July 8th Counter Protest

Saturday, July 8th brought an outpouring of unity in Charlottesville. Some people chose to ignore the Ku Klux Klan’s unabashed public reappearance by attending counter-events held elsewhere within the city. Others marched to the park, looked Klan members in the eye, and delivered a clear message: Charlottesville is no place for hate groups and their abhorrent rhetoric. Not one of us should be uninformed about recent cross-burnings and torch ceremonies that evoke nightmares of a not-so-distant past when KKK members could murder African-Americans with impunity; not one of us should remain indifferent to vitriol that can inspire violence in those receptive to their hate. Still, maybe we can take a small measure of relief that more than one thousand people showed up to drown out a predictably ugly display staged by a handful of pathetic racists.

However, the fast-approaching “Unite the Right Free Speech Rally,” scheduled to take place in Charlottesville on August 12, poses a far greater threat to the community. Jamelle Bouie, who was present for the July 8th rally, concisely summed up the threat: “The real challenge is the less visible bigotry, the genteel racism that cloaks itself in respectability and speaks in code, offering itself as just another ‘perspective’.” This next event will arrive without clownish robes or other flagrant, antiquated displays of bigotry, yet we can neither afford to let this event fly under our radars, nor to treat it simply as another opportunity to protest. Successfully resisting this budding extremist movement means educating ourselves on the differences between what already happened and what is coming.

KKK in Charlottesville on July 8th.

For one thing, we should recognize that many organizers of “Unite the Right” want nothing to do publicly with the Klan. One of the keynote speakers at the rally will be Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who has previously called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” in America. Despite a number of overlapping objectives, he has made on-record attempts to dissociate with the Klan. He and others affiliated with his movement also seek to distance themselves from the Confederate Flag, not because they disavow it as a symbol of white supremacy, but because its associations with poverty and “ignorance” negatively reflect on their brand. Spencer and his cohort want to update bigotry for the 21st Century. Their success relies upon delivering many of the same messages of intolerance in a more fashionable package. To put it another way, the online memes mocking a Klansmen’s misspelling of the word bible would damage their recruiting efforts.

Those present on August 12th will gather under the innocuous-sounding label “Alt Right,” a term that softens a worldview just as repugnant as the Klan’s. Writing in The New York Times in June, John Herrman compared the right’s appropriation of alternative, which carries a counter-cultural connotation traditionally aligned with the left, with an “essential feature” of Trumpism: “[T]he brazen inversion, that trusty maneuver in which you wield your critics’ own values against them — say, borrowing the language of social justice to argue that the ‘oppressor’ is actually oppressed or suddenly embracing progressive social causes in the service of criticizing Islam. It’s a blunt but effective rhetorical confiscation, in which a battle-ready right relishes its ability to seize, inhabit and neutralize the arguments and vocabularies of its opponents, reveling in their continued inability to formulate any sort of answer to the trusty old ‘I know you are, but what am I?’”

This type of approach appeals especially to white males, many of them millennials who feel disenfranchised by an economy that has left swathes of the country behind (it’s worth noting here that extremist groups all over the world often rely on economic desperation as a powerful recruiting strategy). On first blink, these people might seem to offer a sensible alternative to those weary of the standard left-right political dichotomy, or to those who are baffled by pronouns and bathrooms and other liberal talking points. Spencer and others — such as the white nationalist “think tank” founder Jared Taylor — hold advanced degrees from the same “elite” institutions often denigrated by their movement, and use pseudo-intellectual discourses to convince the college educated of their platform’s legitimacy. It’s white supremacy for the thinking person. Other prominent personalities within the movement — the recently-disgraced Milo Yiannopoulos, for instance — exploit the subversive, anti-establishment tendencies of youth by cultivating hatred for multiculturalism, feminism, and anything “politically correct.”

The August 12 rally will collect a disparate gathering of national socialists (aka Nazis), southern nationalists, white identitarians, radical libertarians, and anti-government extremist groups such as the sovereign citizens, and it will attempt to coalesce these groups by emphasizing a few objectives. The first is white male supremacy and along with it, ultra-traditional gender roles (think of a male authoritarian as head of the household, with everyone else silently falling in line), a vehement distrust of non-white immigrants, and a contempt for liberals, whom they will invariably equate with communists and/or fascists. Only 40 or so Klansmen showed up on July 8th. Hundreds will be in attendance on August 12th. Many of those participants will be armed. Many of them will be young and male. It’s a toxic recipe: testosterone and adrenaline mixed with an ever-swelling ideology of rancor and baked in the August heat. One blog-post on a so-called “national populism” website described this event as “a kind of raid on a [social justice warrior] stronghold by an Alt-Right avant-garde. We are going to whack a hornet’s nest.”

