Corvette goes airborne in dramatic drag race crash video
A drag racer walked away from a harrowing crash after the Corvette he was racing at World Wide Technology Raceway in Illinois went airborne.
The video, taken during a high-speed test run on May 31 for the VP Racing Fuels Heads-Up Shootout Series, shows driver Jason Hoard's car lift off the ground and crash into the track and tumble onto the embankment on the side of the raceway.
"Everything was fine absolutely until the second that it wasn't," Hoard said in a June 4 YouTube interview on "The Wes Buck Show." "I was fine, then it literally felt like the car was going backwards. And I (made) myself small in the seat and I immediately thought this is not good.'
Drag racing outlet Extreme 660 Drag Racing, which captured the video and posted it to Facebook, called it "the worst wreck we've filmed."
Hoard credited the car's safety gear for walking away with minor injuries following the crash. He noted in the interview that the impact left him unconscious.
"I'm super sore, and if you saw me moving around, I'd look like a 95-year-old dude," Hoard said.
He added that he had searched the internet for concussion symptoms. "I've been in a bit of a brain fog this week ... I have some floaters in my right eye. I went to the eye doctor, and she said there's some bruising," Hoard said.
NewsNation reported that track staff and the National Hot Rod Association have launched an investigation into the crash. Drag Illustrated reported that the crash took place during a test pass at non-NHRA sanctioned event, though it took place at an NHRA-sanctioned facility.
"Each WWT Raceway drag racing event features an ALS (Advance Life Support) Ambulance Unit staffed by paramedics specially trained in responding to racing crashes," a statement provided to the network reads. "The WWT Raceway Safety teams were rolling to the crash site while Jason was still rolling and were at the scene of the crash less than 30 seconds after it occurred."
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Elle
an hour ago
- Elle
The Case of the Poisoned Cheesecake
When a starry-eyed Olga Tsvyk immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in January 2014, she was 33 years old and ready for something different. She had a university degree, a job in Kyiv at a travel agency, and a tight-knit family she was reluctant to leave behind, but she wanted to try living in America. However, the reality of Tsvyk's life in the U.S. didn't exactly live up to her fantasy. She got a job as a babysitter in a bland town in upstate New York. The exurban milieu left her wanting, and she hated the cold, despite (or perhaps because of) growing up in Ukraine. Soon, a Russian-speaking friend she met on Facebook named Marina encouraged her to move to New York City. There was a lot more action, she said, a touch of glamour, and also a large community of Russian speakers, which was appealing to Tsvyk, who was struggling to master English. Before long, Tsvyk had rented a room in Marina's uncle's house in Forest Hills, Queens. She got a job doing eyelash extensions, a skill she had picked up back home. According to prosecutors, in March 2016, a 40-something recent Russian immigrant named Viktoria Nasyrova walked into her salon. Nasyrova told Tsvyk that she was a masseuse and that she lived with her boyfriend in Brooklyn. She was open and friendly, and they talked easily and amiably when she came in for appointments every few weeks. They shared cultural references, enjoyed tastes of home, like beef rib dumplings and sour cherry jam, and had both endured the same journey to the U.S.—wrestling with legal issues and piles of paperwork. They also looked remarkably like each other: Both women had long brown hair, full lips, manicured eyebrows, and a polished appearance, like an Instagram filter come to life. Nasyrova was curious about Tsvyk's immigration status, telling her that her own green card would be arriving any day. By the summer of 2016, Tsvyk had her own good news: She was about to receive her formal work authorization. Nasyrova was thrilled for her—for both of them—that they'd earned the right to stay and make a life in their new home. Courtesy of Olga Tsvyk Olga Tsvyk But, as prosecutors would later argue, Nasyrova wasn't who she said she was. Not only would she not be receiving a green card, she had been on the run in Russia for at least a year, and her U.S. visa was set to expire. By the summer of 2016, she was running out of road. She had one last scheme—and it involved an unsuspecting Tsvyk, the woman who so closely resembled her. According to prosecutors, Nasyrova decided to kill her doppelgänger and steal her life—or at least her immigration status. Her weapon of choice: a slice of cheesecake. On August 27, 2016, Tsvyk's landlord, Alik, called her to say that he had found a friend of hers sitting in the front yard of their building. (This reporting is based on a number of interviews conducted on the record and on background, as well as court reports and other filings.) The friend told him that her phone battery was dead. When Alik handed over his phone, Tsvyk recognized the voice immediately. It was Nasyrova. She told Tsvyk she had an eyelash emergency. Tsvyk rolled her eyes. She didn't do work out of her apartment, and Nasyrova had been at the salon just three days before. Plus, Tsvyk found Nasyrova increasingly pushy; she would drop by the salon to nag her to go partying with her and her boyfriend, almost like she wanted something from her. But Nasyrova pleaded with Tsvyk. She was heading to Mexico—how could she go on vacation with noticeable gaps in her lashes? Tsvyk remembers having a bad feeling in her gut, but wanting to help Nasyrova. She told her she could see her the next day. 