Unite the Right rally 2018: white supremacists to march in Washington, DC

I reported from the “Unite the Right 2” rally in Washington on Sunday. It was a dreary failure that attracted around 30 people in total and literally ended before it was supposed to start. I interviewed one alt-right supporter who had been confused by the poorly updated rally website and ended up missing the entire demonstration; I walked around the crowd of counterprotesters that dwarfed the neo-Nazis by orders of magnitude.

But as pathetic as of all that was, none of it was quite as hilariously humiliating to the alt-right as the video below — in which the rally’s organizer, Jason Kessler, is yelled at by his father to get out of his parents’ room in the middle of a live stream with a fellow alt-righter (the stream first aired some time ago, but recently resurfaced on Twitter).

Sunday’s counterprotests against the white nationalist “Unite the Right 2” rally in Washington, DC, were largely peaceful. Thousands of people held multiple rallies across the city to celebrate diversity and push back against the hateful views the white nationalists espouse.

But a few left-wing “antifa” (short for “anti-fascist”) counterprotesters did engage in violence, throwing eggs and water bottles and shooting fireworks at police officers and some journalists who were covering the demonstrations.

It was supposed to be the start of another show of force by white nationalists: Unite the Right 2, the follow-up to last year’s disastrous and violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, which concluded with a Nazi sympathizer ramming his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring several and killing one.

But Dan, who said he was a supporter of “peaceful” ethnic cleansing, was the only white nationalist to be seen at the march’s starting point, the Foggy Bottom metro station in Washington, DC.

On August 12, 2018, one year after the white nationalist-organized “Unite the Right” protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, collapsed into chaos and violence that left one counterprotester dead and dozens injured, groups gathered near the White House for another “white civil rights rally.”

The effort largely ended in failure.

After white supremacist groups and members of the alt-right traveled by train into Washington, DC, for Sunday’s “Unite the Right 2” rally, the local transit authority faces outcry for providing what some observers say was preferential treatment for rallygoers.

The backlash began early Sunday afternoon when people began posting photos from the Vienna Metro station in Virginia, where Unite the Right participants gathered before taking the train into DC. According to WUSA9 reporter Mike Valerio and reports from other news outlets on the scene, one entrance to the station was completely closed off to the public, and only let Unite the Right participants enter with a police escort.

The white supremacists marching at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year were not ashamed when they shouted, “Jews will not replace us.” They were not ashamed to wear Nazi symbols, to carry torches, to harass and beat counterprotesters. They wanted their beliefs on display.

It’s easy to treat people like them as straw men: one-dimensional, backward beings fueled by hatred and ignorance. But if we want to prevent the spread of extremist, supremacist views, we need to understand how these views form and why they stick in the minds of some people.

You may have heard that white supremacists are marching through the nation’s capital this weekend. Their rally, Unite the Right 2, is sort of a sequel to the violent neo-Nazi march they held a year ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, that ended with the death of a counterprotester and multiple people sent to the hospital.

Sunday’s festivities, organized by Jason Kessler, will culminate outside the White House in a rally for “white civil rights.” Despite the public backlash to last year’s event, white nationalists still feel emboldened by President Trump’s administration to take their racist views from the dark corners of the internet into the mainstream. And any time they face criticism or opposition, members of the alt-right assert their free speech rights.

On Sunday, “white civil rights activist” Jason Kessler will lead an undetermined number of alt-right, far-right, and white supremacist individuals and organizations in the “Unite the Right 2” gathering in Washington, DC, on the first anniversary of the group’s disastrous rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that claimed the life of a young woman.

As I wrote earlier this week, the ultimate size of the event is anyone’s guess:

Last August, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and members of the alt-right descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, for “Unite the Right,” a rally to put the power of white nationalists on full display. A year after that event resulted in chaos and violence, groups plan to hold another “white civil rights rally” in Washington, DC.

But a broad coalition of organizers representing anti-racist, anti-fascist, and socialist groups say that when Unite the Right 2 participants arrive in DC, they will be met with significant resistance throughout the weekend.

If President Trump was home Sunday afternoon, he could peel back a curtain and watch Nazis gather in a park so close to the White House it might as well be his lawn. But instead of yelling what a typical old man might (“get off!”), he’s gone with a much more tolerant message.

Members of the same alt-right and white nationalist groups who stormed Charlottesville, Virginia, a year ago, marching with tiki torches and chanting slogans from the Third Reich, are descending on Lafayette Square in the second “Unite the Right” event.

Mitt Romney is calling on Americans to “categorically and consistently reject racism and discrimination” on the anniversary of racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and on the eve of a repeat of the Unite the Right rally this year in Washington, DC. The former Massachusetts governor and current US Senate candidate in Utah issued a lengthy statement on Friday defending equality, steeped in his religious upbringing and belief that “we are all children of God.”

Romney, who ran against President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, touched on a number of issues in his post. He weighed in on President Donald Trump’s equivocal reaction to the gathering of the alt-right and white supremacists in 2017, though he did not mention the president by name. He also suggested that it’s misguided to perceive pushes for equal opportunity by groups that have historically been discriminated against as grabs for a disproportionate share of the pie.

President Donald Trump’s equivocal response to violent racism at a gathering of the alt-right and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was one of the low points of his presidency. Ahead of a second Unite the Right rally in Washington, DC this Sunday, Trump appears to want to avoid a repeat — though he is still playing a bit of the “both sides” game.

Without citing Unite the Right by name, Trump on Saturday lamented last year’s “senseless death and division” in Charlottesville. In those clashes, 32-year-old Heather Heyer died after she was struck by a car. “I condemn all types of racism and acts of violence,” Trump said in a tweet. “Peace to ALL Americans!”

Editor’s note: A data error by the author of the study cited here inflated the percentage of non-Hispanic white Americans with alt-right compatible views up to 12 percent. The actual figure is 5.64 percent. All numbers in the piece and headline have been updated to reflect the correct figures.

In the runup to the 2018 Unite the Right rally in Washington, DC, this Sunday — the sequel to last year’s infamous Charlottesville, Virginia, tiki torch demonstration — it’s vitally important to try to figure out just how significant the movement known as the alt-right is as an American political force. If people like white nationalist Richard Spencer are marginal cranks, whose ideas have no resonance with a wider audience, the best thing to do might be to ignore them.

Tensions are flaring between two warring camps inside the alt-right movement ahead of their planned march on the White House Sunday: those who think they should try to look a little less like anti-Semites and racists, and those who think that would make them a bunch of “optics-cucks.”

“We need to remain in the realm of the hip, cool, sexy, fun,” wrote Andrew Anglin, a neo-Nazi who runs the white supremacist website the Daily Stormer, urging his readers not to attend the rally. “We need to speak to the culture. We do not want the image of being a bunch of weird losers who march around like assholes while completely outnumbered and get mocked by the entire planet.”