title: Unite the Right rally

text: The "Los Angeles Times"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s editorial board wrote that "Trump's first response to Charlottesville was tepid and mealy mouthed. His second was too late." South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (one of three African Americans serving in the U.S. Senate, and the only Republican among the three), also said the second statement came too late. NAACP president Cornell William Brooks said Trump's second statement stuck to a "rhetorical minimum" of a condemnation and "gave the impression that the President was trying to have his hate cake and eat it too".


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Richard Spencer, neo-Nazi activist dismissed Trump's second statement as "hollow", and he also said that he believed that Trump had not denounced either the alt-right movement or white nationalism.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: On August 15, Trump appeared before news media at Trump Tower, New York City, to read prepared remarks on the U.S. infrastructure discussion and other economic issues. After reading the statement, Trump took questions from reporters who asked mostly about the Charlottesville events. Trump defended his August 12 statement and repeated his claim that there was "blame on both sides". He also defended White House advisor Steve Bannon, and accused the media of unfair treatment of the rally's participants. Trump said: "Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch", adding in a later response that he believed there were "very fine people on both sides" and "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally". Trump also said that the push to remove Confederate statues was "changing history" and "changing culture".


title: Unite the Right rally

text: TRUMP:  ... you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group ... that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: TRUMP:  George Washington was a slave owner. So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?


title: Unite the Right rally

text: TRUMP:  Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue? So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people—and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally—but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Trump criticized what he called the "very, very violent alt-left", and falsely stated that counter-demonstrators lacked a permit. A municipal spokeswoman said that the counter-protesters did have a permit for two other nearby parks and "counterprotesters did not need permits to protest that rally" in Lee Park.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Trump's remarks also indicated that he had watched the "tiki torch march" that moved through the University of Virginia to Robert E. Lee's statue on August 11, the night before the rally. He stated that there "were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. ... You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest, and very legally protestbecause I don't know if you know, they had a permit", falsely claiming that "[t]he other group didn't have a permit."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: In an interview published the next day, Bannon said the press conference was a "defining moment" and that Trump chose to jettison the "globalists" and align himself with "his people". He said he was "proud of how [Trump] stood up to the braying mob of reporters".


title: Unite the Right rally

text: More than 60 Democratic and Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the United States Senate condemned Trump's remarks. Among those were Senators Bernie Sanders, John McCain, Tim Scott, Susan Collins, Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Flake, Orrin Hatch, Heidi Heitkamp, Claire McCaskill, Joe Manchin, Dean Heller and Tammy Duckworth, and House members Robert C. "Bobby" Scott, Don Beyer, Barbara Comstock, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Will Hurd and Gerry Connolly, as well as Ohio Governor John Kasich and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, "The president's continued talk of blame 'on many sides' ignores the abhorrent evil of white supremacism ..." Speaker of the House Paul Ryan stated, "We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Former presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush stated that, "America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms. As we pray for Charlottesville, we are reminded of the fundamental truths recorded by that city's most prominent citizen in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. We know these truths to be everlasting because we have seen the decency and greatness of our country."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: On August 16, Representatives Jerrold Nadler of New York, Pramila Jayapal of Washington state and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey unveiled a resolution that the three House Democrats co-authored, which would censure Trump for his "inadequate response to the violence", his "failure to immediately and specifically name and condemn the white supremacist groups responsible for actions of domestic terrorism", and for employing chief strategist Steve Bannon and national security aide Sebastian Gorka despite their "ties to white supremacist movements".


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Criticism of the comments also extended to the corporate world; among others, 21st Century Fox CEO James Murdoch said in an email to friends that was obtained by "The Hollywood Reporter", "[W]hat we watched this last week in Charlottesville and the reaction to it by the president of the United States concern all of us as Americans and free people. These events remind us all why vigilance against hate and bigotry is an eternal obligationa necessary discipline for the preservation of our way of life and our ideals." Murdoch also pledged a $1 million donation to the Anti-Defamation League, urging his friends to also make contributions. (Murdoch's statement drew some criticism from media columnists, including "The Washington Post"s Jennifer Rubin and Erik Wemple, who have accused Fox News Channel for helping bring Trump to the political mainstream and its repeated defense of his administration as well as perpetuating a culture of exploiting female employees and using dog-whistle commentary on its opinion programs.)


title: Unite the Right rally

text: The fallout from the third statement led to renewed calls for Trump to resign or be removed from office through either impeachment or through invocation of Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. In an August 15 Twitter post, Democratic House Representative Jackie Speier of California suggested that the never-before-used section of the 25th Amendment (which allows the vice president and either a majority of the cabinet or another body such as Congress to declare that a president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office) be invoked to remove Trump. On August 22, in an interview with Matt Lauer on the "Today Show", Vice President Mike Pence passionately endorsed Trump, saying in part:


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee announced on August 17, that he would introduce articles of impeachment against Trump for his remarks in the press conference, stating that Trump had "failed the presidential test of moral leadership." Arnold Schwarzenegger made an online video criticizing Trump's statement and presented a speech condemning the racists and stating Trump should've said something like that.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: In an August 18 interview with ABC's "Good Morning America", Heather Heyer's mother, Susan Bro, stated that she has not "and now ... will not" meet with Trump after hearing about his statement. Bro said, "I'm not talking to the president now. I'm sorry, after what he said about my child. It's not that I saw somebody else's tweets about him. I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the protesters, like Ms. Heyer, with the KKK and the white supremacists."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: The fallout from this statement also led to renewed calls for Trump to be stripped of honors he won before his presidency. Before the "SummerSlam" event that weekend, protesters outside the Barclays Center called for Trump's removal from the WWE Hall of Fame. Additionally, a petition to revoke Trump of an honorary law degree from Lehigh University by a recent graduate went viral following his comments, gaining more than 25,000 signatures. Trump was previously stripped of an honorary degree from Scotland's Robert Gordon University in 2015. If he loses his degree from Lehigh, Trump will only have three honorary degrees remaining; two from Liberty University and one from Wagner College. A number of alumni of Liberty University announced their intentions to return their diplomas to the university in response to university president Jerry Falwell, Jr.'s continued support of Trump.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: In the days following Trump's August 15 statement, the magazines "The Economist", "The New Yorker", and "Der Spiegel" ran cover art depicting Trump wearing or interacting with a KKK hood.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Additional controversy resulted from a Facebook post by Missouri State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal in which she commented, "I hope Trump is assassinated!" in response to the president's comments. In apologizing for the remark, Chapple-Nadal said to "The Kansas City Star" that she posted the comment in frustration at the "trauma and despair" of Trump's statements about the Charlottesville rally. The post, which she deleted shortly after posting it but not before it was circulated online, led several state and national politicians, including U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill and House Representative Lacy Clay, to call for her resignation; State Rep. Joshua Peters also submitted a letter to State Senate President pro tempore Tom Dempsey (chairman of the Missouri Rules, Joint Rules, Resolutions and Ethics Committee) requesting that a special committee consider Chappelle-Nadal's "censure or removal" from office. Missouri State Sen. Gina Walsh (leader of the state's Senate Democratic Caucus) announced on August 22 that Chapple-Nadal had been removed from all committee assignments, commenting that the controversy had made her a "distraction" to senators.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Trump defended his previous statements at a Phoenix, Arizona rally on August 22, 2017. He did not mention that he had said in his first statement that "many sides" were responsible for the violence at the rally and accused people of "trying to take away our culture" and "trying to take away our history" in reference to the removal of the Confederate statues. Following criticisms from former vice president Joe Biden in a video announcing that he was entering the 2020 presidential race, Trump was asked by journalists in April 2019 to clarify his remark that there were "very fine people" on both sides of the protests at the rally. He responded that he had "answered that question, and if you look at what I said, you will see that question was answered perfectly" and that he "was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Kenneth Frazier, the CEO of Merck, resigned from the President's American Manufacturing Council on August 14, in reaction to the President's response to the rally. Trump quickly responded by attacking Frazier on Twitter. Frazier received widespread support from major figures in politics, media and business, and commentator Keith Boykin said that "It took Trump 54 minutes to condemn ... Frazier" but "two days of issuing equivocal statements" before denouncing the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville. Under Armour founder and CEO Kevin Plank and Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich also resigned from the council that same day, followed by the resignations of AFL–CIO president Richard Trumka, economist and former AFL–CIO deputy chief of staff Thea Lee, and Alliance for American Manufacturing president Scott Paul on August 15. The following morning, two more CEOsDenise Morrison of Campbell Soup and Inge Thulin of 3Mannounced that they would resign from American Manufacturing Council. Wal-Mart CEO Doug McMillon also directly criticized Trump's leadership, saying Trump "missed a critical opportunity to help bring our country together".


