Protesters clash in Stone Mountain

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Crowd swells before police move in[/B][/B]
[B][B]Police left the groups of demonstrators largely alone for more than four hours, and over the course of the morning discipline within the two opposing groups broke down and led to chaotic scenes of small groups shouting or shoving one another.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Tracy Baisden, a Black woman from Atlanta, engaged in a long discussion with a white man, who only identified himself as Zach, as the man declared his desire that races remain separate. Like many such face-to-face encounters, little was settled.[/B][/B]
[B][B]“I think this young man is lost,” Baisden said about Zach.[/B][/B]
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Credit: Jenni Girtman

[B][B]Militia members sprayed several counterprotesters with insect repellent or pepper spray, and several individuals on both sides were knocked to the ground. A counterprotester ripped the face mask from an Associated Press photographer as the he was attempting document the scene.[/B][/B]
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Credit: Alyssa Pointer

[B][B]The sides recorded video of one another, and the entire scene was heavily documented by news photographers, journalists and several documentary filmmakers. Many participants on either side also live streamed the protest on their phones.[/B][/B]
[B][B]By midday, the crowd had swelled to a combined total of more than 500, many of whom mingled in a chaotic scrum outside the Stone Mountain Methodist Church.[/B][/B]
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Credit: Jenni Girtman

[B][B]While counter demonstrators accused the militia members and their supporters as promoting racism, a Florida militia member who gave his call sign as “Rick Rat” said his participation wasn’t “a race thing.”[/B][/B]
[B][B]“Everybody should come together and march on DC and get all the damn Democrats out of office,” he said. ”What I think they are trying to do is start a race war.”[/B][/B]
[B][B]Rick then launched into a version of a popular internet conspiracy theory known as QAnon and accused an unnamed group of Washington “elites” of being pedophiles.[/B][/B]
[B][B]“They are killing the kids and selling their organs,” he said.[/B][/B]
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Credit: Alyssa Pointer

[B][B]Around 1 p.m., following an uptick in fighting between the groups, police marched through downtown with riot shields and dispersed the crowd. Behind the police, a unit of the National Guard waited in case they were needed, but the vast majority of protesters left peacefully. By 2 p.m., downtown Stone Mountain was quiet.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Stone Mountain police Chief Chancey Troutman said he told the groups they had three minutes to disperse.[/B][/B]
[B][B]”If they didn’t disperse in those three minutes, arrests would have been made,” he said.[/B][/B]