wise as to the provenance of Negro Rights.
While locked up Pound took to writing anonymously in small circulation right wing journals. In one of them he wrote under the pseudonym M.V in the New Times that it is perfectly well known that the fuss behind de-segregation in the United States has been started by the Jews and what America needs is White race pride.
BTW when Pound got released from the Bughouse and returned to Italy the first thing he did after making landfall was give a proud Roman Salute
Look up John Kasper. It was a new name to me, but lightly touched on now and then in C-C, by Kerry Bolton and Jonathan Bowden (here).
Kasper was a hypercharged WN and pen-pal/fan of Pound’s when Ezra was at St. Elizabeth’s and Kasper was a student at Columbia. He migrated to DC himself and founded a bookstore there along with one of the first Citizens’ Councils. This was so early in the CC dawn that he actually named his outfit the Seaboard White Citizens’ Council. (The “White” part was generally dropped, being ideologically redundant.) And what became of Kasper? I shall soon find out.
Anyhow, that is nexus between Ezra Pound and massive resistance, which I stumbled across serendipitously because of Deborah Baker’s interest in 20th century poetry.
The driver of the Dodge Challenger was Alex Fields, not James Fields. James Fields was his late father, who died before Alex was born. The driver’s full name was indeed James Alex Fields, Jr., but he was never known as James, only Alex. Correction, please. We do not refer to Stephen Grover Cleveland as Steve Cleveland.
I knew Grover Cleveland. I served with Grover Cleveland. Grover Cleveland was a friend of mine. Ms. Metroland, James Fields is no Grover Cleveland.
Apparently part of “Emily” Gorcenski’s tawdry history is that she’s a man. I think “she” showed up in my city a few days after the Charlottesville unpleasantness to help destroy the Confederate statue in front of the courthouse. A nasty piece of work.
She may have been, after a fashion, but strikes me as innately ambiguous. In the book she tells author Baker she was recovering from sex-reassignment surgery when she saw that “Charlottesville I” torch march in May 2017. Life comes at you fast!
A man who cross-dresses or has their genitals removed is still a man, a seriously f#cked man, but still a man. What’s next? Are you going to pull the Marxist Rabbi trick of saying their is a difference between sex and gender? You can’t expect to post this kind of crap and be taken seriously by sane adults. Go ahead and post this with a response, I dare ya.
Hilarious. If somebody in bluejeans and a waist-holstered 9mm pistol constitutes “a man who cross-dresses,” then you have some very odd definitions.
Referring to an obviously disturbed male as “she” puts you in the category of leftist subversive liar. We can all see lefty tranny. Totally hilarious indeed.
Scott: August 14, 2025 … With respect to Lord Shang, he was chastised by Dr. Johnson for being a high-count commenter but not purchasing a Counter-Currents membership, and I haven’t seen another post from him since, which is unfortunate… I would be willing to buy Lord Shang an annual membership to C-C…
—
That’s generous of you, Scott. What’s unfortunate is that Lord, as the #3 C-C commenter, behind just Greg and Beau, doesn’t spring for the .30 pennies per day minimum for the privilege of posting, after his more than 2,400 comments here.
—
A lot of Boomers my age lost their jobs after Covid (unlike me) and are neither hirable now nor can they afford to retire.
—
I’m a poud Boomer, Scott — 1947 model — probably a little older than you I survived the Chinese virus, the ventilator, ICU and weeks of rehab, and didn’t lose my job as NA Chairman. Maybe I should have but no one was stupid enough to step up and take on the challenge.
It’s doubtful that I’m “hirable’ in the sense you mean the word. My resume would not hardly impress any eployers. I have plenty of work to do these days as it is, including payroll for our National Office staff, writing and mailing the monthly NA BULLETIN, and everything else that comes with running a 50-year-old corporation, 0ur publishing house and online bookstore, and leading a religion, Cosmotheism, as its Trustee — among other things.
I paid my dues working for others, learning how to design and build houses, for a few years while in my 20s, but have been mostly self-employed for more than 40 years. My only two enployers since early 1988 were Ben Klassen and William Pierce. No brag, just fact! I learned a lot from both of those great men about the needs of our race.
Yeah, I don’t understand his reasoning for not springing for a C-C membership. There could be much more to it than I am aware of, but in reading his comments, I thought that he was having a hard time on the margins in the People’s Republic of California. There could be lots of legitimate reasons for this, too. Getting hit by a junkie or a driverless car, for example. I count my blessings as I have seen both.
🙂
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.