When I think about visual displays meant to intimidate and shock, I was thinking about cross burnings. But so many torches all together in a public park next to a Confederate symbol is reminiscent of that approach.

Since the weekend, you’ve been on the receiving end of anti-Semitic tweets and online abuse. What do you make of these, and how do you respond to it?

I think that this is similar to the torches, in that they’re both efforts to intimidate and silence people.

Here in Charlottesville, we had a very full, transparent public debate on the issues of these statues. There were different opinions. We had a divided vote on whether to move one of the statues. We had a Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces that held 17 public meetings and gave us over a dozen recommendations on how we could change our narrative in Charlottesville and tell the full story of race through our public spaces. We’ve done many things like this. We’ve put $80,000 toward the rehabilitation of an African-American cemetery that fell into disrepair.

What I witness nowadays with the demonstration and the anonymous trolls is a bullying, simplistic approach meant to silence anyone who has views they don’t agree with through intimidation. The key thing is not to be intimidated and to stand up for American principles like freedom of speech, religious toleration, checks and balances, and civic dialogue.

Does this feel personal?

I don’t actually think it’s personal — I think it’s a pattern that goes back thousands of years. It has rightly been relegated to the trash heap of history.

As painful as it is for people to read these tweets, I see them as the last gasps of a failing, retrograde, toxic element in American politics that knows that it’s failing. And that’s why they’re so angry. But that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to speak out against it, which is one of the reasons I’ve been calling out the cowardice in these anonymous tweets selectively.