'The last slice, Nasyrova insisted—pushing the package toward Tsvyk—was for her. She absolutely had to try it.' Nasyrova was more than two hours late, but when she arrived, she seemed eager to make amends, bringing cheesecake from what she described as a famous Brooklyn bakery. There were three pieces in a square plastic box meant to hold four. Nasyrova explained that the cheesecake was so good, she had eaten a slice on her way over. She asked Tsvyk to make her tea, and while she was preparing it, she ate two more pieces. The last slice, Nasyrova insisted—pushing the package toward Tsvyk—was for her. She absolutely had to try it. Within minutes of tasting the cheesecake, Tsvyk knew something was terribly wrong. She stumbled toward her bedroom and vomited. Nasyrova seemed unfazed, telling Tsvyk that she would clean it up as she went to fetch paper towels. It was the last thing Tsvyk remembers before she blacked out. The following afternoon, Alik found Tsvyk passed out on her bed dressed in racy lingerie. Alik's daughter Svetlana called the police and Marina, who rushed over to find the paramedics taking her friend's vitals. Her normally olive-toned skin was so pale that Marina thought she was dead. When she knelt by her bedside, she couldn't get Tsvyk to open her eyes. There were sounds coming out of her mouth, but no words. After she was loaded into an ambulance and taken to a hospital, Marina was praying for her friend when Nasyrova called. An unsuspecting Marina filled her in on the unfolding disaster. 'Oh my God,' Nasyrova said, sounding shocked. 'I cannot believe it!' When Tsvyk regained consciousness in the hospital, she told Marina about Nasyrova and the cheesecake. She didn't understand why she was found wearing lingerie; she had been wearing sweatpants when Nasyrova arrived. Had Nasyrova changed her clothes? Marina tried to call her, only to find she'd been blocked or Nasyrova's number was disconnected. When Tsvyk's sister, Iryna, heard about what happened, she hopped on a flight from Ukraine. She arrived on September 1, and found Tsvyk so lethargic—'like a vegetable,' Iryna testified—that she could barely move. Tsvyk needed assistance to get to the bathroom and to eat. She couldn't sleep. Courtesy of CBS News Police recovered this plastic container that had held the cheesecake at Tsvyk's apartment. While nursing her sister back to health, Iryna discovered a scatter of small white pills around her bed. She couldn't find Tsvyk's Ukrainian passport, U.S. paperwork, or her purse. As she searched, she realized Tsvyk was also missing a red bag, some clothes, a gold ring, and perfume, plus $3,000 in cash. She opened Tsvyk's wallet: There was just $17 left. It was an enormous loss for Tsvyk, who already felt like she had to hold her breath every month until she made the rent. She had barely recovered, and now she had to get out of bed and drag herself back to work. She was shaky and afraid; she didn't understand why Nasyrova had targeted her. Tsvyk knew something sinister had happened, and she reported what she could remember to the police. They recovered the plastic container that had held the cheesecake. When the tests came back from the lab, it was found to have traces of a sedative called phenazepam. While illegal in the U.S., phenazepam is prevalent and available with a prescription in Russia—and in high doses it can cause nausea, memory loss, loss of consciousness, and even death. Two days after she returned home from the hospital, Tsvyk's phone buzzed. It was Nasyrova, just calling to see what was up, like it was no big deal. 'Olga, I haven't been able to reach you, what happened?' Nasyrova said. Tsvyk figured she was testing her, pretending to care about her while trying to find out what she knew. Tsvyk was furious and bluntly accused Nasyrova of poisoning her and stealing from her, and trying to make it look like a suicide by dressing her up in fancy lingerie and scattering the pills by her bed as if she was some jilted lover. 'Fine,' said Nasyrova, suddenly turning cold. 'Then go to the police.' Tsvyk had already gone to the police, of course. She kept waiting nervously every day for Nasyrova to be arrested. About six months passed before the case took a turn, when a New York City private investigator named Herman Weisberg got a call from a client. She was a wealthy older woman, who often asked Weisberg to do jobs for other women she knew. Maybe the women were having trouble finalizing a divorce or getting shared custody—his client would pay the bill, like a fairy godmother. 