Wall Street Journal
By Dan Frosch, Cameron McWhirter and Ben Kesling
August 16, 2017
The white nationalist drove from South Carolina. The self-described patriot trekked from Tennessee. The college student espousing white pride flew in from Nevada.
The right-wing extremist movement, which until recently was fragmented by division, starved for members and lacking steady leadership, rarely was capable of uniting its forces as it did last weekend. The mayhem in Charlottesville., Va., was a signal that even if not numerous, these groups are unifying.
Patrick LaPorte IV, 35 years old, a white nationalist from South Carolina who attended the rally, said he was drawn to the event even though there wasn’t a single group driving the charge, but rather a loose conglomeration of like-minded people connected on social media. Mr. LaPorte, who brought a mouth guard with him for protection in the event of a brawl, said he isn’t bothered when people call him a Nazi, though if he were to label himself he would say he subscribes to “white identity.”
In the past, he said, white nationalists might have been scared of showing their faces. For many, he said, those days are over.
For law-enforcement officials and others who have long tracked the extremist groups that descended on Charlottesville, the attendance of so many disparate elements made the gathering a watershed. While only several hundred people showed up, far fewer than the tens of thousands who have gathered to demonstrate against President Donald Trump or support immigrant and women’s rights, it was among the largest gatherings of its kind in decades.
Among the factors driving this new cooperation: a web-driven rebranding of white nationalism that has broadened its reach and allowed groups to work together; a wave of new young, leaders that helped bridge old divisions; and Mr. Trump’s remarks on immigrants, Muslims and media bias, which have left such groups feeling emboldened.
Michael German, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who worked undercover in white-supremacist and neo-Nazi groups in California and Washington during the 1990s, said back then they were so antagonistic toward each other that anyone joining one group was barred from others.
The weekend rally showed that attendees—including white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other groups including self-described defenders of Southern heritage and the First Amendment—were willing to put aside ideological differences to get behind a platform designed to appeal to the Trump administration, which they perceive as sympathetic to their causes, he said.
“What we’ve seen is that these groups are coming together and are maximizing their opportunity to get their point of view across,” he said, “not just to the nation, but to actually influence policy.”
Many leaders of the movement backed Mr. Trump during his campaign and continue to back his leadership, and support his disdain for the media. Eli Mosley, director of events for Identity Evropa—a group describing itself as “a generation of awakened Europeans”—and one of the Charlottesville rally’s organizers, said Mr. Trump gave groups like his “a megaphone” for their “message and ideas.”
“I would say Trump is not one of us, however he does have an implicit sense of white identity,” he said. “Maybe he doesn’t realize it, but he’s distinctly implying it.”
The Charlottesville rally, dubbed “Unite the Right,” was organized to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. It quickly descended into violence. A car driven by an Ohio man with a history of sympathizing with Nazis plowed into a crowd, killing a woman and injuring 19 others. Two police officers who were monitoring the rally also died Saturday when their helicopter crashed.
It was the latest expression of an extremism that has flared throughout American history, especially during periods of social, economic and political stress. In the 1910s and 1920s, the revived Ku Klux Klan drew millions. During the Great Depression, the German American Bund, a Nazi organization, drew supporters with attacks on leftists and Jews. Splinter groups of the KKK and other white-nationalist organizations committed violence against civil-rights workers and blacks during the 1950s and 1960s.
By the 1970s, white-nationalist groups were splintered and small, yet still showed a propensity for violence. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in which the main conspirator had been influenced by white-supremacist and antigovernment ideas, killed 168 people and led to a prolonged FBI crackdown.
Many followers of those groups operated “on the edges of criminality,” said Kathleen Blee, a University of Pittsburgh sociologist who has written books about the Ku Klux Klan, so it became easy for law enforcement to turn followers into informants.
The Charlottesville gathering, she said, was “one of the first cases where people from old racist movements, the David Dukes, came together with the new alt-right in a common project. It’s remarkable that they could pull together this event.” (“Alt-right” is a catchall phrase for far-right groups that embrace tenets of white supremacy or reject mainstream conservatism.)
Social-media effect
The loose agglomeration has coalesced on social media— Facebook , YouTube, Twitter —and online chat rooms. “I can punch a button and have a message out to 10,000 people immediately,” said Preston Wiginton, 52, who recently announced a “White Lives Matter” forum on Sept. 11 at Texas A&M University until the university canceled it on Monday.
Mr. Wiginton said groups such as his are starting to work closely with similar organizations. Meetings like Charlottesville show there is “an uprising” under way by whites against “displacement and marginalization” caused by “diversity and multiculturalism,” he said.
Some newer alt-right groups boast slick websites that have drawn new members. The website for Identity Evropa features photos of young, well-dressed members, essays on white superiority and “boutique” merchandise for sale. The organization is considered a white-supremacist hate group by a range of organizations, including New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.
Mr. Mosley of Identity Evropa disputed the hate-group characterization and said such designations are intended to stifle free speech.
