Deborah Baker
Charlottesville: An American Story
Graywolf Press (Minneapolis), 2025
I’d like to report that this hefty book (480pp but feels more like 840) offers some new findings and insights about the events leading up to the Charlottesville ruckus of August 12, 2017. [1] Which it does. But alas, the author is easily distracted, chasing down so many rabbit-holes she loses control of her material. She spends an entire chapter talking about “racism” in Virginia, which somehow leads her to T.S. Eliot (a “Yankee” from St. Louis and London, who found Virginia still pristine in the 1930s); then Eliot’s comrade Ezra Pound, who boosted such negro poets as Langston Hughes, yet somehow had a thing about the Jews; and then finally Baker caroms off into talking about Eustace Mullins and the Federal Reserve. Yes, seriously! It’s all new to her!
I believe you should assimilate such material before you are 25…or never touch it at all. In her 60s, Baker is far beyond the age of discernment.
But that wasn’t the point I wanted to make. Deborah Baker’s research doesn’t match up with the received narrative she’s trying to push. Repeatedly she comes up with facts that tell us the mainstream narrative was all out of kilter. But instead of giving an honestly revisionist view, Baker tells us the facts, but then forgets them…and recites the official opinion.
To give a few examples. Two weeks before that fatal date, August 12, 2017, the Virginia State Police, Governor Terry McAuliffe, and Mayor Mike Signer were fully apprised that Charlottesville was going to be invaded by gangs of “Antifa” and “black bloc” rioters. This happened at a briefing near Richmond at the Virginia Fusion Center (the intelligence agency of the state police):
Descriptions of anti-fascist tactics predominated, including reports of leftist subversives bringing fentanyl and cans filled with cement, and Antifa stashing caches of bricks in the area around Emancipation Park.[2]
The foreseen danger, then, was from big mobs of Leftist rioters and protestors who were planning to descend on Charlottesville the morning of August 12. The intelligence officers were familiar with many of them, because they were largely the same individuals and groups who had shown up in Washington in January 2017 to disrupt President Trump’s first Inauguration. (#DisruptJ20 was their hashtag.) It was obvious enough what was going to happen.
Later on—once the August 12 shouting and violence were over—Gov. McAuliffe lied through his teeth about the briefing. He told public and press that the Fusion briefing had entirely focused on “armed neo-Nazis and white supremacists.” And by “armed neo-Nazis and white supremacists” he meant the speakers and audience arriving for an event called “Unite the Right.” Which was a confab scheduled for midday August 12, with the objective of protesting against the removal of the Robert E. Lee equestrian statue from Lee Park in downtown Charlottesville. It was a legal gathering. They had a permit and everything.
In other words, McAuliffe was saying that the rioters with Antifa, black bloc, BLM and whatever, were never considered a serious threat. The real danger came from the people who were assembling legally…the ones with a permit…the folks the Leftists hoped to attack.
But forget McAuliffe. Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer remembered the July 27 Fusion Center briefing very differently. He said the intelligence experts at Fusion Center talked only about violent Antifa. Antifa were going to throw bombs and rocks and worse. The way to manage them (the state police people told Signer, and later the Charlottesville police) was to keep the two groups far apart. You had to cordon off the “Unite the Right” people from the Antifa mobs who were going to attack them. There was no talk about “Unite the Right” people being violent.
Mike Signer had many signal qualities. Tall, handsome and personable, he was the product of Princeton and Berkeley (where he got a PhD in political science), and UVA Law School. But he comes off badly in this book—a strutting, weak-kneed popinjay. And he took a lot of shellacking in the mainstream press. He got blamed for August 12. For not doing something. Or not doing enough. But seriously, “Charlottesville” was scarcely his fault. You see, like many mid-sized cities, Charlottesville has a “city manager” type of government. Mayor Signer was just a figurehead, not an executive. A nice, presentable guy for cutting ribbons and giving Arbor Day speeches, but not much else.