title: Unite the Right rally

text: On August 16, after the members of the advisory councils moved to disband, Trump dissolved both councils. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Anat R. Admati said that Trump's equivocations on white nationalist groups had "put them in a very difficult position" and caused critical damage to the president's relationship with corporate leaders.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Sixteen of the 17 members of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities resigned on August 18, in protest of Trump's response to the rally. The resigning members stated in a letter to the President, "Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville." Representatives for the sole remaining member, film director George C. Wolfe, stated that he, too, would be resigning and would add his name to the letter. The White House responded by saying a decision had previously been made not to renew the committee after it expired later in 2017.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: In late August, eight of the 28 members of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council resigned, stating in a joint letter that Trump "threatened the security of the homeland". The letter cited Trump's response to the Charlottesville rally as one of the reasons for leaving.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Several conservative commentators argued that Trump was being unjustly criticized by the media and left-wing political figures for him blaming both sides. Some critics argued that members of the media were excusing the violence from activists associated with antifa, a loosely affiliated group of far-left protesters. Jonah Goldberg wrote that the presence of the alt-right did not excuse Antifa from its policies that "oppose free speech, celebrate violence, despise dissent and have little use for anything else in the American political tradition". Journalists Paul Waldman and Peter Beinart criticized this argument as an ineffective tactic to defend Trump and it also stated that none of the violence from the counter-protesters justified any moral equivalency between the two sides at the rally. Beinart wrote that unlike the alt-right, antifa are not practitioners of an ideology that advocates the ethnic cleansing of other racial and religious groups nor do they "celebrate regimes that committed genocide and enforced slavery", and antifa promotes egalitarianism unlike the alt-right.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Ray Arsenault of the "Tampa Bay Times" wrote that although there were some violent members among their ranks, the counter-protesters were mostly made up of "peaceful activists committed to nonviolence", including several clergymen and Black Lives Matter activists. Linda Qiu of "The New York Times" mentioned that although both sides were violent that day, only one side—the alt-right—was responsible for a deadly act of domestic terrorism. Jonathan Tobin of "The Times of Israel" mentioned that the explicit presence of Nazi and Ku Klux Klan imagery from the white supremacists and Fields' attack "render irrelevant" antifa presence at the rally. Beinart and Qiu also both wrote that right-wing terrorism was far more common than left-wing terrorism.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Public opinion polls showed that reactions to Trump's response were overwhelmingly negative, receiving near universal disapproval from Democrats and only modest support from Republicans. A "Washington Post"/ABC News national poll of American adults taken in the aftermath of the rally showed that 56% disapproved of Trump's response to the violence in Charlottesville, while only 28% approved. The same survey showed that 83% of Americans said that holding neo-Nazi or white supremacist views is unacceptable, while 9% said holding such views was acceptable.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: A Marist Poll of American adults showed that 52% believed that Trump's response to the violence in Charlottesville was "not strong enough". The same poll showed that 4% of Americans said they agreed with the beliefs of white nationalists, with 73% saying they disagreed, 7% having no opinion, and 15% unsure. The poll also showed that 67% believed that the fatal crash should be "investigated as an act of domestic terrorism", while 21% said it should not, and 12% were unsure.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: A CBS News poll of American adults indicated that 55% of respondents disapproved of Trump's response, while 33% approved. A roughly similar split indicated that respondents found Trump's description of events to be inaccurate.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: An "Economist"/YouGov poll of Americans showed that 42% of respondents disapproved of Trump's handling of "the situation in Charlottesville", while 27% approved and 31% had no opinion. When asked "which group ... is more likely to use violence"; 32% of respondents said white nationalists, 10% said anti-racism protesters, and 45% said "both equally likely", while 14% were unsure; Democrats were more likely to attribute violence to white nationalists, while Republicans were most likely to blame both sides equally.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: A Siena College poll showed that 50% of New York residents gave Trump an "F" for his response to the violence.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: The day after the rally, Virginia Governor McAuliffe said at a press conference that he had a message for "all the white supremacists and the Nazis who came into Charlottesville today. Our message is plain and simple. Go home ... You are not wanted in this great commonwealth. Shame on you." Signer said he was disgusted that white supremacists came to his town and he faulted Trump for inflaming racial tensions during his 2016 campaign.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed called for city flags to be flown at half-staff, and indicated he favors renaming Confederate Avenue.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the violence "horrifying" and "evil" and said: "It is racist, far-right violence and clear, forceful action must be taken against it, regardless of where in the world it happens." German Justice Minister Heiko Maas similarly condemned the violence, antisemitism, and racism of the neo-Nazis at the rally.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: The Republican National Committee issued a statement saying it was "unified in revulsion at the abhorrent white supremacists demonstration in Charlottesville ... We urge swift and certain justice be meted out to domestic terrorists and groups aiding and abetting through the propagation of hateful ideology."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Former presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush condemned the rally in a joint statement, saying that "America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms".


title: Unite the Right rally

text: On April 25, 2019, former vice president Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign with a video condemning the events of Charlottesville and Trump's response to it, arguing that "with those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it, and at that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: The General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated, "Terror and violence against peaceful people seeking justice in Charlottesville must be condemned by all ... We are proud of moral leadership by clergy and lay people standing against this promotion of racism and white supremacy."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Orthodox Church in America, all of which are members of the World Council of Churches, each individually condemned the Unite the Right rally and the racist ideology behind it, as did the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Catholic Church.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: The Rabbinical Council of America, Rabbinical Assembly and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, and Union for Reform Judaismrepresenting American Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jews, respectivelyall strongly condemned the white supremacist and neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. Alan Zimmerman, president of Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, recalled the day's events in a blog post: "The fact that a calamity did not befall the Jewish community of Charlottesville on Saturday was not thanks to our politicians, our police, or even our own efforts, but to the grace of God. ... And yet, in the midst of all that, other moments stand out for me, as well. ... At least a dozen complete strangers stopped by the synagogue Saturday to ask if we wanted them to stand with us."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: University of Virginia Center for Politics director Larry J. Sabato, who witnessed the torchlit rally on August 11, said that the weekend was among the university's darkest days and that he hoped that "people will put it into context and understand that we had no control over the individuals organizing it, nor the people who showed up. ... What I saw was pure evil."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: According to Princeton University historian Kevin M. Kruse, there is a historical "false equivalency" precedent to blaming "both sides" in disputes over race relations. Kruse notes that segregationist politicians often equated white supremacists with the civil rights movement, condemning both the KKK and the NAACP. Various historians also questioned Trump's suggestion that the individuals calling for the removal of Confederate monuments would next demand the removal of figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed and others noted that Washington and Jefferson were imperfect men who are notable for creating the United States, whereas the sole historical significance of Confederate figures such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis is that they went to war against the United States to defend "the right of people to own other people."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Other historians noted that some wanted the Confederate monuments moved to museums where the monuments could be appropriately contextualized. Douglas A. Blackmon, senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs and author of a book on slavery and its aftermath in the U.S. told "The Washington Post": "Trump either does not understand the history of the Confederacy or he's sympathetic to white nationalist views. ... [T]hese statues are offensive to millions of citizens that he governs. ... When you reach a point that there are hate groups that engage in terrorist attacks, that these statues are being appropriated and used in [that] way ... simply take [them] down."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: A week after Charlottesville, the Medieval Academy and 28 other scholarly groups released a statement condemning the "fantasy of a pure, white Europe that bears no relationship to reality."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: The leaders of several branches of the United States Armed Forces took to Twitter to denounce the march. Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley, Air Force Chief of Staff General Dave Goldfein, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, Commandant of the Marine Corps General Robert Neller, Chief of the National Guard Bureau General Joseph Lengyel all tweeted statements condemning racial intolerance as anathema to what their institutions stand for. The 82nd Airborne Division took the opportunity to remind its Twitter followers that it had fought Nazis in Europe during World War II. Veterans groups, such as the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, also publicly criticized the march. In 2021, the RAND Corporation released a framework to reduce the risk of extremist activity in the U.S. military.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Taken together, these responses were extremely unusual in United States history. Military leaders almost never take part in political controversies. Furthermore, in whole-heartedly condemning the march and its motives, their public comments put them at odds with the President who is the Commander in Chief of the military. Milley said that his statement was not intended to be political.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: In the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) August 18 report, experts recalled the "horrific events in Charlottesville of 11–12 August 2017 leading to the death of Ms. Heather Heyer, and the injuries inflicted on many other protesters, as well as the terrible beating of Mr. Deandre Harris by white supremacists". The UN Committee experts condemned "the failure at the highest political level of the United States of America to unequivocally reject and condemn" racist violence.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: On International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2021, Biden said: "The horrors we saw and heard in Charlottesville in 2017, with white nationalists and neo-Nazis spewing the same antisemitic bile we heard in the 1930s in Europe, are the reason I ran for president".