That leads to their second objective: violence. Although it seems very possible a rally filled with hundreds of armed young men could descend into chaos on its own, the group actually hopes to goad liberal protesters into throwing a lit match into the proverbial woodpile. The same blogger above says they hope to “create a massive polarizing spectacle in order to draw as huge a contrast as possible. [Liberal protesters] will reveal themselves to be violent, intolerant, opposed to free speech, the insane enforcers of political correctness, etc. They are degenerate scolds. They are the crybabies, hall monitors and diversity commissars that millions of White people resent at their workplace. The cucks are incapable of standing up to these people because they are afraid of being called -ists and -phobes. We have the opportunity to seize the mantle of the opposition.”

Just as these groups bring different tactics than the KKK, we need to bring something different as well. If we simply repeat what we did on July 8th, we will play directly into their hands. Instead, there are a few things that each of us should strive to do.

The first is to educate as many people as possible in the next few weeks. The fractured nature of the groups coming on August 12th makes the movement much harder — deliberately, on their part — to define and successfully resist. So we need to educate ourselves and each other on these ideologies (the Southern Poverty Law Center is a wonderful resource for this). We accomplish this by researching the different symbols and signs these groups use, by becoming familiar with their tactics for disseminating information.

Most importantly, we must learn more about internet trolling and how it can ruin people’s lives under the guise of protecting “free speech.” Some of these extremists will engage in online harassment and doxxing, what they call “troll-storms.” Recently, some harassed a Montana real-estate agent and her family after a supposed real-estate dispute with Richard Spencer’s mother. Months earlier, others launched a terrifying crusade against David French, a staff writer at the conservative National Review, after he criticized then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. These are two examples that underscore the lengths some of these individuals will go in the name of hate, and also reveal their blatant hypocrisy: equating a liberal “scold” with an unending campaign of online terror that leaves people questioning their sanity, fearing for their family’s lives, and wondering if life will ever return to normal.

The second suggestion takes even more discipline and determination: don’t show up. We must not verbally or physically confront anyone at “Unite the Right.” However viscerally satisfying it might be to shout down these people, we ought to reject this traditional vision of protest by remembering we won’t be able to change one single mind nor engage in any form of constructive dialogue on August 12th. We should make peace now with the fact that we won’t be able to drown out their voices as we did with the KKK. The media will cover their event and then move on to the next headline. If nobody outside the group is present, the message will swirl in an echo chamber, which is what already happens online.

Let’s face it: if this whole spectacle were truly about standing up for the right to say whatever they want whenever they want, they’d be at home in air-conditioned basements posting screeds to The Daily Stormer and leaving us to ponder whether to take them ironically or literally. So, let’s call their bluff and expose their hypocrisy. Let them have their “free speech,” and while we’re at it, let’s give them a “safe space” to perpetuate their convoluted discontent into a 95-degree echo chamber. When no one from the opposition shows up to take their bait, when not one pussy hat or Black Lives Matter poster or rainbow flag is visible from their pen, they might resort to skirmishing amongst themselves — after all, it is a rag-tag bunch, and there are legitimate disagreements to be had over who’s the bigger “cuck” — or, they might just lose interest and find another fundamental human decency to disrupt. A quick internet search reveals that some of the most prominent voices in this radical “right” movement first dabbled in some disparate, left-leaning ideologies before settling on their “real” cause, which is not the fight for conservative values, but an insatiable desire for attention.

Here’s another idea of how we show up for our community and against hate: we all spend that Saturday, or any day, volunteering for one of the many organizations within Charlottesville that contributes to the vitality and health of our community. While the right-wing extremists invading our town seek to turn us into a meme to help spread their vile ideology, we can continue — as so many of us already do — to help make this area a better place for all of us.

This isn’t a perfect plan. It certainly won’t be the only plan. If you have suggestions that will help unite the community against these groups while maintaining peace and not playing into the hands of those who will be in attendance underneath a corroded and corrosive statue, then please speak up. We need strong voices, unique ideas, and, above all else, rationality.

There are many ways to fight against racism, injustice, and violence. That fight has been part of humanity since the very beginning and that this is still part of our society doesn’t mean that the struggle is lost — we must look back at past successes that have come after years of varied and persistent fights.

We can’t take our focus away from the larger picture either — we need to better understand why people are susceptible to this form of messaging and we need to work hard in our own communities to prevent that from happening. This is far from over, both for Charlottesville and for America. We can only win the same way we’ve won in the past: we stand up against injustice together.