'We called her 'the mitzvah lady,' ' Weisberg says. This time, the mitzvah lady introduced Weisberg to Nadezda Ford, a Russian woman who lived in Brooklyn. Ford said she was looking for a dangerous woman who had lived next door to her mother back in Russia. 'It was easy for her to steal. It was easy for her to kill.' A tearful Ford explained that her mother, Alla Alekseenko, had first disappeared and had later been found dead, her body charred beyond recognition. Her apartment had been stripped of cash and valuables, including gold, handbags, perfume, her passport, and even her toothbrush, according to Ford. Weisberg soon discovered that Russian authorities had identified Nasyrova as a person of interest in the Alekseenko investigation, but she had left Russia sometime in 2014 or 2015. Interpol even put out a 'Red Notice,' a worldwide alert, seeking her apprehension, in the summer of 2015. Nasyrova had a motive to assume Tsvyk's identity, prosecutors later argued, because her visa status was set to expire and she needed a plan to avoid capture by Russian authorities. Weisberg got to work, first scanning Nasyrova's social media. She might have been laying low in Brooklyn, but on Facebook, she was selling a life of luxury, wearing fur coats and swanning around casinos in Atlantic City. She was also highly active on Russian dating sites. Weisberg found an address where she appeared to be living in Sheepshead Bay, and put her under surveillance, getting his team to stake out her house at night and in the early morning. He called Homeland Security and Interpol, without much success, so Weisberg tapped some contacts at his local police precinct. They met early one March 2017 morning in front of Nasyrova's home. When the officers knocked on her door, Nasyrova appeared. 'It was very early in the morning, and she didn't look as confused or irate as I would be if somebody dragged me out at 6:30 in the morning and put me in handcuffs,' Weisberg says. In fact, to Weisberg, she seemed defiant, even cocky, walking to the squad car in jeans and a green parka with a strut in her step, like she was making her way down a catwalk. When Tsvyk later identified her in a police lineup, she remembers that Nasyrova was smiling. Gregory P. Mango / Polaris Nasyrova under arrest in Brooklyn on March 19, 2017. During the jury trial, prosecutors argued to the jury that Nasyrova had a pattern of predation and brought up another allegation of how Nasyrova cultivated closeness with an unsuspecting victim and then attacked, mostly for financial gain. In June 2016, prosecutors said, a New York dry cleaner named Ruben had met a woman named Anna on a Russian dating site. She was nice, he said, and extremely attentive. She invited him over to her apartment, telling him that she wanted to make him dinner. Ruben brought Anna flowers, wine, and chocolates; she prepared fish and salad for them to eat. Ruben had only a few bites before he passed out. He awoke three days later, with no memory of what happened to him, in NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital in Queens—the same hospital Tsvyk would be admitted to three months later. He was missing his watch, and he soon discovered fraudulent credit card activity. Ruben would later testify that 'Anna' was in fact Nasyrova. On April 19, 2023, on the eve of National Look-Alike Day, the jury handed down a verdict. Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz called Nasyrova a ruthless and calculating con artist who tried to 'murder her way to personal profit and gain.' In a victim impact statement read aloud to the court, a trembling Tsvyk recounted her ongoing fear that Nasyrova 'would come back and finish what she started.' 'It was [an] easy thing [for her] to gain the trust of another person, and then take everything from that person,' Tsvyk said. 'It was easy for her to steal. It was easy for her to kill.' Tamara Beckwith/NY Post/MEGA Viktoria Nasyrova photographed at New York City's Rikers Island Correctional Facility in April 2017 while she was awaiting trial. Nasyrova was convicted of attempted murder, attempted assault, assault, unlawful imprisonment, and petit larceny. She was sentenced to 21 years, followed by five years of post-release supervision. After her sentence was read, Nasyrova showed her displeasure by yelling 'Fuck you' at the judge. When Tsvyk and I meet almost two years later, on a perfect sunny day in December in West Palm Beach, Florida, she's wearing bright pink lipstick and an oat-colored cashmere T-shirt and sipping on a cappuccino in the shade of a palm tree. She was polite, if a bit wary, when I reached out to her. Since her ordeal, Tsvyk has created an entirely new life for herself, running her own day spa, Tsvyk and I chat for over an hour. She tells me it had taken her a long time to start feeling like herself again. In the years following Nasyrova's attack, Tsvyk navigated her way through the fog of being a victim, of testifying at a criminal trial, of having her face and personal details on TV—'the pictures of me in court were so bad,' she says. When Nasyrova was arrested in 2017, Tsvyk checked herself into a silent meditation retreat. She slept in an austere room and ate only vegetarian food; eye contact wasn't permitted. On day three, Tsvyk saw a woman who looked like Nasyrova, and it all came rushing back. But she pushed through, and by day five, she had regained her calm. 