Far Right Plans Its Next Moves With a New Energy

The white supremacists and right-wing extremists who came together over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va., are now headed home, many of them ready and energized, they said, to set their sights on bigger prizes.

Some were making arrangements to appear at future marches. Some were planning to run for public office. Others, taking a cue from the Charlottesville event — a protest, nominally, of the removal of a Confederate-era statue — were organizing efforts to preserve white heritage symbols in their home regions.

Calling it “an opportune time,” Preston Wiginton, a Texas-based white nationalist, declared on Saturday that he planned to hold a “White Lives Matter” march on Sept. 11 on the campus of Texas A&M — with a keynote speaker, Richard B. Spencer, who was featured at the Charlottesville event.

Mr. Wiginton was not the only one seeking to capitalize on the weekend’s events. On Monday, Austin Gillespie, a conservative Florida lawyer who is better known as Augustus Sol Invictus and attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Virginia, said he planned to announce on Tuesday that he would seek Florida’s Republican nomination for the Senate. And at a news conference on Monday, Mr. Spencer, a prominent white supremacist, promised to return to Charlottesville for another rally. “There is no way in hell that I am not going back,” he said.

The far right, which has returned to prominence in the past year or so, has always been an amalgam of factions and causes, some with pro-Confederate or neo-Nazi leanings, some opposed to political correctness or feminism. But the Charlottesville event, the largest of its kind in recent years, exposed the pre-existing fault lines in the movement.

The ugliness of the rally — which included crowds of young white men offering the Nazi salute and which led to the death of a woman in a car attack — has resulted in a fracture on the right. After waiting days, for instance, to directly criticize the extremist groups, President Trump on Monday condemned white supremacists, saying from the White House that “racism is evil.”

Some hard-line conservatives beat Mr. Trump to the punch, apparently concluding that the marchers had gone too far and that their aggressiveness and messages could hurt the movement. Mike Cernovich, an influential right-wing media figure who is hardly shy of controversy, posted a Twitter message on Saturday afternoon, attacking what the self-proclaimed alt-right, parts of which use Nazi imagery and racist language, had become.

“The alt-right will now be made up of losers with nothing to lose,” he wrote. “This sets ceiling on numbers while also attracting loons and terrorists.”

Unwilling to be associated with explicit neo-Nazis, some of those invited to the Charlottesville event did not even bother showing up. Among them was Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, a conservative fraternal organization of self-described “Western chauvinists” that has engaged in several battles with the left in recent months.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/white-supremacists-right-wing-extremists-richard-spencer.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news