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Albemarle County, the City of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia and its medical center collectively incurred $540,000 in costs from responding to the Ku Klux Klan rally in July 2017 and the Unite the Right rally in August 2017. Costs included police overtime and other expenses, costs from the fire department and the public works department, legal fees, and fees from a crisis communications firm. Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital, a private hospital, spent more than $59,000.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: The violence in Charlottesville accelerated the removal of public Confederate statues from many U.S. cities. About twenty monuments were removed in the weeks immediately following the rally. In Baltimore, the city's four Confederate statues were removed on the night of August 15–16; Mayor Catherine Pugh said that she had ordered the overnight removals to preserve public safety. In Durham, North Carolina, a group toppled a statue outside the Old Durham County Courthouse; four activists were arrested in connection with the toppling. Three Confederate statues were also removed from the University of Texas at Austin in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: In Lexington, Kentucky, Mayor Jim Gray asked the city council to approve the relocation of two statues from a courthouse. Proposals to relocate Confederate memorials were also made in Jacksonville, Florida and Memphis, Tennessee, among many other places.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: A plaque in Montreal that was installed in a Hudson's Bay Company store commemorating Jefferson Davis's brief stay in the city by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1957 was removed following the rally, after many complaints.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Most senior city officials in office at the time of the rally had resigned or retired a year later, or were about to. The city attorney (who had considered that the city couldn't legally stop the rally) left Charlottesville for another job, the chief of police resigned in the wake of a report concluding that the police failed to protect the public, and the city manager was set to retire by the end of 2018.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: As a consequence of the rally, a left-wing political coalition became ascendant in local politics, with the aim of overturning what they considered age-old racial and economic injustice. Nikuyah Walker, one of the local activists who charged into a city council meeting days after the rally to confront the city leadership, was elected mayor in January 2018. A "New York Times" report in July 2018 concluded that the issue of whether the rally's violence was mainly the fault of outsiders or a consequence of local racism remained controversial in Charlottesville, and that the city remained divided between activists for change and those who would prefer to return to the "status quo".


title: Unite the Right rally

text: In November 2017, nine Charlottesville residents who suffered physical and psychological injuries during the Charlottesville violence filed a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia against Jason Kessler and other organizers and promoters of the rallies. The plaintiffs claim their civil rights were violated, as the organizers had urged those attending the Unite the Right rally to arm themselves and partake in violence. The plaintiffs sought both compensatory and injunctive relief from the trial. The defendants' motion to dismiss were denied.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: The trial began on October 25, 2021. On November 23, 2021, jurors found in favor of the plaintiffs on the four counts and deadlocked on two other charges. Finding 17 white nationalist leaders and organizations liable, the jury awarded more than $25million in damages.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: In August 2018, four members of the Southern California-based Rise Above Movement (RAM), were indicted in federal court on Virginia on charges of violating, and conspiring to violate, a federal rioting statute. Federal prosecutors and investigators charged the four California menBenjamin Drake Daley, Thomas Walter Gillen, Michael Paul Miselis, and Cole Evan Whitewith planning violent acts at the Charlottesville rally and carrying out multiple assaults against counterprotesters. RAM, a militant white supremacist and neo-Nazi gang, espoused racism and antisemitism. The group, which claimed a membership of more than 50 people, had previously "boasted publicly of their violence during protests in Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Daley, Gillen, Miselis, and White all pleaded guilty in May 2019, admitting that they "collectively pushed, punched, kicked, choked, head-butted, and otherwise assaulted several individuals, resulting in a riot." Daley, Gillen, and Miselis were sentenced to prison turns of 37 months, 33 months and 27 months, respectively. Daley and Miselis submitted conditional guilty pleas that allowed them to appeal on the issue of the Anti-Riot Act, which they claimed was unconstitutional. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rejected this argument, and affirmed the convictions while adopting a limiting constructions to the Act, holding that the key parts of the statute were constitutional as so construed. White, who cooperated with authorities and admitted guilty earlier than the others, served 7 months in prison and in 2019 was released, being permitted to spend the rest of his sentence on home electronic monitoring.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Robert Rundo, the founder of RAM, was charged in federal court in California in a criminal complaint unsealed in October 2018. Other members of the groupRobert Boman, Tyler Laube, and Aaron Easonwere also arrested and charged in federal court in California with violations of the federal Anti-Riot Act, specifically conspiracy to commit rioting and use of interstate commerce with intent to riot. Rundo fled to Central America, where he was quickly arrested and extradited to the United States.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney dismissed the charges against Rundo, Boman, and Eason in June 2019, ruling that the federal Anti-Riot Act is "unconstitutionally overbroad in violation of the First Amendment." Laube's case was also dismissed, following the 2019 withdrawal of a November 2018 guilty plea. In 2021 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed the district court's dismissal, finding that the challenged provisions of the Anti-Riot Act were, in fact, constitutional.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Charlottesville community activist Don Gathers, the co-founder of Charlottesville's Black Lives Matter chapter, who also served on the blue-ribbon committee which, after the Unite the Right rally, met to decide whether to remove or relocate the Confederate statues which were the putative focus of the rally, announced in a press release on January 7, 2019, that he would be a candidate for the Charlottesville city council, using the slogan "Community Driven, Community Focused". Gatherswho was also a member of the city's Civilian Police Review Board, and a deacon at First Baptist Churchscheduled a public event for the next day, but instead of officially announcing his candidacy, Gathers, who is black, withdrew from the race. He also resigned from the Review Board that night.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: On September 18, 2019, white supremacist Daniel McMahon of Brandon, Florida was arrested and charged with willful interference with a candidate for elective office, bias-motivated interference with a candidate for elective office, threats to injure in interstate commerce, and cyberstalking for threatening physical violence to Gathers, because he was a black man running for public office, causing Gathers to fear bodily injury or even death. McMahon, who is known online as the trolls "Jack Corbin" and "Pale Horse", described himself on Gaba social network popular with far-right usersas a "Goddamn fascist". He praised both James Alex Fields Jr., the neo-Nazi who drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally, killing one person and injuring 28, and was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Robert Bowers, the alleged perpetrator of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, frequently citing Fields as an exemplar to intimidate anti-fascists. Corbin has expressed the opinions that "white people are superior to members of other racial, ethnic and religious groups", that undocumented immigrants deserve to be treated "like the cockroaches they are", and white people have the right to exist, but gay people do not.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: In November 2017, Jason Kessler, the organizer of the rally, applied for a permit to hold a rally in Charlottesville in August 2018, on the anniversary of the march. In December 2017, the city of Charlottesville denied the permit, writing that Kessler's application "likely underestimates the number of participants" and that "no reasonable allocation of city funds or resources can guarantee that event participants will be free of any 'threat of violence. While Kessler filed suit against the city, he withdrew the suit before any ruling was made.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: In June 2018, Jason Kessler's application for a "White Civil Rights Rally" was approved for August 11 and 12 by the National Park Service. The rally was planned to be held in Washington DC. A coalition of 18 activist groups under the collective title D.C. Against Hate planned "to counter-protest the event on a massive scale, with the aim of shutting down the rally entirely".


title: Unite the Right rally

text: On July 31, 2018 Facebook announced that it had deleted a number of accounts which were engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior". Among the activities being pursued by these accounts was the organization of a counter-protest of the 2018 anniversary rally in Washington DC. Initial reports showed links between the deleted accounts and the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), which was connected to Russian misinformation campaigns during the 2016 US presidential election.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: The Unite the Right 2 rally occurred on August 12, 2018, and saw low turnout, with up to 30 Kessler supporters while counter-protesters who demonstrated against the rally numbered into the thousands. There were only a few arrests, no one was injured, and the crowd was dispersed early by a rainstorm.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: On August 9, 2018, Debbie Elliott, writing for NPR, noted that "Charlottesville has become shorthand for racial strife." Elliott also noted that the rally "forced [the town] to rethink [its] racial history", adding that "the new narrative is coming from the nearly 20 percent of residents [of Charlottesville] who are not white and have long experienced racial disparities.", but that "as that story is being amplified, some fear being drowned out of the conversation."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: On August 10, 2018, politician Tom Perriello, writing for "Slate", argued that "a growing body of evidence suggests that the true legacy of Unite the Right will be the unity that's been forged by those on the other side—those who dare to face down the evils of historical revisionism and injustice to forge a better future." Perriello also argued that the rally may have started "the slow death of 'both sides' journalism", resulted in "Bankruptcy and jail time for Nazis", helped the Democrats win the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial election in November, and "Rais[ed] the bar for white allyship", resulting in "today's white allies [being] more numerous, less expectant of being in charge, and more prepared to use white privilege as a shield on the front lines."