The broader movement has developed greater cohesion around younger public leaders including white nationalist Richard Spencer, who runs an organization dedicated, in its words, to “the future of people of European descent in the U.S.” and is considered a founder of the alt-right.
Jared Taylor, editor of the white-nationalist website American Renaissance, said Mr. Trump’s influence on the movement had been exaggerated. “This movement was growing with him, without him, and will continue to grow once he’s gone,” he said. “He was exciting, of course, because some of his policies were congruent with some of the policies we would like to see implemented.”
Mr. Trump faced criticism from Republicans and Democrats for not immediately condemning white supremacists for the Charlottesville violence, instead at first blaming “many sides.” Several chief executives have since resigned from a manufacturing-advisory council to the Trump administration in an apparent protest of his failure to speak out more quickly.
On Monday, Mr. Trump singled out white-nationalist groups by name for condemnation. On Tuesday, he backtracked, saying again that he blamed “both sides” for the violence and defending those who showed up to protest the removal of the Lee statue.
The White House dismissed white-nationalist claims that Mr. Trump’s reticence to immediately issue a condemnation counts as an expression of support. “The president has been clear on this in his condemnation of these groups,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders in an email.
In some ways, the internet is proving to be as much a liability as a booster for the movement. Some who attended the Charlottesville rally are being identified on social media by counterprotesters demanding they be fired from their jobs. The Daily Stormer, a prominent neo-Nazi website, was kicked off hosting platforms GoDaddy and Alphabet Inc.’s Google for hate-speech violations after a social-media blitz by progressive activists against the site.
The movement’s size can be difficult to ascertain because membership is secretive and fleeting, meaning there is little detailed information on how many people are actively involved or espouse their beliefs.
A report this year by the Anti-Defamation League found that from 1993 to 2017 extremist right-wing individuals and groups committed 150 terrorist acts, attempted acts, plots and conspiracies in the U.S. The ADL found 43% of these incidents or conspiracies were by white supremacists, 42% were by antigovernment extremists and 11% were by antiabortion extremists.
The report found that the number of such incidents rose in the early 1990s, then fell off, only to rise again between 2009 and today.
Some white nationalists who attended the Charlottesville rally said despite the violence that marred the event there is a renewed sense of urgency that their voices be heard. Attendees in interviews said finally there was an administration that seemed to acknowledge their view that immigration was contributing to the country’s demise.
“We have about a 20-year window that’s going to allow for democratic political change,” said Mr. LaPorte, the white nationalist from South Carolina.
Jeans, polo shirts
He said the movement’s lack of cohesion doesn’t matter online. That said, there was some coordination before arrival, he said. Some people came dressed in dark combat fatigues and others, like him, in jeans and polo shirts.
At the weekend march, the infamous hoods and robes of Klan rallies or brownshirts of neo-Nazis were hard to find, with many dressing like Mr. LaPorte. Even those who wore extremist garb often eschewed more well-known symbols such as swastikas and instead wore pins that read “88,” a number that serves as shorthand for Heil Hitler.
At the rally, older Southern-pride proponents with scraggly beards and militants dressed in all black with pants tucked into their combat boots rallied alongside young, clean-shaven men with neat haircuts, and at least one whose blazer sported a pocket square.
In one photo, a smartly dressed young man is seen hoisting a torch, his mouth agape as he shouts while marching through the city. Peter Cvjetanovic, a 20-year-old student at the University of Nevada, Reno, said in an interview he was the man in the picture.
Mr. Cvjetanovic said he joined Identity Evropa a month earlier and found out about the rally via an internal web server Identity Evropa uses. He flew to Virginia, he said, “to honor and respect white heritage in all its good and all its bad.”
He said he was pleased so many organizations came together in Charlottesville. While he was unsettled by the violence, he said, he has felt compelled to stay true to his ideology since returning home, where he says he has received death threats. “The world hates me no matter what I do,” he said. “I can’t back down now.”
Doc Smith, who sells beef jerky in Clarksville, Tenn., at first wasn’t sure he wanted to attend last week’s gathering in Charlottesville, because he thought marching alongside neo-Nazis would reflect badly on the organization he belongs to, a self-described patriot group called the Hiwaymen.
On Friday morning, Mr. Smith, 50 years old, who has traveled the country to protest the removal of Confederate monuments, put that thought aside and climbed into his pickup truck for the nine-hour drive to Virginia. When he returned home on Sunday, despite his sadness over the death of a young woman, he felt the movement would be inspired. His Facebook page is a story line of videos and updates from Charlottesville.
“Watch the movement explode behind what happened in Charlottesville,” he said. “The next time we come back, there may be thousands.”
—Scott Calvert contributed to this article.
Write to Dan Frosch at dan.frosch@wsj.com, Cameron McWhirter at cameron.mcwhirter@wsj.com and Ben Kesling at benjamin.kesling@wsj.com
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