The big news of the week is the conviction of Donald Trump for 34 felonies. The evening of May 31st, Trump posted to his social media account ”I AM THE POLITICAL PRISONER OF A FAILING NATION, BUT I WILL SOON BE FREE, NOVEMBER 5TH, AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

It’s obvious that Trump was the subject of a politically motivated show trial, and the fact that his prosecution is clearly a farce may have only increased his popular appeal. Trump’s fundraising website crashed almost immediately after the verdict against him was announced, and social media has since been filled with people declaring their renewed intention to vote for him. It’s possible he will be jailed just ahead of the Republican national convention, which is certainly not coincidental timing.

Trump is being paraded around in this manner as a humiliation ritual orchestrated by our nation’s rulers. This is unjust, but it is also unsurprising. Recall Trump’s taunt during a presidential debate of Hillary Clinton when she remarked it was a good thing he was not in charge of the country. He interrupted her to quip, ”because you’d be in jail!” [Trump’s ‘you’d be in jail’ debate jab at Clinton condemned, by Julie Bykowicz, AP, October 10, 2016]. The remark was wildly popular with his supporters, who consider Clinton to be an unindicted felon who should rightly be behind bars. His supporters were dismayed when he backed away from this stance later the same year. “I don’t want to hurt them, I don’t want to hurt them,” he said of the Clintons. “They’re, they’re good people. I don’t want to hurt them” [Donald Trump ”doesn’t wish to” pursue charges against Hillary Clinton, CBS, November 22, 2016].

His mercy has not been repaid in kind, and increasingly appears naive and foolish now that he is facing the apparatchiks of an unforgiving regime over which he once held power. As soon as they seized the reins of power, Democrats began treating Trump supporters—who had assembled at the nation’s Capitol on January 6th to protest what they believed was a stolen election—as terrorists. Over a thousand protesters have been charged with crimes so far and hundreds have been sentenced to prison, many of them for what they believed in good faith was the peaceful exercise of their First Amendment protected rights to freedom of speech and assembly.

Readers of VDARE.com will not have been surprised by any of these political persecutions. They are a continuation of the repudiation of the First Amendment that began in Charlottesville, Virginia during the ill-fated Unite the Right protest of 2017. (Rally permit holder and organizer Jason Kessler explores the importance of this event as a marker of this ominous change in his newly released book, Charlottesville and the Death of Free Speech.)

With Trump’s conviction eclipsing other news, most are unaware that the persecutions of peaceful demonstrators of Unite the Right are ongoing. This week, Jacob Joseph Dix will face trial for the felony charge of burning an object with the intent to intimidate for marching in the Charlottesville torchlit parade on August 11, 2017. Several other torch march arrestees have pled guilty and served time—some of them before it was publicly known that the judge, Claude Worrell, was personally present with his family at a nearby counterprotest that night, and that the prosecuting attorney Lawton Tufts had extensive relationships with Leftist counterprotest groups in Charlottesville. Worrell has now been recused from all torch march trials, and Tufts has been removed from some. There are other men still awaiting trial for the same charges later in the year, most notably attorney and former political candidate Augustus Invictus and Patriot Front leader Thomas Rousseau [Attorney says client who participated in 2017 torch-carrying mob looks too much like Nazi to get fair trial, by Hawes Spencer, Charlottesville Daily Progress, May 25, 2024].

Trump was correct when he predicted, during his controversial ”very fine people” remarks subsequent to Unite the Right, that destruction of statues would progress from those honoring Confederate heroes to those celebrating the American founding fathers. What he did not predict was that the political persecutions of demonstrators would also progress. His own Department of Justice sought prosecution of some Unite the Right attendees. As it turned out, the trend of charging political activists with crimes which began with the permitted Charlottesville rallygoers (who were forced to defend themselves against the unruly antifa that were allowed to run amok), to the January 6th ”Stop the Steal” Trump supporters, to himself.

In the early aftermath of Charlottesville, those who were paying close attention tried to sound the alarm that the rally had been sabotaged by Leftist enemies of free speech with connections to the highest levels of power. We warned that the oppression of the far Right, cheered by foolish and cowardly members of the GOP who wished to distance themselves from controversy, would if unchecked continue to creep towards the center until it had encroached on the rights ordinary conservative Americans. It is an injustice that Trump is being prosecuted in effect for the crime of opposing the ruling Leftist regime. It is also an injustice that Dix, Invictus, and Rousseau are being treated as criminals for their peaceful political activity. If Trump and other Republicans had stood strong for the First Amendment rights of Unite the Right demonstrators in 2017, Trump’s story might have played out quite differently.