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Also on August 10, political scientist Cas Mudde, writing for "The Guardian", argued that "The myth of Charlottesville is that the rally was a big success for the alt-right. The organizers had two major political goals for the rally: firstly, to show the country that the alt-right is not just a social media phenomenon, and secondly, to bring various far right groups together. Neither of these goals was realized." and that "The rally's goal to reunite the extreme 'alt-right' with the radical 'alt-light' has failed as they grow further apart".


title: Unite the Right rally

text: On the third anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in August 2020, lawyer Roberta Kaplan and Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, writing for CNN, argued that "it is now clear that the violence and hatred evident at Charlottesville was not a passing moment or a onetime event.", citing several prominent killings and shootings that happened afterwards which "all had connections to and echoed the slogans and worldview so proudly proclaimed by the groups and individuals who came to Charlottesville.", including the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, the 2019 Poway synagogue shooting, the 2019 El Paso shooting, and the 2019 Halle synagogue shooting.


title: Unite the Right rally

text: Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said that key figures in the Unite the Right rally worked to raise online fury ahead of the January 6 United States Capitol attack.


title: Dollface

text: Dollface is an American comedy streaming television series created by Jordan Weiss that premiered on November 15, 2019, on Hulu. It stars Kat Dennings, Brenda Song, Shay Mitchell, and Esther Povitsky. In January 2020, Hulu renewed the series for a second season, which was released on February 11, 2022. The series was canceled in May 2022.


title: Dollface

text: The series follows "a young woman who – after being dumped by her longtime boyfriend – must deal with her own imagination in order to literally and metaphorically re-enter the world of women, and rekindle the female friendships she left behind."


title: Dollface

text: On November 17, 2017, it was announced that Hulu had given the production a pilot order. The series was created by Jordan Weiss who was also expected to write for the series and serve as an executive producer alongside Stephanie Laing, Margot Robbie, Brett Hedblom, Bryan Unkeless, Scott Morgan, Nicole King, and Kat Dennings. In addition to producing, Laing was also set to direct the pilot episode as well. Production companies slated to be involved with the series included LuckyChap Entertainment and Clubhouse Pictures.


title: Dollface

text: On November 2, 2018, it was announced that Hulu had given the production a series order for a first season consisting of ten episodes. Additional executive producers were reported to include Ira Ungerleider, Tom Ackerley, and Matt Spicer. Ungerleider was also set to serve as the series' showrunner and Spicer as the director of the first episode, replacing the previously announced Laing. Further production companies involved with the series were now expected to include ABC Signature Studios. The series premiered on November 15, 2019. On January 17, 2020, the series was renewed for a second season. On May 10, 2022, the series was canceled after two seasons.


title: Dollface

text: Alongside the pilot order announcement on November 2, 2018, it was confirmed that Kat Dennings had been cast in the production's lead role. On January 31, 2019, it was announced that Brenda Song and Lex Scott Davis had joined the main cast in leading roles. On February 19, 2019, Esther Povitsky joined the cast of the series in a lead role. On April 10, 2019, it was announced Shay Mitchell had joined the cast of the series, replacing Davis. On June 4, 2019, it was announced that Goran Visnjic would join the cast in a recurring role. In July 2021, Jayson Blair, Corinne Foxx, and Luke Cook joined the cast in recurring roles for the second season. On September 17, 2021, Chelsea Frei was cast in a recurring capacity for the second season.


title: Dollface

text: Principal photography for the first season wrapped on June 25, 2019. Filming for the second season concluded on October 15, 2021.


title: Dollface

text: The series premiered on November 15, 2019, on Hulu in the United States, and on Crave in Canada. In selected international territories, the series premiered on Disney+ under the dedicated streaming hub Star as an original series, on March 5, 2021. On Disney+, "Dollface" episodes are debuting on a weekly basis. and in Latin America the series released on August 31, 2021, on Star+.


title: Dollface

text: According to Whip Media's viewership tracking app TV Time, "Dollface" was the 5th most anticipated returning show of February 2022, and the 10th most watched original series across all platforms in the United States, during the week of February 13th, 2022, and the 5th during the week of February 20, 2022.


title: Dollface

text: The first season holds an approval rating of 59% based on 27 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 5.8/10. The site's critical consensus reads: ""Dollface" has all of the right parts: a talented cast, a promising premise, and plenty of surreal intrigue—if only its shallow vision of feminism didn't undermine them." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 54 out of 100 based on reviews from 13 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Dollface

text: The second season has an approval rating of 56% based on 9 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 4.8/10. On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 49 out of 100 based on reviews from 4 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Dr. Martens

text: Dr. Martens, also commonly known as Doc Martens, Docs or DMs, is a German-founded British footwear and clothing brand, headquartered in Wollaston in the Wellingborough district of Northamptonshire, England. Although famous for its footwear, Dr. Martens also makes a range of accessories – such as shoe care products, clothing, and bags. The footwear is distinguished by its air-cushioned sole (dubbed "Bouncing Soles"), upper shape, welted construction and yellow stitching. Dr Martens' design studio is in Camden Town, London; the manufacturing is in the UK, China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.


title: Dr. Martens

text: Klaus Märtens was a doctor in the army of Nazi Germany during World War II. After he injured his ankle in 1945, he found that his standard-issue army boots were too uncomfortable on his injured foot. While recuperating, he designed improvements to the boots, with soft leather and air-padded soles made of tyres. When the war ended and some Germans recovered valuables from their own cities, Märtens took leather from a cobbler's shop. With that leather he made himself a pair of boots with air-cushioned soles.


title: Dr. Martens

text: Märtens did not have much success selling his shoes until he met up with an old university friend, Herbert Funck, a Luxembourger, in Munich in 1947. Funck was intrigued by the new shoe design, and the two went into business that year in Seeshaupt, Germany, using discarded rubber shaped by moulds. The comfortable soles were a big hit with housewives, with 80% of sales in the first decade to women over the age of 40.


title: Dr. Martens

text: Sales had grown so much by 1952 that they opened a factory in Munich. In 1959, the company had grown large enough that Märtens and Funck looked at marketing the footwear internationally. Almost immediately, British shoe manufacturer R. Griggs Group bought patent rights to manufacture the shoes in the United Kingdom. Griggs anglicised the name to "Dr. Martens", slightly re-shaped the heel to make them fit better, added the trademark yellow stitching, and trademarked the soles as AirWair.


title: Dr. Martens

text: The first Dr. Martens boots in the UK, with an eight-eyelet cherry-red coloured smooth leather design known as style 1460, are still in production today, although in many variations. They were introduced on 1 April 1960. The three-eyelet shoe arrived exactly one year later with the style number 1461 (1/4/61). Dr. Martens boots were made in their Cobbs Lane factory in Wollaston, Northamptonshire, where they continued to be made, in addition to production elsewhere, until at least 2018. In addition, a number of shoe manufacturers in the Northamptonshire area and further afield produced the boots under licence, as long as they passed quality standards. The boots were popular among workers such as postmen, police officers and factory workers. By the later 1960s, skinheads started to wear them, "Docs" or "DMs" being the usual naming, and by the late 1970s, they were popular among scooter riders, punks, some new wave musicians, and members of other youth subcultures. The shoes' popularity among politically right-wing skinheads led to the brand gaining an association with violence. Alexei Sayle sang the song "Dr. Martens' Boots" in a 1982 episode of the British TV comedy "The Young Ones".


title: Dr. Martens

text: In 1989 Accent Group became the first manufacturer of Dr. Martens outside the UK, obtaining the rights to make them in Dunedin, New Zealand, which they did for several years. The boots and shoes became popular in the 1990s as grunge fashion arose. In late November 1994, a six-storey Dr. Martens department store was opened in Covent Garden in London which also sold food, belts, and watches. At this time the R. Griggs company employed 2,700 people, expected to earn annual revenue of £170 million, and could produce up to 10 million pairs of shoes per year.


title: Dr. Martens

text: Dr. Martens sponsored Rushden & Diamonds F.C. from 1998 to 2005. Diamonds approached owner and local businessman Max Griggs to request sponsorship from his company. A new main stand was built at Nene Park in 2001, named the Airwair Stand. Dr. Martens were also the principal sponsors of Premier League club, West Ham United F.C., renaming the upgraded west stand 'The Dr Martens Stand'.


title: Dr. Martens

text: In 1999 Dr. Martens fought lawsuits in US courts. The brand filed a number of lawsuits in 2016 based primarily on trademark law.


title: Dr. Martens

text: In the 2000s, Dr. Martens were sold exclusively under the AirWair name in dozens of different styles, including conventional black shoes, sandals and steel-toed boots. AirWair International Ltd revenue fell from US$412 million in 1999 to $127 million in 2006. In 2003 the Dr. Martens company came close to bankruptcy. On 1 April that year, under pressure from declining sales, the company ceased making shoes in the UK, and moved all production to China and Thailand. Five factories and two shops were closed in the UK, and more than of the firm's employees lost their jobs. Following the closures, the R. Griggs company employed only 20 people in the UK, all in the firm's head office. Five million pairs of Dr. Martens were sold during 2003, half the 1990s level of sales.


title: Dr. Martens

text: In 2004 a new range of Dr. Martens was launched in an attempt to appeal to a wider market, especially young people. The shoes and boots were intended to be more comfortable, and easier to break in, and included some new design elements. Dr. Martens also began producing footwear again at the Cobbs Lane Factory in Wollaston, England in 2004 as part of the "Vintage" line, which the company advertises as being made to the original specifications. Sales of these shoes are low in comparison to those made in Asia, however; in 2010, the factory was producing about 50 pairs per day. In 2005, under turnaround CEO David Suddens the R. Griggs company was given an award by the "Institute for Turnaround" for implementing a successful restructure.


title: Dr. Martens

text: In 2006, Griggs' 1460 Dr. Martens AirWair boot was named in the list of British design icons which included Concorde, Mini, Jaguar E-Type, Aston Martin DB5, Supermarine Spitfire, Tube map, World Wide Web and the AEC Routemaster bus.


title: Dr. Martens

text: Worldwide sales of Dr. Martens shoes grew strongly in the early 2010s, and in 2012 it was the eighth-fastest-growing British company. Over 100 million pairs of Dr. Martens shoes were sold from 1960 to 2010, and in 2010 the company offered 250 different models of footwear. The R. Griggs company opened fourteen new Dr. Martens retail stores in the United Kingdom, United States and Hong Kong between 2009 and 2011, and also launched a line of clothing during 2011.