'The universe sent me that woman to get over what happened,' Tsvyk says. She has worked hard to control her thoughts and force Nasyrova out of her head. 'At first, I wanted her to die,' Tsvyk says, nonchalantly. 'Now I feel nothing bad for her at all.' Courtesy of Olga Tsvyk Olga Tsvyk That generosity might be made easier, at least in part, because of Nasyrova's spectacular decline. She's presently incarcerated at the Bedford Hills Correctional Center in Westchester County, New York, where she is reportedly making and selling 3D art to her fellow inmates—and refusing to take court-ordered anger management classes. She had also filed an appeal, arguing that the trial court should not have allowed prosecutors to mention Alekseenko's murder or Ruben's poisoning because she hadn't been charged or convicted of either of those crimes, and that they prejudiced her chances with the jury. The New York Appellate Division disagreed and denied Nasyrova's appeal last fall. She's also been subject to another, perhaps more cosmic form of justice. While awaiting trial, she was injured during her detention at New York City's notorious Rikers Island jail complex, and sued, winning almost $160,000. She entrusted that small fortune to a friend—giving her power of attorney, asking her to handle payments to her lawyer and make disbursements to her family back in Russia. But after paying some of Nasyrova's legal fees, the friend disappeared with around $55,000, according to documents related to the case. The Queens district attorney's office declined to comment on whether they intend to pursue prosecution. This story appears in the Summer 2025 issue of ELLE. More True Crime Sarah Treleaven is a writer and producer and the host of USG Audio's The Followers: Madness of Two podcast. She lives in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Unearthing the Deep Fascist Roots of the Unite the Right Rally
On August 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists carrying tiki torches mobbed the University of Virginia's campus, shouting racist and antisemitic slogans and violently attacking the students who stood up to them. The next day, the same hateful crowd rallied in a Charlottesville park that held a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The city of Charlottesville had recently engaged in a public debate over whether to get rid of the statue, and supposedly the white supremacists were there—summoned by a number of neo-Nazis, chief among them Richard Spencer, and a local racist troll named Jason Kessler—to defend it. Really, they had come to court attention and cause harm. They succeeded on both fronts. Their event, called Unite the Right, became national news when they swarmed the UVA campus, chanting, 'Jews will not replace us.' (This had what to do with Robert E. Lee?) It became a national tragedy when, on August 12, James Alex Fields Jr., who kept a framed photo of Hitler by his bed, rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring several and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. The biographer and essayist Deborah Baker's Charlottesville: An American Story is both an account of those two horrifying days and an intellectual history of the far right in the United States. It mixes investigative rigor—Baker must have listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of archived Charlottesville City Council meetings, as well as far-right podcasts and YouTube videos—with emotional intensity and wide-ranging cultural critique. Baker reaches from Virginia's slaveholding history to the poet Ezra Pound's deluded post–World War II fascism to the misogynistic trolls of Gamergate in her quest to understand Unite the Right. The result is not merely smart but shattering. It joins the ranks of some of the best American nonfiction in recent years—Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing; Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show—as testimony to events we'd be unwise to forget. Baker's approach to her material is distinct in two ways. One is that, like Schulman but unlike many authors of researched nonfiction, she's not a reporter, and shows no deference to the norm of representing both sides. She did not interview any of the white supremacists that came to—or came from—Charlottesville. Baker saw them as tricking 'conscientious journalists into following them down rabbit holes,' or taking advantage of those who 'couldn't imagine they believed what they said they believed. [The media] thought it was a game, not a calculated strategy to spread their message.' Nor does she show a journalist's inclination to suppress her judgment. Baker writes damningly about the intellectual cowardice and inconsistency that set the stage for the city of Charlottesville's and University of Virginia's mismanagement of Unite the Right: At both the march and the rally, police not only failed to defend the counterprotesters, who were left to protect themselves against heavily armed, malevolent throngs, but, in some