Unite the Right, the violent white supremacist rally
in Charlottesville, explained
The alt-right rally was a coming-out party for resurgent white nationalism in America.
by Dara Linddara Aug 12, 2017
Hundreds of protesters descended upon Charlottesville,
Virginia, on Saturday for a “Unite the Right” rally: a belated
coming-out party for an emboldened white nationalist movement in the
United States.
The rally was dispersed by police minutes after its
scheduled start at noon, after clashes between rallygoers and
counter-protesters, and after a torchlit pre-rally march Friday night descended into violence. But activity is ongoing, with some rallygoers engaging in a march instead.
It was perhaps a predictable culmination to the event —
which has been a prime example of the difficulty of disentangling
defenses of “free speech” from efforts to prevent violence, and the fine
line between the self-described alt-right movement and more widely recognized forms of white nationalism.
Self-described “pro-white” activist Jason Kessler
organized the rally to protest the planned removal of a statue of
confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville.
Kessler is affiliated with the alt-right movement that uses internet
trolling tactics to argue against diversity and “identity politics” —
part of a broader cultural backlash that helped elect Donald Trump.
But the rally quickly attracted other more traditional groups of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan.
The involvement of hate groups and the threat of violence
led the city of Charlottesville to attempt to marginalize the rally for
“hate speech,” but the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defended
the demonstrators’ rights. The combination of rallygoers spoiling for a
fight, and counter-protestors determined to convey that the rallygoers’
ideology was not welcome in America, allowed the violence to overshadow
the speech — and eventually prevent the rally from going forward as
planned.
Plans to remove a Confederate statue have made Charlottesville a hot spot for right-wing activism
Charlottesville, like many cities in the South, still has
public spaces and monuments celebrating heroes of the Confederacy —
many of which weren’t erected until the 20th century, as the civil
rights movement began to pick up steam and Jim Crow laws started to come
under attack.
In the wake of the 2015 massacre of several worshipers at
Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston by a white supremacist, there’s been a
renewed push to remove some of these Confederate monuments and rename
streets and squares honoring the Confederacy. But where those campaigns
have succeeded, there’s often been a backlash from conservatives
concerned about attempts to erase history, Southerners who consider the
Confederacy part of their “heritage,” and outright white nationalists.
In Charlottesville, advocates targeted a statue of Robert E. Lee
in a park called Lee Square — City Council members pointed out that
Lee had no connection to Charlottesville, implying that commemorating
him was just an indirect way to celebrate the Confederacy, while a
high-school student collected 600 signatures on a Change.org petition to
rename the statue. (A counter-petition collected 2,000 signatures.)
In February, the city council voted to sell the statue and rename the park Emancipation Park. (The statue is still in place.)
The decision made the city a target for right-wing activism and
shows of strength — and for activists keen to stand up to them and
demonstrate that such ideas weren’t welcome. The Ku Klux Klan held a
rally in Charlottesville in July, which was dwarfed by a massive
counter-protest.
Meanwhile, Charlottesville resident Jason Kessler — a
pro-white activist and a member of the Proud Boys, a loose collective of
pro-Trump alt-rightists — put together the Unite the Right rally for
Saturday, to be held at what event posters still call Lee Park. Speakers
include some of the alt-right personalities who have flirted most
openly with white nationalism, including Baked Alaska, an internet provocateur
who was once the tour manager for fellow internet provocateur Milo
Yiannopoulos, as well as self-identified white nationalists like Richard
Spencer.
Political researcher Spencer Sunshine of the firm Political Research Associates told the Guardian’s Jason Wilson
that while the rally was originally intended to attract a broad
coalition of right-wing groups, it had become “increasingly Nazified” —
with some primarily anti-government “patriot” groups refusing to sign
on, and explicitly fascist groups like the National Socialist Movement
getting on board instead.
And many supporters and attendees of the rally certainly
had no problem using Nazi tropes to promote it, as this “fan art” poster
shows:
According to the Charlottesville police affidavit put out before the
rally, planned attendees included the Klan; the militia movement (a
right-wing movement that gained traction in the 1990s, whose members
include the activists who took over a federal nature reserve in early
2016); the “3%”, a right-wing anti-government movement; the Alt-Knights,
an alt-right “fight club”; and others.
The Nazification of the alt-right
The arc of the Unite the Right rally — from an ostensible
attempt to bring a broad coalition of conservative groups together to
protest the controversial removal of a statue, to a “Nazified” rally for
“the pro-white movement in America” — mirrors what’s been happening to
the alt-right as a whole. The movement’s leaders have become
increasingly willing to dabble in white-nationalist rhetoric and tropes,
while attempting to avoid direct accusations of being themselves white
nationalists.
The rise of the alt-right is one face of a broader
backlash against “identity politics” and “political correctness,” which
have left some white Americans feeling that they’re losing ground to
nonwhites — or that America is losing its identity — and that political,
economic, and media elites are either uninterested in defending their
heritage or actively trying to eradicate it.
Among some younger, more internet-savvy people, hatred of
“political correctness” has paired neatly with online troll culture, in
which pushing boundaries and offending people is seen as harmless at
worst and a show of cleverness at best.
In 2015 and 2016, the alt-right was an inescapable online
presence, with some of its members crediting the movement’s “meme
magic” with the unexpected popularity of Donald Trump in the Republican
presidential primary and, later, the general election. With Trump’s
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 didn’t 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 — like the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. But racist rhetoric has
become a hallmark of the movement, from the use of “cuck” to deride
anti-alt-right conservatives to Twitter harassment of Jewish journalists
by photoshopping them into images of Nazi gas chambers.
That crosses the line into ideologies that most Americans
agree are taboo. People may believe that Donald Trump supporters aren’t
necessarily racists, but they are willing to agree that members of the
Klan and Nazis are racists. Indeed, it’s a contrast with those groups
that allows some people to draw the line between “real racism” and
liberals “crying wolf” about racism. (This is true outside the alt-right
as well — just look at pro-Trump commentator Jeffrey Lord, fired by CNN this week after tweeting “Sieg heil!” in what he claims was a joke.)
Many public figures and politicians on the left, center, and center-right have argued that
the alt-right is defined by these actions — among many on the left, the
term “alt-right” itself is an unacceptable euphemism that legitimizes
an ideology that would be considered unacceptable if it were simply
called white nationalism. Progressive writer Lindy West
wrote in 2016 that the term “alt-right” was “an attempt to rebrand
warmed-over Reconstruction-era white supremacy as a cool, new (and
harmless!) internet fad.”
Instead of responding by deliberately distancing
themselves from white nationalism, though, leaders of the alt-right have
deliberately blurred the distinction. They’ve adopted memes and hand
gestures (like the “okay” symbol) as an inside joke, because people
outside the movement have mistaken them for white nationalist symbols.
The attitude tends to be that if “the left” is going to see them as
Nazis, they might as well encourage that conception.
But there are plenty of people whose Naziism isn’t ironic
at all. And at an event like the Unite the Right rally, it’s impossible
to tell the difference between someone who’s wearing a swastika pin or
giving a Nazi salute “ironically” and someone who’s doing it in earnest.
The people who claim they’re doing it “ironically” don’t appear to have
any problem with that confusion.
The line between “protected speech” and violent street fighting is getting very blurry
As the movement behind the Unite the Right rally has become so closely intertwined with groups universally condemned as racist, the response to the rally has started to treat it as inherently illegitimate — as an attack on the rights of people of color, LGBTQ Americans, non-Christians, and immigrants to live and worship safely in the United States.
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