The new white revolution just isn't happening.
One year after Charlottesville, the alt-right is gathering again â in Washington
Jane Coaston
At last yearâs Unite the Right rally, hundreds of members of the alt-right and white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, purportedly to defend a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, as it faced removal approved by the City Council. The event was supposed to be the alt-rightâs zenith, coming into its own as a real political force with real political power â and,
tangentially, grabbing the ear of the president.
The event began with a torchlit rally where
attendees shouted, âYou will not replace us!â (some replacing âyouâ with âJewsâ). The next day, the event attracted a counterprotest, during which a self-avowed Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd,
killing a young woman. Afterward, President Donald Trump famously remarked that there were âvery fine people on both sides.â The events werenât the high point of the alt-right but the beginning of the end of the alt-rightâs real or imagined political effectiveness.
And on August 11, theyâre doing it again â this time, outside the White House.
Itâs not clear how many people will attend Unite the Right 2 â many white nationalists have already said they have no interest in going, while others who might otherwise attend are enmeshed in legal troubles stemming from last yearâs rally. Meanwhile, organizers of the coalition DC Against Hate have told at least one outlet that they
expect at least 1,000 counterprotesters to attend events aimed against Unite the Right 2 under the banner âShut It Down DC.â
A year ago, members of the alt-right felt strong enough to venture off the internet and into the real world. Now, the movement has largely been broken â by the law, by widespread disapproval, and mostly by their own actions â and Unite the Right 2 could represent its last stand.
The plan for Unite the Right 2: a march, but please, no swastikas
On May 8, âwhite civil rights activistâ Jason Kessler filed an application with the National Park Service to hold a rally of about 400 people in Lafayette Park, directly across from the White House. His
stated purpose: âProtesting civil rights abuse in Charlottesville Va / white civil rights rally.â Kessler, who organized last yearâs debacle, initially applied for the rally to be held in Charlottesville again. His application was turned down by the city, however, and
his subsequent efforts to sue the city for denying his application failed.
Š Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images White nationalists and neo-Nazis encircle counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville on August 11, 2017.
His application to march in Washington, DC, though, was
approved by the National Park Service in June, though local police have not issued permits for the event.
The current plan is to travel on the Metro from Vienna, Virginia, to the Foggy Bottom station (near George Washington University) in DC, then to march to Lafayette Square for a two-hour rally with speeches from figures like
alt-right Wisconsin candidate Paul Nehlen, who may attend. American flags and Confederate flags are permitted, but Nazi flags, unlike last year, are not.
On the rallyâs website, organizers
warned: âALWAYS Be aware of your surroundings. Do not talk to the media. Do not engage in any fighting. ALWAYS be a good representative for our cause.â
But coordinating this event has seemingly been chaotic at best, as revealed by recent
internal Facebook chats from Unite the Right planners (obtained from an anonymous source by the media collective Unicorn Riot, a left-leaning investigative journalism nonprofit). The chats appear to show Kessler arguing with other planners about a wide range of issues. Those include basic logistics like transportation and housing; whether or not a nonwhite speaker would give them âpolitical coverâ to have major white supremacist figures speak as well; and whether thereâs a good way to ânormalizeâ anti-Semitism without appearing to do so (in other words, without
using anti-Semitic memes).
Ironically, in the midst of discussions about which neo-Nazi groups could provide security for rallygoers, Kessler sort of seemed to try to tamp down violent rhetoric. As Unicorn Riot wrote (bolded words attributed to Kessler from the Facebook group chat):
Likely inspired by his ongoing legal problems, Kessler at times expressed concerns at the violent rhetoric being used in his Unite The Right 2 planning chat.
âPlease donât talk about fighting anyone at the rally,â he wrote on May 28.
âHurts the legal situation.â He also chastised other event co-planners for discussing whether their security team should plan for violence:
âthis is absolutely the wrong kind of thing to be talking about on Facebook.â
Unmentioned in the Facebook chats is just
how many white nationalist groups â like the neo-Confederate and white supremacist group League of the South, for example â have little to no interest in Unite the Right
2.
Unite the Right went very, very wrong for the alt-right
To understand the shambolic disorganization of Unite the Right 2, itâs critical to understand its predecessor.