Furthermore he tried too hard: to please everyone, including militant Leftists on the city council and among the town’s rainbow clergy. Signer opposed moving the Robert E. Lee statue from Lee Park (temporarily referred to as “Emancipation Park”). Yet at the same time he also tried to pander to the anti-Lee crowd, telling them he understood their feelings. Signer liked to give long, pompous, orations to city council members, and some of them considered him a windbag, Baker says. The city council really didn’t like him much.
Perhaps the most cringeworthy thing about Signer is that once, in full rhetorical flight, he claimed to be Jewish…only he wasn’t. It seems he had a Jewish stepfather, and now wanted to appropriate that identity. Author Baker says this all came as a big surprise to the local Jews.
But to get back to the story. Signer learned that a thousand or maybe 1500 Antifa types were getting ready to riot in his town, and he didn’t have the authority to evict them. What could he do? He was just the figurehead mayor. So what happened instead? The governor, the execrable and dishonest Terry McAuliffe, called it all off the morning of August 12, declaring an emergency. The local police told the groups they had to disperse, and so they did.
At least the “Unite the Right” people did. Meanwhile the Antifa rioters continued to carry on for a bit, throwing bottles of piss, and blocking motorists who were trying to escape.
One of those motorists was Alex Fields from Ohio, driving down Fourth Street in his black Dodge Challenger. An Antifa mob, with placards and pipes and bats, tried to stop him, whereupon he revved up and tried to blast his way through. And then somehow an obese 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, died, because she collided with the vehicle she was trying to block. She died of a blunt-force trauma, or a heart attack, or perhaps both.
Around the same time, a few miles out of town, two state cops crashed while riding their Bell helicopter. It appears they were buzzing motorists on the highway…and perhaps attempting a deep bank while 50 or 100 feet up. (Something you shouldn’t do at that altitude in a helicopter.)
Baker gives us no details on how the state cops died, in their helicopter joyride, and tells us next to nothing about the background of Alex Fields and Heather Heyer. But what could prevail upon someone to join in a violent demonstration on Fourth Street, waving signs and poles and halting traffic? I’m sure it seemed a great social occasion, a big party for Heather Heyer, who held part-time jobs as a waitress and law-firm file clerk, and probably didn’t get invited to many top-drawer affairs.
Alex Fields is a more mystifying creature. Unlike Heather, who was a local, Alex seemingly came out of nowhere. As in Nowhere, Ohio. Where he supposedly had a paraplegic mother and a father who died before Alex was born. (The press persistently referred to Alex as James Alex Fields, Jr., or even just James Fields: making him even more of a cipher than he was to begin with.[3])
A high school teacher has told reporters that Alex was a diagnosed schizophrenic and on daily medication. And apparently our mad Alex came to Charlottesville, drove to Charlottesville in his Challenger, all alone. Alex comes to an event where he knows no one. None of the Unite the Right participants know him. Fortuitously Alex is dressed in the white polo shirt and khaki trousers of the group calling itself Vanguard America. (Gosh, how did that happen?) The Vanguard America folks let him hold a shield and be photographed a few times with them. Although, again, nobody knows him.
When Alex is arrested and mad-swiftly sentenced for life imprisonment for an auto accident, nobody seems to raise the defense that he is diagnosed as mentally ill. And not garden-variety mentally ill, as with a mood disorder, but actually the sufferer of a biochemically based psychosis, schizophrenia.
What’s going on here? Why is Alex Fields (supposedly) in a Federal maximum-security prison in Missouri, rather than in a mental hospital or a prison for the criminally insane? The whole thing makes no sense. I personally doubt this “Alex Fields” person is in any prison, if he exists at all.
In a significant omission, author Baker makes no effort at all to look up and interview Fields. In theory that should be easy to do so. Besides, she might have got a nice Rolling Stone cover out of it. Bigger than Charlie Manson.
Similarly, she makes no effort to interview Jason Kessler (ostensible showrunner for the “Unite the Right” event) or Richard Spencer, or any of the other gadflies and podcasters who were due to speak at his August 12, 2017 confab. Baker gives us a lot of vague commentary from lesbian clergy and stoner activists in Charlottesville, but generally avoids the major figures.
