A year after Charlottesville, hate marches on

It’s been a year since hundreds of white nationalists, carrying everything from semi-automatic rifles and Nazi symbols to Confederate flags and tiki torches, marched on the grounds of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, chanting “Jews will not replace us” and threatening people of color.

The rally, which started on the night of Aug. 11 and continued through the next day, culminated in tragedy — as a self-proclaimed white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters, injuring 19 and killing one.  Separately, two Virginia state troopers died in a helicopter crash while en route to provide more security and help quell the violence.

Though Charlottesville resembled the sort of race-themed conflicts that were common prior to the Civil Rights era, experts today see the Charlottesville rally as a significant political and cultural event, something that energized hate groups nationwide and pushed the practice of routine violence against people of color and other targeted groups closer to mainstream.

The rally — and President Donald Trump’s “both sides” response to it — also gave oxygen to extremists of all stripes, from the far-left group Antifa, which has embraced conflict and physical violence as away to combat fascism, to the mainstream political campaigns of several self-acknowledged white supremacists and American Nazis.

Floodgates opened

Since Charlottesville, white supremacists have held at least 54 rallies nationwide. Some have turned violent, drawing counter-protesters and skirmishes between opposing groups. Recent examples of such violence took place in Berkeley and Portland, Ore.

“Charlottesville is the largest show of white supremacy our nation has seen in about a decade,” said Joanna Mendelson, senior investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism in Los Angeles.

“Charlottesville opened Pandora’s Box. It set the tone.”

The ADL on Thursday Aug. 9, close to the one-year anniversary of the Charlottesville march, released a Hate Extremism Anti-Semitism Terrorism (H.E.A.T) map, an interactive feature with more than 4,500 data points showing right-wing, Islamist and left-wing terror plots in the country between 2002 and 2017. It also has information on white supremacist propaganda on campus, white power rallies, and anti-Semitic incidents.

The ADL reported that 2017 saw a 60 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents from 2016, the biggest year-to-year spike since 1979 when the organization began tracking such data.

Turning hate mainstream

Charlottesville is playing a pivotal role in pushing the ideals of white supremacists closer to the mainstream, said Peter Simi, associate professor of sociology of Chapman University who has studied white supremacy for more than two decades.

Simi recalled taking a photo of a billboard he saw in Las Vegas, in 2002, because it portrayed what he viewed as a racist message. “It was a map of the United States, with arrows coming out of Mexico,” he said. The arrows, he added, were drawn to depict “an invasion” — a concept that, at the time, was viewed as fringe.

Three months ago, he said, the same image popped up on his Facebook feed.

“This was posted by someone who is part of my social network. It’s amazing to me that what was once posted by (a) fringe, extremist group is now being displayed to millions of people through Facebook.

“This is where we are today,” Simi added. “Nothing sounds crazy any more.”

Trump’s comments in the wake of Charlottesville — saying the conflict involved “fine people on both sides” — also offended many who believed the president’s criticism of white nationalists should have been clear and unequivocal.

Simi suggested that attitude, and ongoing rhetoric from and policies enacted by the White House targeting Muslims and immigrants, is changing mainstream politics.

Though white supremacists and others who espouse racist views routinely aspire to political office, they’ve almost always run on third party tickets. In this election cycle several candidates who describe themselves as American Nazis or white supremacists have run as Republicans — a fact that has outraged some in the GOP and energized others.

Race baiting at school

In the year since Charlottesville, coarsening rhetoric increasingly is seen and heard and felt on school campuses, said Peter Levi, regional director of ADL’s Orange County/Long Beach chapter.

“It’s clear in our K-12 schools, in our area, hate incidents are increasing just like in the rest of the country,” Levi said.

“It’s not just Anti-Semitism. We’re seeing an increase in anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant incidents,” Levi added. “When one marginalized group is targeted, all groups are targeted.”

There’s also been a bump in hate talk online.

“Our kids are tech savvy and find this world of hate out there. The online space is where everyone gathers to spread hateful ideology and get new recruits.”

Levi offered the example of Atomwaffen, the white supremacist group to which Samuel Woodward, the 20-year-old Orange County man accused of murdering Blaze Bernstein, a gay, Jewish student, allegedly belonged.

“That hate group wasn’t based in Orange County or even Southern California,” Levi said. “But he found it online.”

Thriving right and left

In addition to energizing the alt-right, Charlottesville also has roused fringe groups on the left, primarily the Antifa, whose members are known to come to right-wing rallies masked, dressed in all black and armed with pepper spray.

Arno Michaelis, a former white supremacist who now works to counter such ideologies and narratives, said extremists on both the left and right “need each other” to survive.

Michaelis, who lives in Milwaukee, said he knows this from experience. He co-wrote “The Gift of Our Wounds” with Pardeep Singh Kaleka, whose father was one of six people killed in 2012 by gunman Wade Page at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis. In that book Michaelis notes that the hate group he founded in the 1980s helped breed radicals such as Page.

Now, in post-Charlottesville America, Michaelis sees conservative hate mongers thriving on what he perceives as push back from the far left — what Michaelis describes as a “white people suck” narrative. That attitude, in his view, is “very much energizing for white supremacists.”

“These are the engines that drive polarization and help these groups energize each other.”

After Charlottesville, a change?

While post Charlottesville America remains racially charged, a few signs point in a different direction.

Earlier this week, at a doctor’s office in Jacksonville, Fla., Michaelis stood with another former white supremacist, Ken Parker, as a dermatologist removed Nazi tattoos from Parker’s skin.

Parker, a Navy veteran who joined the Ku Klux Klan in 2012, and later joined the National Socialist Movement, said his change of heart came last summer. The day after he marched in Charlottesville, he said, he nearly collapsed from heat exhaustion.

A film maker at the scene, Deeyah Khan, who was making “White Right: Meeting the Enemy,” saw Parker suffering and did something that touched Parker’s heart — she offered him a drink of water.

“I used to think all Muslims were terrorists,” Parker said, referencing Khan. “But meeting her, and talking to her, really opened my eyes.”

The solutions

Mendelson said the solutions to what Charlottesville has unleashed must “be varied.”

“We need to engage policy makers, organizations, have partners in tech and work with educators because our kids are absorbing this larger sentiment of hate,” she said. “We need to make our youth critical thinkers in the world of ‘fake news’ and need to teach them to be savvy consumers of social media.”

It’s also important to engage children in conversations about these difficult topics.

“The ADL has a curriculum that talks about Charlottesville and how to open up and talk to your kids,” she said. “If we don’t do that, we’ll have a very long road ahead of us.”

Simi says he has mixed feelings about Charlottesville. While it generated a major pushback against white nationalism and bigotry, it also helped mainstream an ideology, which was struggling in the fringes of society, he said.

“The one thing that we should never do as a society,” Simi said, “is to normalize it.”