instances, attacked them. The author knows some of that inconsistency personally, which is the other distinctive piece of her approach. She grew up partly in Albemarle County, Virginia, where Charlottesville sits. Her father, though he came from a family of New England abolitionists, was also raised there, and he lends the book a telling moment. In 1968, when Baker was in elementary school, he published a 'thin volume' called Strike the Tent: In the Steps of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. In its preface, he wrote that, although his account might seem 'a bit sentimental and slanted' toward its Confederate subjects, he wanted not to glorify or redeem them, but to comprehend why it is that, as he wrote, '[w]hat men may sincerely believe they are fighting for is often unrelated to the consequences of their doing so.' Any Confederate who thought he was defending 'individual liberty and freedom' was risking his life for its opposite. Baker isn't caught in this rhetorical (or maybe emotional) trap, but she's intimately acquainted with its distinct Virginian manifestation. All over the country, Americans tell themselves romantic stories about the Confederacy, narratives in which Southern troops were scrappy underdogs who didn't care about saving slavery. Of course, this narrative has its own moral bankruptcy: Not caring about slavery is differently, not less, rotten than championing it. But Virginia's white elite, squinting backward from Lee and Stonewall Jackson to George Washington, James Madison, and Charlottesville's own Thomas Jefferson, have their own set of 'fairy tales. That the South stood for something fine and brave. That Virginia was exceptional in the same way that America, above all other nations, was [and] Virginians were a breed apart from the regular run of Americans. Finally, to be a Virginian was to live in accordance with the most exacting code of chivalry, 'for here the ideals of the nation were born.'' Because Baker knows this vision of Virginia, she can—and does—write against it. She suggests that for white Charlottesvillians, a real reckoning with history would involve not only removing Confederate statues, which the city did in 2021, but confronting the toxic effects of Virginian exceptionalism: state, city, and university authorities' refusal to admit the presence of hate; white Charlottesvillians' unwillingness to listen to Black ones; an overriding inability to react to new information. Of course, the whole country suffers from these issues. We always have. One of Charlottesville's central arguments is that the nation's refusal to reckon with history is connected to its most violent, authoritarian elements. Donald Trump, of course, is radically anti-historical. During his first term, he created a commission for 'patriotic education' in reaction to The New York Times' 1619 Project, which described the centrality of slavery to America's founding, and this March, he issued an executive order banning 'anti-American ideology,' which seems to mean any discussion of race, from exhibits at the Smithsonian museums. It is as if he believes that, by erasing racism from the historical record, he can also erase its effect on our present, though the effect he and his supporters have in mind isn't structural inequality but what they call 'wokeness'; as if, by forbidding talk of racism, he can prevent protest of it, too. Charlottesville is full of this absurd way of thinking, and Baker makes no bones about its link to fascism. Fascist movements, from Benito Mussolini's to Richard Spencer's, claim they will turn back time to an illusory past in which the dominant social order went unquestioned. Trump wants to do the same. In 2020, a Charlottesville clergyman who counterprotested the rally told Baker, 'We're in the shit. America is Charlottesville now. Everywhere is Charlottesville.' In 2025, he's more right than ever. During the two days of Unite the Right, Charlottesville, Virginia, was the place where the nation's better ideals came to die, and one of the places its dark new ideology, the one now ripping civil society and the civil service to shreds, was starts with the statues. In 2015, a Charlottesville high schooler named Zyahna Bryant launched a petition to get the city's sculptures of Lee and Jackson taken down and the parks where they stood renamed. At 15, Bryant wasn't a stranger to activism: Baker, who has a novelist's instinct for detail, writes that, after Trayvon Martin's murder three years earlier, Bryant had organized a 'protest at the federal courthouse: a twelve-year-old girl corralling ten-year-olds with popsicle stains on their shirts.' In high school, she called the city's vice mayor, Wes Bellamy, and asked him to get on board with removing the statues. He did, and Charlottesville created a special commission to examine the issue, but conversation stagnated. Baker writes that, at community forums (which she listened to after the fact), the statues' white defenders 'believed that four generations in Virginia, or a Confederate ancestor who was by Lee's side at Appomattox, or simply their childhood memories should give special weight to their testimony.' Many of the city's longtime