title: Dr. Martens

text: The private equity company Permira acquired R. Griggs Group Limited, the owner of the Dr. Martens brand, for £300 million in October 2013. For a time Dr. Martens footwear was sold under a "for life" scheme, under which it would repair or replace worn-out DM shoes forever for a price somewhat more than twice the normal price for a pair. This offer was available in 2016, but was withdrawn for new sales from May 2018. After Permira purchased Dr. Martens, Steve Murray, former brand president of Vans was hired as CEO. Murray went on to hire Leslie Lane away from DaKine to serve as President of the Americas, former colleague Dan Le Vesconte of Vans as President of EMEA, Darren Campbell of Asics as Head of Product, and Kyle Duford from Nau.


title: Dr. Martens

text: In 2018 ten million pairs of Dr. Martens shoes were produced, only one percent in the UK. Annual revenue in 2019 was £454 million, six times more than in 2013. The most popular model remained the 1460 boots. In 2019 Dr. Martens announced plans to double the production of shoes and boots in the UK, to 165,000 pairs annually in 2020. Dr Martens' design studio is in Camden Town, London.


title: Dr. Martens

text: In 2019 "The Guardian" reported concerns that the quality of Dr. Martens shoes had declined since either production was moved to Asia or Permira acquired the brand. Many of the newspaper's readers reported that recently produced Dr. Martens products did not last as long as older production. The company responded that there had been no change in the materials used or production processes since manufacturing was moved to Asia, and only 0.5% of its footwear was defective.


title: Dr. Martens

text: In January 2022, the Dr Marten factory in Wollaston featured on the BBC programme Inside the Factory; Series 6, Leather boots.


title: Dr. Martens

text: Dr. Martens have garnered significant following and ownership within various subcultures, notably within the LGBT and Punk communities.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, (born 17 August 1949) is an English actor, novelist, film director and screenwriter, and a Conservative peer of the House of Lords.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: He is primarily known as the author of several "Sunday Times" bestseller novels; for the screenplay for the film "Gosford Park", which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2002; and as the creator, writer and executive producer of the multiple award-winning ITV series "Downton Abbey" (2010–2015).


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Fellowes was born into a family of the British landed gentry in Cairo, Egypt, the youngest of four boys, to Peregrine Edward Launcelot Fellowes (1912–1999) and his British wife, Olwen Mary ("née" Stuart-Jones). His father was a diplomat and Arabist who campaigned to have Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, restored to his throne during World War II. His great-grandfather was John Wrightson, a pioneer in agricultural education and the founder of Downton Agricultural College. Peregrine's uncle was Peregrine Forbes Morant Fellowes (1883–1955), Air Commodore and DSO.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Fellowes has three older brothers: Nicholas Peregrine James, actor; writer David Andrew; and playwright Roderick Oliver. The siblings' childhood home was at Wetherby Place, South Kensington, and afterwards at Chiddingly, East Sussex, where Fellowes lived from August 1959 until November 1988, and where his parents are buried.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: The house in Chiddingly, which had been owned by the whodunit writer Clifford Kitchin, was within easy reach of London where his father, who had been a diplomat, worked for Shell. Fellowes has described his father as one "of that last generation of men who lived in a pat of butter without knowing it. My mother put him on a train on Monday mornings and drove up to London in the afternoon. At the flat she'd be waiting in a snappy little cocktail dress with a delicious dinner and drink. Lovely, really."


title: Julian Fellowes

text: The friendship his family developed with another family in the village, the Kingsleys, influenced Fellowes. David Kingsley was head of British Lion Films, the company responsible for many Peter Sellers comedies. Sometimes "glamorous figures" would visit the Kingsleys' house. Fellowes said that he thinks he "learnt from David Kingsley that you could actually make a living in the film business."


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Fellowes was educated at several private schools in Britain, including Wetherby School, St Philip's School (a Catholic boys school in South Kensington) and Ampleforth College, which his father had preferred over Eton. He read English Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was a member of Footlights. He graduated with a 2:1. He studied further at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Fellowes moved to Los Angeles in 1981 and played a number of small roles on television for the next two years, including a role in "Tales of the Unexpected". He believed that his breakthrough had come when he was considered to replace Hervé Villechaize as the assistant on the television series "Fantasy Island", but the role went to actor Christopher Hewett instead. He was unable to get an audition for the Disney film "" (1985) in Los Angeles, but was offered the role when he was visiting England. When he asked the film's director why he was not able to get an interview in Los Angeles, he was told that they felt the best actors were in Britain.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: After this, Fellowes decided to move back to England to further his career, and soon played a leading role in the 1987 TV series "Knights of God" as Brother Hugo, the "ambitious and ruthless second-in-command" of a futuristic military cult. Subsequently, in 1991 he played Neville Marsham in Danny Boyle's "For the Greater Good" and Dr. Jobling in the 1994 BBC adaptation of "Martin Chuzzlewit". Other notable acting roles included the role of Claud Seabrook in the acclaimed 1996 BBC drama serial "Our Friends in the North" and the 2nd Duke of Richmond in the BBC drama serial "Aristocrats". He portrayed George IV as the Prince Regent twice: first in the film "The Scarlet Pimpernel" (1982) and the second in the 1996 adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's novel "Sharpe's Regiment", as well as playing Major Dunnett in "Sharpe's Rifles". He also played the part of Kilwillie on "Monarch of the Glen". He appeared as the leader of the Hullabaloos in the television adaptation of Arthur Ransome's "Coot Club", called "Swallows and Amazons Forever!".


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Aside from acting, he launched a new series on BBC One in 2004, "", which he wrote and introduced onscreen. He was the presenter of "Never Mind the Full Stops", a panel game show broadcast on BBC Four from 2006 to 2007. He created the hugely successful and critically acclaimed period drama "Downton Abbey" for ITV1 in 2010. He won a Primetime Emmy for outstanding writing and a Broadcasting Press Guild award for writing "Downton Abbey". He wrote a new "Titanic" miniseries that was shown on ITV1 in March–April 2012.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: In April 2015, "The Hollywood Reporter" reported that Fellowes was at work on a new period drama series for NBC television, to be set in late 19th-century New York City, entitled "The Gilded Age". Fellowes suggested that a younger version of Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess character from his "Downton Abbey" drama might appear in the new series, saying: "Robert Crawley would be in his early teens, Cora would be a child. A young Violet [the Dowager Countess] could make an appearance." As the title suggests, the series would be set during the time of America's so-called Gilded Age – the industrial boom era in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – and portray the upper echelons of New York's high society during that period.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Production and writing for "The Gilded Age" was updated in January 2016 indicating that filming would start at the end of 2016. As reported in RadioTimes: "NBC's "The Gilded Age" is set to start shooting later this year, Fellowes tells RadioTimes.com. Asked whether he'd written the script yet, Fellowes replied, 'No I haven't, no. I'm doing that this year', before adding: 'And then hopefully shooting at the end of the year.'"


title: Julian Fellowes

text: In April 2016, it was announced that Fellowes would be the producer of "The Gilded Age" when it was reported that Fellowes is "about to begin writing The Gilded Age for NBC, a sort of American Downton about fortunes made and lost in late 19th century New York, which he will also produce."


title: Julian Fellowes

text: On 4 June 2016, Fellowes was asked by "The Los Angeles Times", "Where does "The Gilded Age" stand?" Fellowes replied,


title: Julian Fellowes

text: It stands really with me up to my neck in research, and I'm clearing the decks, so that when I start "Gilded Age", I'm only doing "Gilded Age." These people were extraordinary. You can see why they frightened the old guard, because they saw no boundaries. They wanted to build a palace, they built a palace. They wanted to buy a yacht, they bought a yacht. The old guard in New York weren't like that at all, and suddenly this whirlwind of couture descended on their heads. The newcomers redesigned being rich. They created a rich culture that we still have – people who are rich today are generally rich in a way that was established in America in the 1880s, '90s, 1900s. It was different from Europe. Something like Newport would never have happened in any other country, where you have huge palaces, and then about 20 yards away, another huge palace, and 20 yards beyond that another huge palace. In England right up to the 1930s, when people made money, they would buy an estate of 5,000 acres and they'd have to look after Nanny. The Americans of the 1880s and '90s didn't want too much of that.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: In August 2016, Fellowes indicated that his plans for "The Gilded Age" would not overlap substantially with the characters in "Downton Abbey" since most of them would have been children in those earlier "prequel" decades. Writing for "Creative Screenwriting", Sam Roads asked Fellowes, "Will there be any connection between The Gilded Age and Downton Abbey?" to which Fellowes stated:


title: Julian Fellowes

text: I can't see it really. Someone asked if you would you see any of the Downton characters, but most of them would be children. They said that Violet wouldn't be a child, and I replied that "Yes, I suppose you could see a younger Violet", and this became a newspaper story. "Violet comes from Downton to appear in The Gilded Age!"


