Earlier by Anne Wilson Smith: Democrat Communist Coup Intensifies: Soros Prosecutor Jim Hingeley Indicts Charlottesville Tiki Torch Demonstrators—Six Years (!) Later
A ridiculous six years after the legendary August 11, 2017 nighttime Tiki Torch march across Charlottesville’s University of Virginia campus, Florida attorney Augustus Sol Invictus became the seventh participant to be arrested, on June 26th 2023. Today, after being held in jail in Florida for weeks apparently out of sheer vindictiveness—he did not contest extradition to Virginia—he is due to appear in court in Charlottesville at a bond hearing.
Invictus is the most publicly recognizable person yet to be caught up in this witch hunt. He has twice campaigned to represent Florida in the US Senate, in 2016 as a Libertarian and 2018 as a Republican. He was scheduled to speak at Unite the Right and had intended to use his speech to announce his candidacy for the 2018 Senate race.
The torchlight march was the precursor to the Unite The Right rally scheduled for the following day. This legally-permitted rally—whose planners had been coordinating in good faith with local law enforcement officials for months—was suppressed by hordes of violent communist protesters and complicit Democrat officials.
Invictus is certainly a colorful character. He has been accused of domestic violence by several women, and was charged for domestic violence “of a high and aggravated nature” against his ex-wife in 2020. He was found not guilty in April 2022 by a SC jury after a brief deliberation[Invictus, the former Senate, president candidate from Florida, not guilty in SC trial , by Andrew Dys, Rock Hill Herald, April 20, 2022].
In fact, he has no criminal convictions at all. Though once known for his eyebrow-raising and unconventional pagan practices, Invictus revealed on his podcast last year that he is now a practicing Roman Catholic.
Other men arrested for torch-march related activities this year, all charged with the felony of burning an object with the intent to intimidate, include:
Shortly after the first torch march-related arrests were publicized in April, Invictus explained on his podcast (Crime & Punishment, Ep. 74: Charlottesville's Reign of Terror) that the political persecution of Charlottesville UTR participants was the prototype for what happened to participants the January 6th "Stop the Steal" rally in Washington DC:
It's supposed to be a great divide between a legal prosecution and a political prosecution... Conservatives are really coming to understand Charlottesville was the prototype for J6. You create this alternate reality of what actually happened at the event, and you dragnet prosecute everybody you can get your hands on... Charlottesville was the watershed moment, and J6 was just where everybody finally woke up.
The prosecutions are indeed based on an alternate reality. Body camera footage of a meeting of march organizers earlier in the day of the Tiki Torch march provides irrefutable proof of their intentions to obey the law. In fact, they proactively informed the police of their plans hours before the event took place.
This discussion was captured on video by Christopher Cantwell, who out of a well-advised abundance of caution wore a body camera for the entire day.
In the video, Cantwell asks Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler:
Is law enforcement already cooperating with us on this?... I’m going to tell you from my perspective, if we’re gonna do [the march] at all, I want the cops involved.... We need the cops on our side one hundred percent of the time with this.
Kessler replies:
Okay. I have a contact with the police department. We can speak to them before we do this.
Cantwell continues:
If they are, for whatever reason, unwilling or unable to escort us through this, I would suggest calling [the torch march] off.
FOIA records confirm that law enforcement was indeed aware of the demonstration before it took place, and that campus police reassured concerned UVA students via email of their intention to keep everyone safe [Emails Suggest UVA Police Downplayed White Supremacist Groups During Unite The Right Rally, shadowproof.com, September 9, 2017]. Officers were present before and during the march, but did not attempt to intervene until after protesters and counter-protesters clashed and participants from both groups were beginning to disperse.
The Tiki Torch marchers had every reason to believe they were exercising their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Torchlight marches are an American political tradition. The 2002 Virginia statute under which these men are now being prosecuted was passed to prevent cross-burnings. It had never occurred to anyone that it could apply to Tiki Torches, especially since none of the marchers exhibited what the statute called “a direct tendency to place another person in reasonable fear or apprehension of death or bodily injury.”
Not only did law enforcement implicitly sanction the march, but the Commonwealth Attorney at the time, Robert Tracci, concluded that there were no grounds for bringing charges against the marchers. However, he was unseated in 2019 by Soros-backed Jim Hingeley, who during his campaign had criticized Tracci's failure to prosecute the marchers.
The number of sealed indictments yet to be acted on is unknown. One may only speculate about the number which remain or the timing with which they will be announced.
That weekend, Unite the Right participants learned that the American freedoms they had taken for granted no longer exist. We now live in post-Constitutional America, and the torch march has retroactively been declared to be an illegal demonstration. Anyone involved with this event now has to wonder whether and when they might be ripped from their lives and extradited to Albemarle County to face felony charges.
And as Invictus explained on his podcast, that is the point.
If you were a Soviet Council, how would you do it? You'd do the same exact thing. You would arrest a test case. You would publicize it, make sure everybody knows about it, [say] 'Well, we're arresting several, actually, we already have several indictments. We don't want to tell you who they are or where they are. We want the entire country to know that the hammer could drop anywhere at any time, so watch yourselves.' ...
This is literal state-sponsored terror
And it is a communist coup.
Anne Wilson Smith (email her) is the author of Charlottesville Untold: Inside Unite the Right and Robert E. Lee: A History Book for Kids. She is also the creator and editor of Reckonin.com.