Black residents steered clear of the debate, recognizing that in the face of such willed obliviousness, 'Silence was the only power [they] had.' And the obliviousness was intense. One white Virginian wrote to the commission that, although she agreed that the story of slavery needed telling, the statues should remain in place because she appreciated their beauty alongside the parks' blooming trees: She imagined, Baker writes, that 'these two histories might peacefully coexist, one ugly and painful, the other framed by flowers.' But not all the statues' defenders prevaricated in this way. In fact, as the commission stalled, local white supremacists—whose presence, Baker notes, was widely known, though rarely acknowledged—came out of the woodwork, so that instead of parks without Confederate statues, Charlottesville now had ones full of Confederate flag-wavers 'protecting' the bronze generals. One of Charlottesville's most impressive qualities is Baker's subtle insistence on keeping her eye on guns. She links gun culture to video game culture, to whiteness, to the Civil War. She summons the writer Tony Horwitz's argument that just as 'Americans had once appeased and abetted the Slave Power, they were now appeasing and abetting the spread of guns.' Baker excoriates a dominant culture that accepts mass shootings and armed vigilantism as part of life, that tolerates a gun lobby that bullies and railroads anyone who considers 'the proliferations of guns unsettling' or sees 'freedoms curtailed by the shadow guns cast over our lives.' In Charlottesville, after the statue debate and, of course, on the weekend of Unite the Right, this shadow was overwhelming. Baker describes armed white supremacists telling injured, unarmed counterprotesters that 'this is what you get when you get in the street,' as if their weapons gave them the right to hurt anyone in their way. Of course, those white supremacists weren't only local. The statue debate got Spencer's attention, too. A University of Virginia graduate and professional hate-monger who coined the term 'alt-right,' he was, in 2017, as Baker writes, 'openly audition[ing] for the role of Trump's brain.' He was also adopting harassment techniques he'd learned from Gamergate, the concerted threatening, stalking, and doxing of the game designer Zoë Quinn in 2014. In writing about Spencer, Baker decodes an aspect of Unite the Right that initially bewildered her. Early in Charlottesville, she writes that after the virulent antisemitism of the torch march, she 'was hard pressed to see the connection between Charlottesville's Confederate statues and Hitler Youth, between Southern white supremacy and European fascism. Which histories—whose histories—were in play?... It felt as though American and European national creeds were being remixed and weaponized in ways I couldn't wrap my mind around.' She wasn't alone in her confusion: She writes that even a Charlottesville rabbi she spoke with struggled to see why neo-Confederates hated Jews. I can relate. I'm Jewish, and a branch of my family settled in Richmond, Virginia, not long before the Civil War. One of my ancestors was conscripted into the Confederate Army, a shameful bit of family history that is part of a greater legacy of Jewish complicity with slavery: Consider the Lehman brothers, who built their fortune on plantation cotton. In my estimation, the involvement of many Jews in one of America's great sins binds us to the nation; it's proof of Jews' Americanness. We're obligated to do what we can to remediate slavery's harms. Unite the Right didn't change my mind about that. But it did make me take seriously the alt-right's belief that Jews aren't American at all. Baker takes it seriously, too. In researching the history of fascism in the United States, she came to understand that 'Jews were the glue that held the ideology of white supremacy and white nationalism together.' She traces this idea to the 1930s, when Ezra Pound, who had moved to Europe, became a fascist. Hoping to ground Mussolini's and Hitler's ideas in U.S. history in order to better promote them at home, he turned to Virginia's sage, Thomas Jefferson. He argued that Jefferson's vision was, in fact, the same as Mussolini's, and, in the 1950s, acquired a young protégé, John Kasper, who he hoped could help spread these ideas and 'give fascism an all-American face.' Kasper did so, Baker writes, by going to Charlottesville in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and arguing that Jews had put Black people up to demanding integration. Some 50 years later, Spencer took the Confederate statue debate as an excuse to do precisely the same. Baker writes that fascists like Pound, Kasper, and Spencer, looking to Hitler, argue that the 'liberal elite driving the conversations in media, business, and culture, were either Jews or in the pay of Jews, and thus hostile to a political order in which Christian white men claimed ascendancy.' This conspiracy theory allows them to reject the idea that Black Americans might achieve something on their own: Really, the Jews are behind them. It also allows them to foment grievance. Baker describes the Nazi Andrew Anglin whipping up his