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Fellowes wrote an adaptation of the novel "Doctor Thorne" by one of his favorite writers, Anthony Trollope. The ITV adaptation aired on 6 March 2016.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: A report in early September 2018 stated that Fellowes had two projects underway, both in development: the Netflix series "The English Game" and "The Gilded Age" for NBC. In May 2019, "The Gilded Age" moved to HBO.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Fellowes wrote the script for "Gosford Park", which won the Oscar for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen in 2002. He also won a Writers Guild of America award for it. In late 2005, Fellowes made his directorial début with the film "Separate Lies", for which he won the award for Best Directorial Début from the National Board of Review.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: In 2009, Momentum Pictures and Sony Pictures released "The Young Victoria", starring Emily Blunt, for which Fellowes wrote the original screenplay. Other screenwriting credits include "Vanity Fair", "The Tourist" and "From Time to Time", which he also directed, and which won Best Picture at the Chicago Children's Film Festival, the Youth Jury Award at the Seattle International Film Festival, Best Picture at the Fiuggi Family Festival in Rome, and the Young Jury Award at Cinemagic in Belfast. His greatest commercial success was "The Tourist", which grossed US$278 million worldwide, and for which he co-wrote the screenplay with Christopher McQuarrie and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Other films in which Fellowes has appeared include "Full Circle" (1977), "Priest of Love" (1981), "The Scarlet Pimpernel" (1982), "Goldeneye: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming" (1989, as Noël Coward), "Damage" (1992), "Shadowlands" (1993), "Jane Eyre" (1996), "Tomorrow Never Dies" (1997), "Regeneration" (1997) and "Place Vendôme" (1998). He has continued his acting career while writing. He unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of Master of Lake-town in the 2012–2014 "The Hobbit" series.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Fellowes was the screenwriter and one of the producers for "Downton Abbey", which was released in September 2019, and its sequel, "". Most members of the cast of the television programme appear in the movie versions.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Fellowes's novel "Snobs" was published in 2004. It focuses on the social nuances of the upper class and concerns the marriage of an upper middle-class girl to a peer. "Snobs" was a "Sunday Times" best-seller. In 2009 his novel "Past Imperfect" was published. Another "Sunday Times" best-seller, it deals with the débutante season of 1968, comparing the world then to the world of 2008.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: A period novel, "Belgravia" began broadcast, in 11 weekly episodes, from April 2016 and is available, via an app, in audio and text format.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: As an actor, Fellowes began his acting career at the Royal Theatre, Northampton. He has appeared in several West End productions, including Samuel Taylor's "A Touch of Spring", Alan Ayckbourn's "Joking Apart" and a revival of Noël Coward's "Present Laughter". He appeared at the National Theatre in "The Futurists", written by Dusty Hughes. As a writer, he penned the script to the West End musical "Mary Poppins", produced by Sir Cameron Mackintosh and Disney, which opened on Broadway in December 2006. He wrote the book for the musical "School of Rock" which opened at The Winter Garden on Broadway in December 2015. In May 2016 he was nominated for a Tony.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: On 13 January 2011, Fellowes was elevated to the peerage, being created Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, of West Stafford in the County of Dorset, and on the same day was introduced in the House of Lords, where he sits on the Conservative Benches.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Fellowes is involved in volunteer work. He is Chairman of the RNIB appeal for Talking Books. He is a vice-president of the Weldmar Hospicecare Trust and Patron of a number of charities: the southwest branch of Age UK, Changing Faces, Living Paintings, the Rainbow Trust Children's Charity, Breast Cancer Haven and the Nursing Memorial Appeal. He also supports other causes, including charities concerned with the care of those suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He recently opened the Dorset office of the southwest adoption charity, Families for Children. On May 19, 2022, Julian Fellowes was awarded The Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York, Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence. Prior Award winners include author Tom Wolfe, Louis Auchincloss, and David McCullough. Author Washington Irving founded the Society in 1835.Fellowes sits on the Appeal Council for the National Memorial Arboretum and is a Patron of Moviola, an initiative aimed at facilitating rural cinema screenings in the West Country. He also sits on the Arts and Media Honours Committee.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: On 28 April 1990, Fellowes married Emma Joy Kitchener (born 1963), daughter of The Hon. Charles Kitchener (1920–1982) and a lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent. She is also a great-great-niece of Herbert, 1st Earl Kitchener. He proposed to her only 20 minutes after meeting her at a party, "having spent 19 minutes getting up the nerve". On 15 October 1998 the Fellowes family changed its surname from Fellowes to Kitchener-Fellowes.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Fellowes publicly expressed his dissatisfaction that the proposals to change the rules of royal succession were not extended to hereditary peerages, which had they been would have allowed his wife to succeed her uncle as Countess Kitchener in her own right. He said: "I find it ridiculous that, in 2011, a perfectly sentient adult woman has no rights of inheritance whatsoever when it comes to a hereditary title." Instead, the title became extinct on her uncle's death because there were no male heirs.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: On 9 May 2012, the Queen issued a Royal Warrant of Precedence granting Lady Fellowes the same rank and style as the daughter of an earl, as would have been due to her if her late father had survived his brother and therefore succeeded to the earldom.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Fellowes and his wife have one son, the Honourable Peregrine Charles Morant Kitchener-Fellowes (born 1991).


title: Julian Fellowes

text: Lord Fellowes was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Dorset in 2009. He is also Lord of the manor of Tattershall in Lincolnshire and president of the Society of Dorset Men. Their main family home is in Dorset.


title: Julian Fellowes

text: His wife was story editor for "Downton Abbey" and works with charities, including the Nursing Memorial Appeal.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Giorgia Meloni (; born 15 January 1977) is an Italian politician who has been serving as the Prime Minister of Italy since 22 October 2022, the first woman to hold this position. A member of the Chamber of Deputies since 2006, she has led the Brothers of Italy (FdI) political party since 2014, and she has been the president of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party since 2020.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In 1992, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist political party founded in 1946 by former followers of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. She later became the national leader of Student Action, the student movement of the National Alliance (AN), a post-fascist party that became the MSI's legal successor in 1995 and moved towards national conservatism. She was a councillor of the Province of Rome from 1998 to 2002, after which she became the president of Youth Action, the youth wing of AN. In 2008, she was appointed Italian Minister of Youth in the Berlusconi IV Cabinet, a role which she held until 2011. In 2012, she co-founded FdI, a legal successor to AN, and became its president in 2014. She unsuccessfully ran in the 2014 European Parliament election and the 2016 Rome municipal election. After the 2018 Italian general election, she led FdI in opposition during the entire 18th Italian legislature. FdI grew its popularity in opinion polls, particularly during the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy by the Draghi Cabinet, a national unity government to which FdI was the only opposition party. Following the fall of the Draghi government, FdI won the 2022 Italian general election.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: A right-wing populist and nationalist, her political positions have been described as far right, which she rejects. She describes herself as a Christian and a conservative, and she claims to defend "God, fatherland, and family". She is opposed to abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and LGBT parenting, saying that nuclear families are exclusively headed by male–female pairs. Her discourse includes femonationalist rhetoric and criticism of globalism. Meloni supports a naval blockade to halt immigration, and she has been accused of xenophobia and Islamophobia; she has blamed neo-colonialism as a cause behind the European migrant crisis. A supporter of NATO, she maintains Eurosceptic views regarding the European Union, which she describes as Eurorealist, and was in favour of better relations with Russia before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, after which she pledged to keep sending arms to Ukraine. However, Meloni has expressed controversial views, such as praising Mussolini when she was 19. In 2020, she praised Giorgio Almirante, a civil minister in Mussolini's Italian Social Republic who produced racist propaganda and co-founded the MSI. Nevertheless, Meloni has said that she and her party condemn both the suppression of democracy and the introduction of the Italian racial laws by the fascist regime.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In 2022, according to "Forbes", Meloni was the seventh most powerful woman in the world, while according to "Politico Europe", she was ranked at the first place in the "Disrupters" category.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Giorgia Meloni was born in Rome on 15 January 1977. Her father was from Sardinia and her mother is from Sicily. Her father, a tax advisor, left the family when she was one year old in 1978, by moving to the Canary Islands; 17 years later, he was convicted for drug trafficking and sentenced to 9 years in a Spanish prison in 1995. He last contacted Meloni in 2006, when she became the Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies. She grew up in the working-class district of Garbatella. She has a sister, Arianna, who was born in 1975 and is married to Francesco Lollobrigida, the Italian Minister of Agriculture since 22 October 2022, which was renamed the Italian Minister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignity under the Meloni Cabinet.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In 1992, at 15 years of age, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist political party that dissolved in 1995. During this time, she founded the student coordination (The Ancestors), which took part in the protest against the public education reform promoted by minister Rosa Russo Iervolino. In 1996, she became the national leader of Student Action, the student movement of the post-fascist National Alliance (AN), the national-conservative heir of the MSI, representing this movement in the Student Associations Forum established by the Italian Ministry of Education.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In 1998, after winning the primary election, Meloni was elected as a councillor of the Province of Rome, holding this position until 2002. She was elected national director in 2000 and became the first woman president of Youth Action, the AN youth wing, in 2004. During these years, she worked as a nanny, waitress, and bartender at the , one of the most famous night clubs in Rome.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Meloni graduated from Rome's Amerigo Vespucci Institute (AVI) in 1996. After her election to the Italian Parliament in 2006, she declared in her "curriculum vitae" that she obtained a high school diploma in languages with the final mark of 60/60. This created some controversy, as the AVI was not a foreign language high school and was not qualified to issue a diploma in languages; instead, it was a technical high school specialized in the tourist industry, to which she later clarified.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In the 2006 Italian general election, she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies as a member of the National Alliance (AN), where she became its youngest ever vice-president. In the same year, she started to work as a journalist. In 2006, Meloni defended the laws passed by the Berlusconi III Cabinet that benefited companies of the prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi and also delayed ongoing trials involving him. Meloni stated "it is necessary to contextualise them. Those are laws that Silvio Berlusconi made for himself. But they are perfectly fair laws."


