Schmidt was one of the organizers of the violent counter-protest to the Unite the Right rally. She was also one of the organizers of Charlottesville's BLM group and was called out by Jason Kessler prior to the rally. Schmidt even brought her own security detail to the riot. Despite her security precautions, she got scared and hid in a comic book shop. I suppose she knew Antifa would start violence. She was quoted as saying, "You have to disrupt stuff. This won’t be a nice forming of a book club and reading Ta-Nehisi Coates in the basement of our church. It’s about disrupting this and questioning the police.” Schmidt has been active in the movement to remove Confederate monuments from Virginia. She doesn't want to simply put the statues in a museum, she wants to melt them down She was sued for defamation by one of the members of the Monument Fund, a group that works to preserve historical monuments. Schmidt helpfully set up a website: www.whiteaccomplices.org to aid white people in overcoming their white supremacy. She's an associate professor of religious studies at UVA. Schmidt was raised a Mennonite but is now Roman Catholic. https://archive.ph/jDC53#selection-983.122-983.140 https://archive.ph/RrHXT#selection-825.0-825.14 https://archive.ph/7d6VV#selection-1749.89-1749.103 https://archive.ph/mzi1Y, https://archive.ph/AqDfl