One exception here is an individual who may have been the most central of all, although she’s generally written off as just another Charlottesville weirdo. That is Emily Gorcenski. According to author Baker’s telling, Emily was basically the hub, the linchpin, of the whole Antifa inundation of Charlottesville in August 2017.
I first heard of her through an Identity Evropa friend who on social media was challenging her to a throwdown once he got down to Virginia. I think he posted this note around August 10. The implication was that Emily was leader of the Charlottesville Lefty activists, and much more than that. Since at least May she had been haranguing all the Antifa kingpins to round up their troops and “Come on down!” (As Ed Reimer used to say in the Northeast Airlines commercals.)
And so they did. And the generous amount of ink that Deborah Baker gives Emily Gorcenski is well earned. At least, Emily’s the only interviewee Baker goes into any sort of depth with.
Officially a “data scientist,” who of late has mainly been working and living in Berlin (presumably because of her complicity in the 2017 excitement) Gorcenski has a life story that I found unbelievable on the face of it. Per Baker, she was born of a Polish-American family in the Connecticut River valley of northern Connecticut. She does not look a bit Polish; rather, pure South Chinese, if anything. Thus I assumed, when I first saw her on social media, that she was adopted. You know, like those Korean War Orphans we used to see around. Except Emily is clearly not Korean, and also about thirty years too young to have been a Korean War Orphan.
According to Emily’s story (as related by Baker) when she was twelve years old she was told by her father (her legal “father”; her birth parents were now divorced) that “I am not your real father.” No, the real father was some Oriental that Emily’s mother got it on with. And that’s why Emily did not look like her blond-haired, blue-eyed Balto-Slav brothers and sisters in the Gorcenski family. Emily apparently never questioned any of this before she was 12, and never tried to look up her real father.
The rest of her personal saga is too outré for a family publication such as this, but by August 11, 2017 she was in Charlottesville, strapping on a SIG Sauer 9mm into her waist holster. She tweeted this in photos. This was the night of the “tiki torch march,” an impromptu preliminary event the night before the Unite the Right gathering. 400 or 500 early arrivals—mostly young men, but not a few young women, all in polo shirts and khakis—were parading through town, around the University.
And Emily was armed for bear. She went out to Nameless Park in Charlottesville and joined fifteen or twenty other Lefties holding hands around the statue of Mister Thomas Jefferson. Now Emily livestreamed her experience, showing the tiki torchers parading into the park, circling the statue. It was magnificent choreography—like the Roman legions snaking down the hillside, before the final battle in Spartacus! And Emily rose to the occasion. She wept and screamed and cried into her smartphone as she livestreamed the story. “Where ARE you? Where are the REST of you? Only twenty of us! We are F***ed!”
Notes
[1] A recap, for the young at heart: There were a series of “Alt Right” and identitarian demonstrations in America in early 2017, mainly in New York, Washington, Boston, and Charlottesville. On Mother’s Day, May 2017, a small gathering in Charlottesville, led by Richard Spencer, protested the city council’s intention to move the Robert E. Lee statue out of Lee Park. Activist Jason Kessler proposed a grand, all-inclusive gathering of all Rightist groups in America, to descend upon Charlottesville on August the 12th, the day grouse shooting opens. It was so widely publicized that Leftist activists jumped on it and made it their own. The Rightist gathering itself, Unite the Right, never took place, although there was a torchlight procession the night before. Several deaths were attributed to the protests and riots.
[2] Lee Park, north of downtown, had temporarily been renamed Emancipation Park. The statue of General Lee and Traveller was later removed and melted down. The park is now given the uncontroversial label of Market Street Park. (East Market Street and 1st Street, near the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville.)
[3] At the online journal for which this was originally drafted, the editor mystifyingly changed all my “Alex Fields” mentions to “James Fields.” Some trouble with reading comprehension there. Meantime a couple of obvious typos were ignored.
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