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In 2008, at 31 years old, she was appointed Italian Minister of Youth in the Berlusconi IV Cabinet, a position she held until 16 November 2011, when Berlusconi was forced to resign as the prime minister amid a financial crisis and public protests. She was the second youngest-ever minister in the history of united Italy. In August 2008, she invited Italian athletes to boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games in disagreement with the Chinese policy implemented towards Tibet; this statement was criticized by Berlusconi, as well as the foreign affairs minister Franco Frattini. In 2009, her party merged with Forza Italia (FI) into The People of Freedom (PdL) and she took over the presidency of the united party's youth section, called Young Italy. In the same year, she voted in favour of a decree law against euthanasia.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In November 2010, on behalf of the ministry, she presented a 300 million euro package called the Right to the Future. It was aimed at investing in young people and contained five initiatives, including incentives for new entrepreneurs, bonuses in favour of temporary workers and loans for deserving students. In November 2012, she announced her bid to contest the PdL leadership against Angelino Alfano, in opposition to the party's support of the Monti Cabinet. After the cancellation of the primaries, she teamed up with fellow politicians Ignazio La Russa and Guido Crosetto to set out an anti-Monti policy, asking for renewal within the party and being also critical of the leadership of Berlusconi.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In December 2012, Meloni, La Russa, and Crosetto founded a new political movement, Brothers of Italy (FdI), whose name comes from the words of the Italian national anthem. In the 2013 Italian general election, she stood as part of Berlusconi's centre-right coalition and received 2.0% of the vote and 9 seats. She was re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies for Lombardy and was later appointed the party's leader in the house, a position that she would hold until 2014, when she resigned to dedicate herself to the party. She was succeeded by Fabio Rampelli.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In March 2014, she became president of FdI, and in April she was nominated for the 2014 European Parliament election in Italy as the leader of the FdI in all the five constituencies. FdI party obtained 3.7% of the votes, not exceeding the threshold of 4%, and she did not become a Member of the European Parliament; she received 348,700 votes. On 4 November 2015, she founded Our Land – Italians with Giorgia Meloni, a conservative political committee in support of her campaigns. Our Land was a parallel organization to FdI, and aimed at enlarging FdI's popular base.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: On 30 January 2016, she participated in the Family Day, an anti-LGBT rights demonstration, declaring herself against LGBT adoption. At the same Family Day, she announced that she was pregnant; her daughter Ginevra was born on 16 September. In the 2016 Rome municipal election in June, she ran for mayor with the support of Us with Salvini, a political party led by Matteo Salvini, and in opposition to the candidate supported by Berlusconi's Forza Italia (FI). In May 2016, she promised to name a street after Giorgio Almirante if elected, causing controversy among the local Jewish community and the anti-fascist ANPI. Meloni won 20.6% of the vote, almost twice that of FI's candidate, but she did not qualify for the run-off, while FdI obtained 12.3% of the vote.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: During the campaign for the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum on the reform promoted by Renzi's government, Meloni founded the "No, Thanks" committee and participated in numerous television debates, including one against the then prime minister Matteo Renzi. As "No" won with almost 60% of the votes on 4 December, Meloni called for snap elections. When Renzi resigned the next day, she withheld confidence from the next government led by Paolo Gentiloni on 12 December. The 2–3 December 2017 congress of FdI in Trieste saw the re-election of Meloni as president of the party, as well as a renewal of the party logo and the joining of Daniela Santanchè, a long-time right-wing politician.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: As party leader, she decided to form the alliance with the League (Lega), led by Salvini, launching several political campaigns with him against the centre-left government led by the Democratic Party (PD), placing FdI in Eurosceptic and right-wing populist positions. In the 2018 Italian general election, FdI stood as part of the centre-right coalition, with Berlusconi's FI, Salvini's Lega, and Raffaele Fitto's Us with Italy. Meloni's party obtained 4.4% of the vote and more than three times the seats won in 2013. She was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the single-member constituency of Latina, Lazio, with 41% of the vote. The centre-right coalition, in which the League emerged as the main political force, won a plurality of seats in the Chamber of Deputies; as no political group or party won an outright majority, it resulted in a hung parliament.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: On 19 October 2019, she participated in the Italian Pride rally in Rome against the newly formed Conte II Cabinet. In her speech, she criticized the proposal to replace on the Italian identity cards of minors the wording "father" and "mother" with "parent 1" and "parent 2", concluding with the slogan "I am Giorgia. I'm a woman, I'm a mother, I'm Italian, I'm Christian". This slogan was remixed by two Milanese DJs, becoming a disco-trash catchphrase with millions of views, imitations, and memes on social media, even winning a gold disc. By her own admission in her autobiography, the media and viral success of the remixed music video, having lost the original satirical intention in favour of the LGBT community with which it had been created, greatly increased her popularity as a politician, who she said was suddenly transformed "from a boring politician into a curious pop phenomenon".


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In February 2021, she joined the Aspen Institute, an international think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., which includes many financiers, businessmen, and politicians, such as Giulio Tremonti. On 19 February 2021, the University of Siena professor Giovanni Gozzini insulted Meloni calling her vulgar names from a radio; both the president Sergio Mattarella and the prime minister Mario Draghi phoned Meloni and stigmatized Gozzini, who was suspended by the board of his university.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In October 2021, Meloni signed the Madrid Charter, a 2020 document that describes left-wing groups as enemies of Ibero-America involved in a "criminal project" that are "under the umbrella of the Cuban regime". It was drafted by Vox, a Spanish ultranationalist party. She also took part at Vox's party congress, where she said: "Yes to the natural family. No to the LGBT lobby. Yes to sexual identity. No to gender ideology ... no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration ... no to big international finance ... no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!" In February 2022, Meloni spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida. She told the attending American conservative activists and officials they must defend their views against progressives.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Heading into the 2022 Italian general election, a snap election that was called after the 2022 Italian government crisis, it was agreed among the centre-right coalition that the leader of the party receiving the most votes would be put forward as the prime minister candidate. As of July 2022, FdI was the first party in the coalition according to opinion polling, and she was widely expected to become Prime Minister of Italy if the centre-right coalition obtained an absolute majority in Parliament, which would be the most right-wing government in the history of the Italian Republic according to some academics. In an attempt to moderate herself to placate fears among those who describe FdI as neo-fascist or far right, including fears within the European Commission that she could lead Italy towards Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Meloni told the foreign press that Italian fascism is history. As president of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party since 2020, she said she shared the experiences and values of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, Likud in Israel, and the Republican Party in the United States. Critics were sceptical of her claims, citing her speeches on immigration and LGBT rights. She campaigned for lower taxes, less European bureaucracy, and a halt to immigration through a naval blockade, saying she would put national interests first.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: In a record-low voter turnout election, exit polls projected that the centre-right coalition would win a majority of seats in the 2022 general election. Meloni was projected to be the winner of the election with FdI receiving a plurality of seats, and per agreement with the centre-right coalition, which held that the largest party in the coalition would nominate the next prime minister, she was the frontrunner and would become the country's first female prime minister. The PD, head of the centre-left coalition, conceded defeat shortly after the exit polls, and Hungary's Orbán, Poland's Mateusz Morawiecki, United Kingdom's Liz Truss, and Marine Le Pen, former leader of National Rally (RN) in France, congratulated Meloni. European radical right parties and leaders, such as Alternative for Germany and Vox, also celebrated Meloni's results. After many years of absence from politics, Gianfranco Fini, former leader of the MSI and AN during the early years of Meloni's political career, expressed satisfaction for her victory, said he had voted for her party, and described her as an anti-fascist, despite her rejection of the label, which she considers to be political.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Observers have debated how right-wing a Meloni-led government would be, and which label and position on the political spectrum would be more accurate or realistic. Many variously described it as Italy's first far-right led government since World War II, and Meloni as the first far-right leader since Benito Mussolini, and some academics also described it as the most right-wing government since 1945. Many questioned its direction, citing Berlusconi's and Salvini's Russian ties, in contrast to Meloni's Atlanticism. Others, such as Sky News, while citing Meloni's and her party's neo-fascist roots, disagreed with the far-right label and said: "Giorgia Meloni is not a fascist." Steve Sedwick of CNBC summarized the discussion, saying: "Have we got a centre-right coalition, have we got a right coalition, have we got a far-right coalition, or have we got a fascist coalition? I have seen all four printed, depending on who you read."


