Standard Mischief

As I said yesterday, the National Park Service granted a permit for assorted Klan and Nazi misfits to protest today at Antietam National Park.

USA Today:

?The National Park Service has issued a permit for a Klan demonstration June 10 on a farmstead at Antietam National Battlefield in western Maryland. The battle in 1862 remains the bloodiest day in U.S. history.
…
Antietam Battlefield superintendent John Howard says the right to free speech meant he was obligated to issue the permit. ?The First Amendment is very clear on that,? he said. ?The framers of the Constitution decided this for me in 1791. It applies to all, not just people we like.?

All well and good, because freedom is for everybody, not just you. But what happens if no one can attend?

Today I combined a much needed exercise hike with a visit to Antietam to see what all the fuss was about. I didn’t want to wade into the thick of the action, but I did bring my camera, and I wanted to take some pictures of both sides. But the NPS wouldn’t let me get close.

(Yup, there’s a protest way the heck over there. You can even see the helicopter in this photo. Click on the picture for higher-rez picture (384 KB), as a pop-up if you allow javascript)

I arrived about 1 pm and scouted around. The closest I was allowed to get was about 200 yards away. NPS had created a protest area for the Boneheads, and another for the counter-protesters, and a third area for the Fourth Estate to set up in. I wasn’t there for the whole thing, but I think the NPS bussed in each group separately. They had at least two shifts of riot police, and every half hour they seem to rotate a crew of them between the two groups. The Nazis had a megaphone, and depending on how hard the wind was blowing, you could actually hear a bit of what they were saying. I’m pretty sure that they brought up ?Immigration?, ?Crime Statistics by African-Americans?, ?The Second Amendment? and probably a bunch more. I couldn’t hear most of it. I think the counter-protesters had a drum.

There was a guy with a pair of binoculars there, and he said he saw the protesters had three people in sheets, and three with swastikas, and someone who looked like a lawyer. Later, he said four more guys (presumably late arrivals) hopped out of a van and joined the Brownshirts. His option was that there definitely were more counter-protesters. He said that they had a purple flag. They only rarely tried to drown out the other side.

There was an impressive dragnet. The press said the police presence was 200 strong, and I don’t doubt it. They had police everywhere, mounted police, police cars, trucks, a mobile RV police command center, mobile communication system, and they even had a chopper flying back and forth, over and over again for the first hour preceding the protest. They also had a cluster of cops in Sharpsburg, MD’s town center, and a police car at the edge of town on each major road.

(And we had these people making sure we don’t freely assemble ourselves any closer. (higher-rez 166 KB)

I know they were just trying to keep everyone safe, but was a 200 yard perimeter really necessary? What happens if there’s a protest and no one can hear you? Can we rely on the credentialed press to get the story straight?

I’ve been searching teh interwebs since I got home and although there are a few independent reports, 90% of everything is the same exact AP report. The WaPo:

About 30 people, some in white robes and others in the military-style clothing and swastika armbands of the National Socialist Movement of America, stood next to a farmhouse on the battlefield. Some delivered speeches attacking immigrants, blacks and other minority groups.

I’m not sure this is correct, It looked like there were far fewer. But then again, I had to squint to see.

About 200 federal, state and local officers watched to ensure peace and to act as a buffer between the Klan and about 30 counter-demonstrators.

The counter-protesters had a tarp shielding them, but from what we could tell, there seemed to be more of them present. Something like 25-50 people seems reasonable.

NBC affiliate Channel 10 WAVY-TV seems to have a slightly different AP feed:

A counter-demonstration organized by Confederate re-enactors drew about the same number of people. Around 200 police officers from various agencies were there to make sure things remained peaceful. The groups shouted insults at each other, but no violence broke out.

(Here, earlier, re-enactors were firing some cannons. (higher-rez 629 KB)

I don’t think the re-enactors had anything to do with the protest. They were there earlier firing cannons (far more entertaining, IMHO) but when the protest started, they were stuck with us in the peanut gallery. One of them let me take a brief look through their telescope.

And that’s about it. I’m sorry there’s not more to report, squinting across the cornfield got pretty boring after about an hour.

Related Tags: Ku Klux Klan, KKK, Klan, Antietam, National Socialist Movement, NSM, sacred ground, battlefield, nazi