The Score: Summer Hatred, Newish Currencies, Pete Wells, Stan Evans

This week on The Score – a veteran journalist chronicles Charlottesville’s “Summer of Hate.” A lawyer helps us understand Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. A candidate for Congress in Virginia’s Fourth District tells us why he’s running. All this and more on The Score.

We diverge from our usual format this week. Instead of four interviews about politics, policy, or culture, in this slower season of late August we just have three interviews for our radio listeners. Our podcast listeners (that’s you), however, get a web-only extra From the Archives. Stay tuned to the second half of the program to find out more.

Summer of Hate, #Charlottesville
First, the summer of 2017 in Charlottesville was unforgettable. A Ku Klux Klan rally on July 8 that ended in tear gas sprayed on counter-protesters was just the beginning. The summer climaxed on the weekend of August 11th and 12th when neo-Nazis, Confederate nostalgists, white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others gathered in Charlottesville’s downtown where they were met with equally loud and righteously outraged anti-racist, anti-fascist demonstrators. The rallies ended in violence and a Pulitzer-prize winning photograph of one of the Nazis mowing down a group of marchers, killing Heather Heyer, in the moment that Charlottesville became a hashtag.

The University of Virginia Press asked longtime Charlottesville journalist Hawes Spencer to write a book to chronicle the events of 2017.

The result is a new volume called Summer of Hate: Charlottesville USA, released on August 7, along with a companion volume (published August 10, also from the UVA Press) called Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity and edited by University faculty members Claudrena N. Harold and Louis P. Nelson. (Contributors include Asher D. Biemann, Gregory B. Fairchild, Risa Goluboff, Bonnie Gordon, Willis Jenkins, Leslie Kendrick, John Edwin Mason, Guian McKee, P. Preston Reynolds, Frederick Schauer, Elizabeth R. Varon, Rachel Wahl, and Lisa Woolfork.)

I turned the tables on Hawes, who has interviewed me on several occasions (for example) and – full disclaimer – I wrote a few articles for him when he was editor of The Hook, a weekly newspaper no longer in publication. This is the first time I have interviewed him.

Follow Hawes Spencer on Twitter at @HawesSpencer.

Libertarian in the Fourth
During this election year, The Score has had as guests a number of candidates for Congress from Virginia, including Senator Tim Kaine, his challengers, Matt Waters and Corey Stewart, as well as Fifth District Republican Denver Riggleman, Sixth District Republican Ben Cline, and Seventh District Libertarian candidate Joe Walton. We welcome all candidates to the program regardless of political party. If you are a campaign manager or candidate, send me a message and we’ll arrange a time and place for an interview.

This week’s episode features U.S. Navy veteran Pete Wells, the Libertarian Party’s nominee in Virginia’s Fourth Congressional District, currently represented by Democrat Donald McEachin, who is seeking re-election. In the first part of the interview, Wells recounts his experience as the first Virginia congressional candidate who successfully challenged a disqualification to be on the ballot by the State Board of Elections. He also reflects on how Congress can reassert its Article I authority under the Constitution and reclaim what it has ceded to the Executive Branch. Later on, he answers questions about some policy issues, including trade and immigration.

The Republican nominee in the Fourth District is Ryan McAdams. You can follow Pete Wells on Facebook or visit his campaign web site. Informal remarks he gave at the Libertarian Party of Virginia convention in March are on YouTube.

Bitcoin
Adella Toulon-Foerster is a partner at the Cogent Law Group in Washington, DC, where she specializes in the legal aspects of financial technology and, specifically, cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.

I met with Adella at her home in Alexandria, where her enthusiasm for Bitcoin and alternative currencies practically bubbled over during our conversation. I started by asking about one way Bitcoin ended up in recent news stories: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Russian hackers who paid for their cyberwarfare projects by mining Bitcoin.

You can follow Adella Toulon-Foerster on Twitter at @BitcoinKhaleesi.

From the Archives
Our “From the Archives” segment this week is a real treat. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2013, I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the pioneers of the modern conservative movement, journalist and author M. Stanton Evans. Stan is no longer with us, but his influence lives on (if in nothing else, in Evans’ Law of Political Perfidy: “When our friends get into power, they aren’t our friends anymore”).

At CPAC 2013, Stan spoke on a panel about “first principles” (see video, below) and promoted his most recent book, co-written with Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government. I began by asking Stan about the early years of the movement, when names like Goldwater and Reagan were the lodestones of conservatism. He demurred when I said he had been “present at the creation” (although he was one of the drafters of the Sharon Statement in 1960). The interview closes with questions about Stalin’s Secret Agents.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkwN864RfQc&w=560&h=315]

That covers the territory for The Score for the week of August 25, 2018. Be sure to tell your friends where to find us. Help us to keep the conversation going. The Score will be back next week with more news, interviews, and reviews.