Commentary: "Charlottesville" history gets rearranged for history

"To revisit the Unite the Right rally, as the former CNN producer Nora Neus does in her excellent oral history “24 Hours in Charlottesville,” is to realize that the patterns of right-wing violence that are now familiar were then still new. “Just hearing lots of reports of people bringing guns. I was like, Oh my God, is this something we’re going to experience today?” a news photographer named Zack Wajsgras told Neus. Part of the novelty was how confident the militias were, raising Confederate and Nazi banners in the center of one of America’s premier college towns. In some ways, they behaved, nine months after Trump’s election, as if they were in control. Tom Perriello, a former Democratic congressman from the region who was at the rally as a counter-protester, told Neus, “You could not tell who was National Guard and who was white supremacist. They were in full camo. They had earpieces in. They were moving in formations. They had open long guns. They were, in every meaningful way, ex…