After all the spectacle, just 20 nazis marched in DC. They were provided a private metro car to the event, and police vans from it. They were vastly outnumbered by counter protestors. Given how tepid the online chatter was leading up to the event I’d expected a small turnout but even I was pleasantly surprised at just how few white nationalists turned up. Jason Kessler’s rally was a spectacular failure that cost DC residents $2.6 million, or $87,000 per Nazi.
It would be easy to laugh at Kessler’s failure. Especially given that he’s now living with his parents and his Dad is interrupting his Internet videos to humiliate him. But America’s White Supremacy problem is far from over. Here’s a breakdown of what we’re facing, one year after Charlottesville:
- White Supremacists are running for office and winning Republican primaries. Corey Stewart, the Minnesota native who has embraced a Confederate heritage that doesn’t even belong to him, is the Republican nominee for Senate in Virginia. He’s also the only Virginia politician who hasn’t condemned white nationalists. Stewart is part of small but growing movement of candidates who are running on white nationalism and winning primaries.
- Violent White Supremacist protests are still happening. We might not see another white nationalist rally as large as Charlottesville in 2017 but the Frogs have never stopped demonstrating, and those protests are still violent.
- White Supremacist beliefs are now mainstreamed. Recent research suggests that 11 million Americans think like the so-called Alt-Right. There’s also research showing definitively that racial resentment, not economic anxiety, propelled candidate Trump to victory and when white people “fear democracy will benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment” to it.
- Tech companies still empower (and profit from) White Supremacy. One year after tech companies made a big show out of kicking the Frogs off their platforms, white supremacists can for the most part still crowdfund their hate online easily on mainstream platforms. And as Right Wing Watch points out, Silicon Valley is still more than happy to profit from their efforts.
- White Supremacy is a national security threat. Former intelligence officials have been sounding the alarm about this for years. A poll conducted by Military Times last year revealed that U.S. military troops rate white nationalism a bigger national security threat than Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.” Nowhere is this more obvious than Russia’s continued campaign to exploit America’s unresolved issues with race online, a campaign which Trump and the majority of the Republican party have no interest in stopping. Appeasing their white supremacist base matters more to them than protecting America from foreign attack.
“Racism is a cultural and institutional disease to be quarantined, not a moral position to be debated.” said Joan Donovan and Brian Friedberg this week. They were writing about how America media fails to cover white supremacy in a way that doesn’t amplify and validate their message but their words can be applied more broadly to America culture around race.
White supremacy is a moral issue but America continues to treat it as a political issue with two equally valid positions. Jason Kessler’s attempt at organizing another rally might have failed but his mission of uniting the right into a white supremacist political movement succeeded.
White supremacy is a moral issue but America continues to treat it as a political issue with two equally valid positions.
