Courtesy of HuffPo:Police perimeter around the white supremacist conference #AmRen is intense. We heckling them like hell. pic.twitter.com/mMYd8vave9— Lacy MacAuley (@lacymacauley) April 28, 2018
Police formed a tight perimeter around a Tennessee state-owned hotel Saturday, guarding a white nationalist conference inside the building from anti-racist protesters gathered outside.
American Renaissance, a racist Virginia-based organization listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, reserved the 125 rooms inside Montgomery Bell State Park Inn for the weekend conference. Attendees not staying at the hotel arrived there early Saturday morning. Nearly all of them were men. They wore suit and ties — mandatory dress for the event — and didn’t respond to reporters’ questions as police escorted them inside.
Anti-racist protesters arrived a short time later. State park rangers subjected each protester to a metal detector test before allowing them to enter a fenced-off area across from the hotel.
One protester, Beth Foster, grew upset when park rangers wouldn’t allow her to bring a purse inside, as bags were prohibited in the protest zone.
“This is absolutely absurd,” she told the officers. “Nazis” from out of state, she told them, were allowed to rent out an entire Tennessee taxpayer-owned hotel, and yet she wasn’t allowed to bring a tiny purse inside a section of her own state park. Eventually Foster — co-director of the Mercy Junction Justice and Peace Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee — left her purse and walked through the security checkpoint.
“It’s anti-racist activists that the state sees as the enemies,” she told reporters. “Not the Nazis or the white supremacists who are in our buildings, using our public restrooms, and eating in our public restaurant, plotting genocide.”
So to be clear the police perimeter was in place BEFORE any protesters even arrived?
So they just assumed they would be violent?
The protesters, many of whom I would assume were also residents of the state, were then not only forbidden to enter the hotel on state park land, but were corralled into a fenced off area like cattle.
And you know this is now a thing, with the Nazis and white supremacists demonstrating real fear about the protesters that show up at their rallies and gatherings, even though most of the violence, and the only death, is attributed to their side.
So much for being the "master race," right?