followers' emotions by listing their humiliations—student debt, addiction, trauma and injuries from fighting in meaningless wars—and then, to 'relieve them of their shame, [directing] their attention to the root cause of their tribulations: Jews.' Immediately after, he led them into the streets of Charlottesville. There, the alt-right mob encountered no resistance from the University of Virginia's authorities—its president, Baker writes, assumed that because Spencer was an alum, he'd abide by the university's honor code—or from Charlottesville and Virginia police. Baker draws a direct line from the city's underwhelming response to the statue debate sparked by Zyahna Bryant to its failure to prepare properly for Unite the Right, although police intelligence analysts and anti-fascist activists had given warning. The city and state governments and police chiefs just didn't want to take seriously the threat that the alt-right posed. And the Unite the Right organizers applied for, and got, a permit for their march. In the city's eyes, this entitled them to do what they liked, even as their rally turned into a violent and then murderous riot. Meanwhile, the unarmed Charlottesvillians who opposed the white supremacists received no police protection. They were accused of unlawful assembly; cops watched blankly as armed men kicked, hit, and maced them. It seems that not one trooper or officer was present when Heather Heyer was killed. Charlottesville's counterprotesters and the anti-fascists from around the region who helped them are Charlottesville's heroes. One of Baker's central subjects is Emily Gorcenski, a local data scientist who went from monitoring fascist chatter on the internet to confronting Spencer and his cronies face-to-face, bearing a storm of physical violence and anti-trans abuse. Others are members of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, a group of Christian faith leaders who learned the techniques of nonviolent resistance in order to stand up to Unite the Right. She talks to a local arts administrator who turned into an activist after the statue debate, the founding members of Charlottesville's chapters of Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice, and citizen journalists who captured the riot in real time. Many of these people were both physically and morally wounded that weekend. Andy Stepanian, an activist who helped manage the counterprotesters' crisis communications, told Baker that, when he saw Heyer receiving chest compressions, it was as if his brain 'short-circuited. From that moment he lost the ability to live in the here and now. It has never returned.' All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish. Charlottesville is not a book of the here and now. It's too wide-ranging for that. In all its movement through time, through archives and forums and the intellectual history of America's ugliest movements, it seeks to locate 'the germ of the present in the past'—a mission of which Baker declares herself skeptical; maybe, she writes, it's 'just something writers tell themselves to exert control over events that are effectively beyond their control. But it was what I knew.' It's also a way of looking into the future. By linking Spencer to Pound, Baker demonstrates that American fascism is hardly newer than its Italian and German inspirations; by highlighting Pound's Jeffersonian pretensions, she reminds us of how deeply the crime of slavery affects not just the nation's founding philosophies but their later uses; and by tying the Jefferson-Pound-Spencer lineage to gamer culture, she reminds us how contemporary—how online—these problems are. Unite the Right happened through the internet. So did Trump's electoral victories. He's handed the reins of government, it seems, to alt-right activists who agitate on social media; he's letting Elon Musk, a tech billionaire who promotes far-right parties around the world and celebrated Trump's inauguration with a Nazi salute, dismantle the civil service. Charlottesville tells us how the country got here: by kowtowing to guns, by refusing to accept responsibility for racism close to home, by too many people ignoring what they don't want to see and not taking seriously what they don't want to hear. All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish, just as Charlottesville's white supremacists took the town's foot-dragging on removing the Lee statue as an opening to wave guns and Confederate flags in public parks. At the very end of the book, Baker challenges readers to attend closely not only to the hateful currents she investigates in chilling detail, but to the activists who resisted them in Charlottesville and continue to do so to this day. She is clear that these activists are responding to a deeply entrenched hate that preceded them and is more powerful than them—so powerful that its representatives are now in Congress and the White House. Yet these grassroots movements, she thinks, are our only hope. She writes that we must listen to them. 'We must regard them not as radicals … but as ordinary Americans standing up and fighting in a myriad of ways for what is right.' At this point, we've all got to do the same.
