Patterico's Pontifications

8/13/2017

Shocker: Charlottesville Driver Was Obsessed with Nazism

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 1:06 pm



The first hint of James Fields’s ideology has emerged, from a former teacher of his. Surprising precisely nobody, he turns out to have been a Nazi sympathizer:

The accused driver, James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Ohio, had espoused extremist ideals at least since high school, according to Derek Weimer, a history teacher.

Weimer said that he taught Fields during his junior and senior years at Randall K. Cooper High School in Kentucky. In a class called “America’s Modern Wars,” Weimer said that Fields wrote a deeply researched paper about the Nazi military during World War II.

“It was obvious that he had this fascination with Nazism and a big idolatry of Adolf Hitler,” Weimer said. “He had white supremacist views. He really believed in that stuff.”

Weimer said that Fields’s research project into the Nazi military was well written but appeared to be a “big lovefest for the German military and the Waffen-SS.”

This deals a blow to any incipient alt-right conspiracy theory that, oh, maybe his gas pedal got stuck. Yesterday perennial alt-right defender John Cardillo — in between issuing tweets blaming the wrong person, and talking about how “the right is finally fighting back” so you have to “strap in” because it’s “going to get bumpier” — filled his Twitter timeline with theories about how this might be a false flag operation. Guess that theory is done.

Time for Cardillo and his ilk to move to Plan B: proclaim the need for Fields to be tried for murder while spending all your time denouncing Antifa.

[Cross-posted at RedState and The Jury Talks Back.]

Sunday Afternoon Music

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 12:55 pm



Felix Mendelssohn has always gotten a bad rap. Early on, he was dismissed as a lightweight — an astonishing child prodigy, to be sure, but “Mozart lite” at best. In recent years, he has started to earn more respect — but not as much as he deserves, in my opinion. He has always been near the top of the list of my favorite composers, since I was child. We would go on long car trips when I was young (I didn’t fly on a plane until I returned home on break from college my freshman year) — and I mean long. As in “Fort Worth, Texas to Long Island” long. A set of Mendelssohn symphonies on cassette helped make these trips bearable.

Mendelssohn’s string quartets are often overlooked by the general public, but they are among my favorite works in all music — and I am not alone in that opinion. I spoke with one of the members of the Mandelring Quartet after a recent Los Angeles performance, and he ranked Mendelssohn’s quartets among his favorite in all the literature.

What you’re about to hear was written by an 18-year-old. If you were not already familiar with Mendelssohn’s astounding precocious musical ability at a young age, you would never guess that. Passionate and melodic, this stands as one of the great works of Western civilization.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]


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