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Six years After The Charlottesville Unite The Right Rally, the Right Is More Toxic Then Ever [1]

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Date: 2023-08-12

The August 11, 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia may have shocked the nation with its open Nazi salutes, tiki torch parades, and chants of “Jews will not replace us,” but it was merely a prelude of things to come including the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Much has changed since then: former President Donald Trump is facing multiple indictments; groups such as The Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, Patriot Front, and Oath Keepers, have become household names; over 560 January 6 insurrectionists have been tried and convicted with 336 sentenced to prison with more cases to come; the Supreme Court continues to push a rightward agenda; and Christian nationalism has been successfully folded into the Republican Party.

Today’s right-wing activists aren’t openly marching and shouting “Jews will not replace us.” Instead, in the six years since Charlottesville, we have witnessed dramatic and targeted organizing by the right: school boards across the country are under attack by such organizations such as Moms for Liberty; book banning has become a right-wing thing; LGBTQ people are under attack in red state Republican-controlled legislatures; abortion rights have been decimated (though there has been a rising movement to fight back); Twitter (now X) has been taken over by reactionary billionaire Elon Musk; and the climate change-denying Heritage Foundation has been busy drawing up plans to destroy the “administrative state” should the GOP win the presidency in 2024.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center recently pointed out, “Members of the White nationalist movement are placing much of their energy into harnessing the anger and resentment of Trump supporters into a broad authoritarian movement. The hope to convince White Americans that they are persecuted by ‘anti-white’ ideas and policies, including the adoption of inclusive education in schools. This movement could cause further disruption and violence, especially as the country heads closer to the 2024 presidential election.”

With White nationalism thrust into the national spotlight, then-President Donald Trump was asked to comment on the White supremacist-initiated violence in Charlottesville, and he infamously stated that there were "very fine people on both sides," referring to both the anti-racists and the White nationalists.

“That [White nationalists] existed was itself nothing new. What was new, however, was the GOP’s recognition of the nascent era of Trumpian conservatism as an opportunity to both cement and capitalize on those shared interests more concretely than anytime since the 1960s,” Rafi Schwartz recently wrote (https://www.mic.com/impact/how-charlottesville-transformed-the-republican-party).

For many Americans, Charlottesville was the first encounter with the boldness and reality of White supremacists taking to the streets. And while Unite the Right didn’t actually unite the right, it, coupled with Trump’s presidency, accelerated the rise of right-wing terrorism as a major threat.

Unite the Right also solidified the important role right-wing media plays in drumming up the bigotry and conspiracy mongering that has become the coin of the GOP realm.

According to Schwartz:

That normalization has been sped by another symbiotic relationship: that between the GOP and the far-right media. The biggest player in the ecosystem is Fox News, whose various hosts’ screeds frequently rose to de facto policy slates within the Trump administration. Anti-immigrant rants by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham helped mainstream the White nationalist “great replacement” theory. What’s more, the pair’s invectives against removing Confederate iconography were aligned with the purported animating impetus behind the march itself — the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. While both Ingraham and Carlson had fanned the flames of bigotry in the past, that their post-Charlottesville broadcasts so overtly embraced the same rhetoric as the marchers show just how much Unite the Right was an ossifying moment for conservatives in general. Sure, the Nazi violence in the streets wasn’t ideal, but by massaging the marchers’ rallying cry just enough, Fox News and other right-wing outlets like Newsmax and OAN helped push the GOP more toward the far-right goal of a white Christian ethnostate than ever before.

We have learned – as if we didn’t know this already – that White nationalism is not an aberration in this country, and that it doesn’t take much to unleash the forces of bigotry and hate. The Unite the Right rally helped set off another period of White nationalism in the country, which has not slowed during the past six years. While the far right remains disparate and fractious, the Unite the Rally helped to embed the ideology of these groups in the Republican Party.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/12/2186818/-Six-years-After-The-Charlottesville-Unite-The-Right-Rally-the-Right-Is-More-Toxic-Then-Ever

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