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Immediately after the first meeting of the new legislature, tensions began to grow within the centre-right coalition. On 13 October, Berlusconi refused to support Ignazio La Russa, FdI's candidacy to be President of the Senate of the Republic. He succeeded in being elected by obtaining 116 votes out of 206 in the first round thanks to the support from opposition parties to the centre-right coalition. Tensions further grew, in particular between Berlusconi and Meloni, whom Berlusconi described as "patronising, overbearing, arrogant ... [and] offensive" in a series of written notes in the Senate. In the following days, after meetings between parties' leader, tensions loosened and the centre-right coalition parties reached an agreement on the formation of the new cabinet.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: On 20 October, consultations between President Sergio Mattarella and parties officially began. On the following day, delegates from FdI, the League, FI, and Civics of Italy–Us Moderates–MAIE, announced to Mattarella they had reached an agreement to form a coalition government with Meloni as Prime Minister. In the afternoon, Mattarella summoned Meloni to the Quirinal Palace, asking her to form a new government. She accepted the task and on the same day announced the composition of her cabinet, which was officially sworn in on 22 October. She is the first woman to hold the office of Prime Minister of Italy.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: On 25 October, Meloni gave her first official speech as Prime Minister in front of the Chamber of Deputies, before the confidence vote on her cabinet. During her speech, she stressed the weight of being the first woman to serve as head of the Italian government. She thanked several Italian women including Tina Anselmi, Samantha Cristoforetti, Grazia Deledda, Oriana Fallaci, Nilde Iotti, Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Maria Montessori, who she said, "with the boards of their own examples, built the ladder that today allows me to climb and break the heavy glass ceiling placed over our heads." The government won the confidence vote with a comfortable majority in both houses.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: One of the first measures implemented by the government regarded COVID-19 and concerned in the complete removal of the COVID-19 vaccination certificate, known in Italy as the Green Pass; moreover, the non-vaccinated doctors were re-integrated into service. On 31 October, the government approved a decree providing for a penalty of up to six years of imprisonment for illegal parties and rallies. Despite being officially presented as a decree against illegal rave parties, the law was applicable to any illegal gathering that the public authority deemed dangerous, which garnered criticism, including from jurist Vitalba Azzolini. The decree also caused a lot of protests from opposition parties and civil rights associations, and was also contested by FI. According to Amnesty International, the decree "risked undermining the right to peaceful protest." The Meloni government has rejected the accusations and announced that it will accept minor changes to the text in Parliament. In the first weeks after taking office, Meloni implemented stricter policies than previous governments regarding the fight against illegal immigration. From an economic point of view, Meloni and her government have decided to prevent the increase in energy prices, in continuity with her predecessor Mario Draghi, by lowering prices, giving subsidies to families and businesses and making new drilling decisions in the Italian seas to increase national gas production. The government decided also to increase the cash ceiling from €2,000 to €5,000.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: The first foreign leader met by Meloni was the French president Emmanuel Macron, who was in Rome on 23 October to meet president Mattarella and the Pope, and had a bilateral meeting with Meloni, primarily focused on the ongoing energy crisis and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On 3 November, Meloni met European Union (EU) leaders such as Ursula von der Leyen, Charles Michel, Paolo Gentiloni, Roberta Metsola, and other politicians in Brussels. On 7 November, Meloni took part in her first international summit, the United Nations COP27 in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt. During her speech, Meloni stated: "Italy remains strongly convinced of its commitment to decarbonisation in compliance with the Paris Agreement. We must diversify energy suppliers, in close collaboration with African countries." During the conference, the prime minister also had a bilateral meeting with the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In the following week, Meloni partecipated to the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, where she had her first bilateral meeting with the U.S. President Joe Biden on 15 November.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Observers have described Meloni's political positions as far right; in August 2018, Friedel Taube wrote in "Deutsche Welle" that "Giorgia Meloni has a long history in far-right politics." In a July 2022 interview with Nicholas Farrell of "The Spectator", Meloni rejected descriptions of her politics as far right, calling it a smear campaign by her opponents and cited British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton as one of her influences. She has also described herself as a mainstream conservative. Additionally, Meloni has been described as hard right, right-wing populist, and nationalist.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Meloni has been described as being close to Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary and leader of Fidesz, National Rally in France, and Vox political party in Spain, representatives of the Law and Justice party in Poland, and the Republican Party in the United States. Meloni self-described her political party, Brothers of Italy (FdI), as a mainstream conservative party, and she has downplayed its post-fascist roots. She is in favour of presidentialism and supports the change of the Constitution of Italy.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Meloni opposes abortion, euthanasia, and laws that recognize same-sex marriage, and describes herself as "pro-family". She has said she "wouldn't change" the abortion law in Italy but wanted to apply more fully the part of the law "about prevention", such as permitting conscientious objection doctors to refuse to carry them out. She also stated that the recognition of same-sex unions in Italy is good enough, and she said it was something she would not change; in 2016, while she said she would respect the law if elected mayor of Rome, she had supported a referendum to abrogate the civil-union law. At a rally at the Piazza del Popolo in October 2019, she spoke against same-sex parenting; her speech became viral on Italian social media platforms. During a February 2016 interview to "Le Iene", an Italian television show, she had also said that she would "rather not have a gay child".


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Meloni has opposed the , a hate speech law. She is opposed to the DDL Zan, an anti-homophobia law that would expand the Mancino law to cover LGBT discrimination, declaring in 2020 that "there is no homophobia" in Italy. She is also opposed to surrogacy, which is pejoratively known in Italian as "utero in affitto", and she has pushed in Parliament for a law to make it a "universal crime". Meloni is supportive of the anti-gender movement, based on Catholic theology in the 1990s that condemns social positions not approved by the Catholic Church, including gender studies, and she is sceptical of what she calls "gender ideology"; she says it is being taught in schools, and that it attacks female identity and motherhood. She is supportive of changing the Constitution of Italy in order to make it illegal for same-sex couples to adopt children. In March 2018, she criticized The Walt Disney Company for the decision to represent a gay couple in the musical fantasy movie "Frozen II". On Facebook, she wrote: "Enough! We are sick of it! Take your hands off the children."


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: She sees feminism as an ideological tool against right-wing politics rather than in pro-women terms and has described herself as "a person for women". In her 2011 book "We Believe", she wrote: "I am a right-wing woman, and I proudly support women's issues. In recent years we have had to suffer contempt and racism by feminists. ... Perhaps as far as feminism is conceived in this way, it is more a question of ideology than of gender and substance." She is opposed to pink quotas and has denied being anti-women as accused by some critics. Giorgia Serughetti, a political philosopher and author of "The Conservative Wind", said that femonationalism is working for Meloni.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: The likely possibility of Meloni being the first woman to become Prime Minister of Italy has been widely discussed both prior to and after the 2022 Italian general election. Some women did not see this as a victory due to her political positions, while others saw it at least partly in a positive light, and a few others called her a feminist despite Meloni's rejection of the label. Prior to the election, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented: "The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing." This prompted a response from some critics and observers, including historians Ruth Ben-Ghiat and David Broder. Ben-Ghiat wrote: "Meloni would also represent continuity with Italy's darkest episode." For her part, Meloni declared herself ready to govern and criticized feminists.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Meloni has criticized Italy's approach towards illegal immigrants, calling for a zero-tolerance policy, and she wants to blockade migrants from reaching Italian ports, and boost the birth rate of Italian nationals to ease the need for migrant labour. She is opposed to birthright citizenship proposals, which would give citizenship including education rights to immigrants born and living in Italy. She has linked illegal immigration and crime, and refugee arrivals to human trafficking and prostitution. Amid the 2022 escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Meloni said she supported to give refugee status to those coming from a war-shaken country but not to asylum seekers. She said: "It's time to call things by their name, to give refugee status to those fleeing war, women, and children, perhaps doing the opposite with those who aren't refugees." In August 2022, she reposted a pixelized video on Twitter that shows a woman being raped by an asylum seeker. The victim of the violence decried the publication of the video and said she was recognized by the video posted. After receiving backlash, Meloni defended herself by accusing other politicians of not having condemned the rape itself.


title: Giorgia Meloni

text: Meloni has blamed neo-colonialism for Africa's underdevelopment and the 2015 European migrant crisis, and she said she favours cooperation over what she termed France's neocolonialism. She has been considered as opposed to the reception of migrants, as well as to multiculturalism, and she has been accused of making xenophobic statements, as well as of Islamophobia. In 2018, she said she would welcome Venezuelans, saying they are Christians and often of Italian origins. She has often criticized George Soros and what she terms "globalists", at times reflecting the views of Soros conspiracy theories, once saying: "When you are a slave, you act in Soros's interests." She has endorsed the Great Replacement, a white nationalist conspiracy theory. She also believes there is a planned mass migration from Africa to Europe for the purpose of replacing and eliminating Italians, an antisemitic, white genocide, and far-right conspiracy theory known as the Kalergi Plan. She has described pro-immigration policies as part of an alleged left-wing conspiracy to "replace Italians with immigrants". In January 2017, she called immigration to Italy "ethnic substitution".