For white activists, a moral victory in Charlottesville

CHARLOTTESVILLE — It was a deadly weekend of rage-fuelled street battles. And after the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, leaders of white nationalist groups claimed success.

“It was a huge moral victory in terms of the show of force,” said Mr Richard B Spencer, the far-right figure who had come to Charlottesville to speak during Saturday morning’s Unite the Right rally.

The declaration from Mr Spencer, in an interview late on Saturday, was typical of the man who has rhetorically elbowed his way into the national conversation with his use of Nazi language, and his unalloyed contention that America belongs to white people.

The demonstrations in Charlottesville were perhaps the most visible manifestation to date of the evolution of the American far-right, a coalition of old and new white supremacist groups connected by social media and emboldened by the ascendancy of Mr Donald Trump to the United States presidency. Yet it is by no means clear what the demonstrations mean for the future of this movement and what, if any, lasting effect they will have.

Will the overt displays of racism return the extreme right-wing to the margins of politics, or will they serve to normalise the movement, allowing it to weave itself deeper into the national conversation?

Many Americans watched transfixed as members of those groups marched down the street, barked out anti-Semitic chants and openly displayed the symbols of Nazi Germany and the secessionist South.

Many also looked on in horror as a speeding car crashed into other vehicles on a crowded street on Saturday afternoon, resulting in the death of a 32-year-old woman and injuries to at least 19 other people.

Although Mr Trump, in his comments, declined to single out the white supremacist movement, many mainstream conservatives were appalled. Senator John McCain called the white supremacists “traitors” on Twitter, while House Speaker Paul Ryan called them “repugnant”.

The Justice Department announced late on Saturday that it was opening a civil rights investigation into the incident.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last night that the “evil attack” in Charlottesville meets the legal definition of an act of domestic terrorism.

“You can be sure we will charge and advance the investigation toward the most serious charges that can be brought because this is unequivocally an unacceptable evil attack,” he said, adding that terrorism and civil rights investigators were working on the case.

Some left-leaning Charlottesville organisers such as Dr Laura Goldblatt, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Virginia, said the full airing of such ideas would eventually lead more Americans to reject them. “I think this is the beginning of the end for this spectacularised part of the movement,” Dr Goldblatt said.

But some key far-right leaders say the outcome was exactly what they had hoped for. “We achieved all of our objectives,” said Mr Matthew Heimbach, a founder of the Nationalist Front, a neo-Nazi group that bills itself as an umbrella organisation for the white nationalist movement, in an interview on Saturday. “We showed that our movement is not just online, but growing physically. We asserted ourselves as the voice of white America. We had zero vehicles damaged, all our people accounted for, and moved a large amount of men and materials in and out of the area. I think we did an incredibly impressive job.”

Mr Jason Kessler, a Charlottesville conservative and the main organiser of Saturday’s rally, has been fighting for months against the City Council’s plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park, which once bore Lee’s name.

Although he is a relative newcomer to the white nationalist movement, Mr Kessler is well known in his hometown. He has attacked the city’s status as a sanctuary for immigrants and waged a public battle against Mr Wes Bellamy, the black vice-mayor of Charlottesville and one of its city councilmen. For weeks, a flyer for the Unite the Right meeting made its way around the Internet. It featured Pepe the Frog-styled soldiers bearing Confederate battle flags, and promised speakers such as Mr Spencer and Mr Michael Hill, the president of the Southern pro-secession group League of the South.

In Charlottesville, established groups such as the local chapter of Black Lives Matter, as well as liberal and anarchist groups, started planning their response in June when activists learned that the Ku Klux Klan would be marching in the city — and that Mr Kessler’s rally would follow quickly after it, said Mr Nathan Moore, who sits on the steering committee of Together Cville, a resistance group that formed shortly after last year’s presidential election.

“It was all these different affinity groups that came together in the same place, even if they didn’t know each other before,” Mr Moore said. “It’s been a real summer of hate here.”

Ms Heidi Beirich, who runs the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which monitors far-right groups, was among those who watched with alarm as the online excitement over the gathering grew. “It was astounding to see it go from 100 people saying they were going to go, to 300, to 500, to 700, to raising money on online platforms to facilitate that,” she said.

Over the weekend, far-right groups poured into town, representing long-established racist organisations and the newer alt-right movement.

Dr George Hawley, a University of Alabama political science professor who studies white supremacists, said many of the far-right members he had interviewed did not inherit their racism from their parents, but developed it online. Many of them had never heard of, say, Mr David Duke, the former Louisiana politician and former leader of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

On Friday night, hundreds of far-right sympathisers bearing torches marched across the University of Virginia campus, chanting, “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” There was a brawl with counter-protesters, and at least one arrest.

Mr Kessler said the movement’s torch-lit rally on Friday night was especially successful. “It was a beautiful moment that no one will ever be able to take away from the people who were involved.” The next morning, the trouble started early. Mr Spencer recalled driving to Emancipation Park with Mr Kessler. They arrived around 10.15am, and were almost instantly met with dissent. “As we were going in, I was sprayed with Mace,” Mr Spencer recounted. “Someone jumped out of the crowd, and I got it in the face.”

The counter-protesters included members of the local Charlottesville clergy and mainstream figures such as Harvard professor Cornel West. As the rally erupted into violence on Saturday morning, the First United Methodist Church on East Jefferson Street opened its doors to demonstrators, serving cold water and offering basic medical care.

Mr Hawley said he believed the far-left activists — known as antifa — were welcomed by the white nationalists. “I think to an extent, the alt-right loves the antifa because they see them as being the perfect foil,” he said.

But Dr Goldblatt, while not addressing those leftists who resorted to violence, said some kind of response in the street was necessary.

History, she said, has shown that “ignoring white supremacy, in terms of shutting your doors and not coming out to confront them, has been a really dangerous strategy”.

Mr Preston Wiginton, a white nationalist from Texas, announced this weekend that he would hold a White Lives Matter rally at Texas A&M University on Sep 11, with Mr Spencer as a guest speaker.

And on the neo-Nazi site, Daily Stormer, a post promised: “There will be more events. Soon. We are going to start doing this non-stop. Across the country.” THE NEW YORK TIMES