As my
colleague Dara Lind wrote on the alt-right in 2017:
In 2015 and 2016, the alt-right was an inescapable online presence, with some of its members crediting the movementâs âmeme magicâ with the unexpected popularity of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary and, later, the general election. With Trumpâs election, some of its leaders have become more seriously engaged in politics, via pro-Trump organizations like the Proud Boys and the Alt-Knights.
Like Trump himself, alt-right leaders didnât start out by explicitly aligning themselves with the sort of right-wing groups and movements that almost everyone in 2017 America is willing to agree are racist â like the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. But racist rhetoric has become a hallmark of the movement, from the use of âcuckâ to deride anti-alt-right conservatives to Twitter harassment of Jewish journalists by Photoshopping them into images of Nazi gas chambers.
Around this time, the statue of Robert E. Lee was
targeted by activists for removal from a park in Charlottesville after the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston by a white supremacist. The alt-right saw this as the perfect moment to gather to defend âSouthern heritage.â But as the planning for the event commenced, the tenor and tone of the rally soon shifted. As Lind wrote, the rally turned âfrom an ostensible attempt to bring a broad coalition of conservative groups together to protest the controversial removal of a statue, to a âNazifiedâ rally for âthe pro-white movement in America.ââ
The 2017 edition of Unite the Right was intended by its organizers and supporters to be a âpivotal momentâ for white supremacists and the alt-right, featuring some of that movementâs biggest names, from white nationalist
spokesperson-of-sorts Richard Spencer to Matthew Heimbach of the Traditional Workers Party, a neo-Nazi group.
But thatâs not what happened. Instead of marking a high point for the âpro-white movement,â the tiki torch-lit march on August 11 and the violence of the rally the next day resulted in the killing of
Heather Heyer and
universal condemnation. Since August 12, 2017, the alt-right has been dealt several blows.
Organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right have been embroiled in
lawsuits filed by victims of the violence that took place. Many of the alt-rightâs
biggest personalities, like Richard Spencer, lost funding platforms because, understandably, platforms like Patreon and PayPal didnât want to be associated with
advocates for the return of the Third Reich. Other alt-right figures are involved in legal proceedings related to,
for instance, harassing a Jewish woman online, or participation in a
trailer park brawl.
One white nationalist attendee (best known for
sobbing uncontrollably at the thought of his imminent arrest) was even
recently banned from entering the state of Virginia. Kessler himself tweeted insults about the young woman killed during the rally, then even his fellow rallygoers disavowed him. And politically, the rally only served to, in the words of the
New York Times, âempower a leftist political coalition that vows to confront generations of racial and economic injusticeâ in Charlottesville.
On a larger scale, as
the Atlanticâs Angela Nagle wrote in December 2017, the violence of Unite the Right put into sharp relief the distinct difference between what the alt-right purported itself to be (people posting âfunâ memes mocking so-called âpolitical correctnessâ), and what it actually became (a cover for racists and anti-Semites, complete with Nazi insignia and swastikas):
The rally brought into the open the movementâs racist coreânot the winking shit-posters and fuzzy-faced geeks wearing obscure-internet-joke T-shirts, but a small army of unapologetic white nationalists. Anyone who flirted with the alt-right now understood what they were pledging allegiance to. ... âCharlottesville changed everything,â [Gavin McInnes, who had previously associated with alt-right elements] said to Boston Herald Radio. âI donât advocate the alt-right. I donât advocate their politics.â
It should be noted, however, that many of the attendees of Unite the Right clearly knew exactly what the point of the event was.
Š Provided by Vox Media, Inc.
From former KKK leader David Dukeâs Twitter account. August 9, 2017.
For those targeted by the denizens of the alt-right â those whose images were photoshopped into Nazi gas chambers and who received harassing tweets and emails for months â the alt-right was always a cesspool of hate.
But for casual observers, people who arenât on Twitter and donât visit
Breitbart â the
âplatform for the alt-right,â in the words of former Breitbart chair and White House strategist Steve Bannon â Charlottesville made that reality all too real.
One year after Charlottesville, the alt-right is gathering again â in Washington
