On August 12, 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia hosted the largest fascist-led rally the United States had seen in many decades. What happened shocked the nation out of its complacency regarding how right-wing politics were unfolding in the US under the then-President Donald Trump. This also foretold the coming years of far right violence. Charlottesville’s effects still reverberate today, both on those who were present and in local and national politics. It is possible to trace the direct line from that rally to January 6, 2021’s storming of Capitol.
The Violence Begins
The evening before the “Unite the Right” rally, attendees of a torchlit march chanted “Jews will not replace us” and attacked peaceful student counter-protesters. The following day, street fighting was capped when a neo Nazi drove a car to an anti-fascist march and killed Heather Heyer. He also injured almost 30 others. Three days later, Trump made his infamous statement that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Steve Grey is a militant anti-fascist who drove from the northeast to provide support for local counter-protesters and community members in what he knew would be “a very dangerous situation.” Arriving the night before with other activists, they heard that the fascists were on the move and went to intercept them. But Grey and his fellow anti-fascists didn’t know what they were getting into. The mob was attacking terrified students at the University of Virginia (UVA), as they tried to counterprotest. They were protected by out-of-town antifascists. Grey said he was surprised that he only “got a little hurt considering how many people attacked us,” including being punched by a dozen people and burned with torches. Devin Willis (one of the students) later described how lighter fluid was thrown upon him. “I thought I had made a very terrible mistake and that I might die that night,” he said.
The counter-protesters’ anger was fueled by the acts of the night prior, which continued until the actual rally. Both sides were dispersed by the police, who had until that point been absent completely. Later, the car attack occurred in a different place.
Today, many of those who were there during the attack are still suffering from trauma. Some have suffered life-altering injuries. Natalie Romero’s skull fracture changed the shape of her forehead and she has difficulty holding things. Panic attacks are also common. Thomas BakerYou will need a hip replacement. Marissa BlairMarcus Martin and Marcus Martin were married shortly after the attack. However, their injuries continued to follow them. He couldn’t continue playing sports and she couldn’t focus enough to read a book. They grew apart and eventually divorced — something Blair directly attributed to the events. Others, who weren’t physically hurt, still suffer from anxiety, flashbacks and survivors’ guilt.
Reverberating Effects
Local politics were also affected by the fallout. The UVA administration was under pressure to hold them accountable immediately afterward. However, they did not stop the torchlit march. Jalane Schmidt, a scholar-activist at UVA, said that in the city itself there has been “much more consciousness of the institutional nature of white supremacy.” After Unite the Right, local activists “finally got some traction” in addressing racial disparities around affordable housing, social services and policing, and were able to influence the planning commission’s passage of a new comprehensive plan.
The events at Charlottesville were a sign of far-right violence to come. Heyer was not the first person murdered by the “alt-right,” but her death portended many more, including by vehicular attacks, in subsequent years. Video footage of anti-fascists fighting in the streets soon became commonplace. There were also many car attacks and deaths during Black Lives Matter protests a few years later. In just the two weeks after George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, 19 deathsThese were linked to the demonstrations. In less than two years, cars were driven into demonstrations. 68 times. Right-wing memes encouraging car attack became more common. Some states even passed them. “hit-and-kill” lawsDrivers are granted varying degrees of immunity if they strike protesters.
White supremacist massacres based on the same template proliferated. These included attacks on a Pittsburgh synagogue (11 dead); a Walmart in El PasoThe attack on Latinos left 23 dead, and a Black supermarket in Buffalo left 10 dead. Of the numerous shootings which killed fewer people, the most infamous was Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder of two at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, demonstration. Even the multiple deaths of January 6th are often overlooked in the context of the attempted coup.
Charlottesville had a devastating effect on the far right. In 2015 and 2016, the openly white supremacist wing of the “alt-right” was able to flex real political muscle by acting in concert with the more “moderate” parts — those which stopped just short of openly racist politics, such as the Proud Boys. This alliance was disbanded due to widespread outrage at the Unite the Right events. Hannah Gais, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the rally “stymied the abilities of alt-right leaders to actuate political change,” putting it “on a path of irreversible decline.”
Gais also observed two other trends to the right. The most radical elements, such the neo Nazi Atomwaffen Division, embraced terrorism. They held that legal political action by white supremacists was inevitably a strategy of failure, and violence had to be used to take “the system” down.
The second trend Gais pointed out was that, although most in the Republican Party separated themselves from the open white supremacists, “The mainstream right … has increasingly embraced conspiracy theories, such as the ‘Great Replacement,’ that extremists used in their chants that weekend.” (The baseless “Great Replacement” idea holds that there is an intentional plan to alter the demographics of white-majority countries so that whites become a minority. In the more extreme version, “the Jews” are held responsible for masterminding it; in the more mainstream form, individual Jews are often named, especially George Soros.) Gais noted that that “rhetoric won that day, even if its organizers did not.”
Joe Biden also frequently referred to Charlottesville in the past, most notably in the video announcing his presidential run, where he called it a “defining moment for this nation” and attacked Trump’s “very fine people” comment. Biden’s official statementOn the fourth anniversary of Charlottesville, a new hate crime statute was adopted. But Biden’s Charlottesville mentions haven’t always gone down well with everyone. He called Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, later in the same day that his election video came out, but she did not endorse him. (Bro joined him later at the hate crime bill sign-in. Grey is philosophical about this, saying that while Biden is no friend of anti-fascists, at least his video did not denounce “both sides.”
From Charlottesville to Jan 6
Gais said that the events of Charlottesville and January 6 are “inextricably linked to one another.” The shared participants are the most obvious, of course. They include Baked Alaska(Anthime Gionet, a speaker at the rally in 2017, and Nick Fuentes who is the leader of the white supremacist Groypers. Moreover, the organizer of the Unite the Right, Jason Kessler, was a member of the Proud Boys — the same group whose coordinated actions on January 6 led to the arrests of over 40 members.
The two events were, ideologically speaking, the major public actions by the extreme and moderate sides of the alliance that was formed in 2015 after Trump’s election bid. Both the far-right-leaning open white supremacists who rant about Jewish conspiracies and the red-hatted Trumpists who rant about the stolen election share the same underlying ideas. Both aim to destroy the democratic process and replace it with a hierarchical, dictatorial state.
While in reality they are the most privileged members of a society, in their imagination they are its victims, persecuted by “elites” (whom they define as Jews, globalists or “the swamp”) and undermined by subversive radicals (anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter). They believe in a utopian future (whether a white ethno-state or an America made great again) — but they believe that time is running out, and they must act now or their country (or race) will be lost.
Tactically, there is obviously no shortage of examples of the kind of violence seen at Unite the Right in the country’s history. But militant movements don’t arise out of thin air, and they almost always need to have some previous actions to motivate themselves and get everything into alignment. Charlottesville stood out for its bravery in using violence at large, far-right-leaning demonstrations. This was the first time this kind of violence had been seen since the turn century. What Gais called “a disavowal of traditional politics and the demographic process, combined with decentralized violence” was the door that Charlottesville opened at the beginning of Trump’s administration. At the end, it was January 6.
