Hmm. An actual equivalence.

They are both right.

Planners of Deadly Charlottesville Rally Are Tested in Court

In the hours after last summer’s white power rally in Charlottesville, Va., erupted into violence, the planners of the protest mounted a defense: 

While much of the country may have found their racist chants and Nazi iconography deplorable, they claimed that they had a First Amendment right to self-expression, and that none of the bloodshed was actually their fault.

Six months later, that narrative of blamelessness, which started on the airwaves and the internet, is now being tested in the courthouse. 

In a direct assault on the so-called alt-right movement, a sprawling lawsuit contends that the leaders of the Charlottesville gathering engaged in a conspiracy to foster racial hatred, and are legally responsible for the 30 injuries and the death of a woman, Heather Heyer, that occurred.

. . . .

The nine named plaintiffs — students, clergy members and local residents who say they were hurt in Charlottesville — have accused the event’s leaders of plotting to deprive them of their civil rights by encouraging their followers to arm themselves and partake in violence. 

(Heather Heyer’s family is not among the plaintiffs.)

The defendants — an array of neo-Nazis, white identitarians and old-line pro-Confederates — have ridiculed the charges as an act of “lawfare” maliciously intended to silence them and destroy them financially.

“The goal here is to break us and keep us from taking to the streets,” said Jeff Schoep, the leader of the National Socialist Movement. 

“That should concern all Americans, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum.”

As the case moves forward, it is likely to explore the limits of the First Amendment’s broad free-speech provisions and the principle that incitements to violence are not protected.

The plaintiffs are on safe legal ground claiming that incitement to violence is not protected.

What is new is the threat of an effort to have speech and expression that do no more than retail the central doctrines of the various tribes of the white racist right legally condemned as per se incitements to violence.

That would, far more openly and extensively than the vagaries of hate speech legislation, effectively ban the entire white racist right, while setting up legal assaults on such purveyors of black racial hatred of whites as The Nation of Islam, as well as others.

It would represent a stark abandonment and reversal of the extensive protection of speech and expression, not only of outright Nazis and various kinds of white racists but also of black racist organizations as well as other hate groups, afforded by a long line of Supreme Court rulings.

Just one of many points at which the new racial leftist PC and actual liberalism are diametrically opposed.

Of course, the court could find for the plaintiffs without going so far, if the plaintiffs can show defendants did not merely prepare for self defense in case of attacks by violent counter-demonstrators but both prepared and planned to start violence, to provoke and engage in violence against the counter-demonstrators, no matter how harmless the conduct of the latter may have been.