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Man 'attacked' as tensions flare with van-dwellers
A campaigner has been "attacked" as tensions continue to escalate with a van-dwelling community. During filming on Tuesday, a BBC camera was struck by a van-dweller as Tony Nelson, who founded a group calling for the vehicles to be removed, was interviewed. Mr Nelson had attempted to speak to a man living in a van at Durdham Down in Bristol, where around 107 vehicles are parked, believed to be one of the largest van-dwelling sites in the UK. The man accused Mr Nelson of spreading "hate and violence" against van-dwellers, and said the two groups were "well past talking to each other" before reportedly pushing him. More news stories for Bristol Watch the latest Points West Listen to the latest news for Bristol Faced with soaring rental prices, another van-dweller told BBC News he had no choice but to live in his vehicle and said they were not harming anyone. However, some residents say they are now too scared to go out at night and have complained about increased litter. Callum has been living in a van on the Downs for nine months. After a house share with friends ended, he said he did not have enough money to put down a deposit on a rental flat and was "lucky" to find the vehicle. But when residents in the area formed a group calling for van-dwellers to be removed from the area, Callum said it had "an emotional effect". "As much as I kind of see their side, it's a lot of weight on us. "People are tooting their horns, revving their engines. If this was your home, would you want someone to come and disturb your sleep and your life in that way? "It would be nice if they just left us alone, if we're not doing any direct harm to anyone up here, I don't see why we shouldn't be allowed to stay," he said. Living rent-free had allowed Callum to drop down his hours working in hospitality and retrain as a joiner, he said. And now he has a new job, he said he and his partner were looking for a flat. Callum is one of 107 vehicle dwellers who Bristol City Council estimates live on the Downs. Mr Nelson, who founded the Facebook group Protect the Downs, believes living in a van had become a "lifestyle choice". His group, which has nearly 2,000 members, has called for the council to use its powers to remove vans and those living in them. Mr Nelson said: "People really feel very strongly about the council's inaction, their permissiveness, their saying 'it's OK to come and trash our parks'. "People are fed up with that. I don't know if it's council incompetence or whatever." He wants the council to help those who need it, and move others on. Bristol City Council (BCC) said it was choosing not to move people on as this would simply result in "moving people from one part of the city to the other". "Every inch of this city is important and special to somebody", said councillor Barry Parsons, who chairs the Homes and Housing Delivery Committee. The council has previously shut down other encampments - once they were deemed to have had too great an impact on the area. BBC News was told the current impact on the Downs was assessed to be at a "medium" level, which meant it did not meet the threshold for intervention. Nevertheless, Mr Parsons said it was "unfair" to claim the council had done nothing, as it had developed a new policy that will be in place "by the end of the year". "I can understand why people are feeling anxious and frustrated. "We're trying to do something really new, that hasn't been tried before, here or anywhere else in the country", he said. There are proposals to provide kerbside "service sites", where people living in vans could dispose of waste and get access to water, as well as plans to open more "meanwhile sites", where people can live in their vans and be provided with basic services. The council currently has around 60 such pitches, with a new site due to open soon. But there is already a waiting list for spaces. Privately, several councillors raised concerns about the pace at which change seemed to be happening, acknowledging people needed to see improvements quickly. And up on the Downs, among people living in vans, and those living beside them, patience is wearing thin. Follow BBC Bristol on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630. Fear and loathing over van dwellers on Bristol's leafy streets Tensions rise at one of the UK's biggest van-dwelling sites Locals form group over Bristol Downs van dwellers Rise in number of van-dwellers concerns residents Bristol City Council
