In the aftermath of the horrific events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where one person was killed and more than a dozen others injured in violence surrounding the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally, some event organizers and those who were set to be speakers are trying to claim that they are neither neo-Nazis nor racist and that they did not incite violence. Both claims are patently false.
In a statement released via the white nationalist radio show “Political Cesspool” yesterday, Unite the Right rally organizer Jason Kessler said (in part) that his group couldn’t “be characterized as ‘Neo-Nazis’ because 1 person appeared at a public rally with a swastika.”
But he knows it was not just one person: young men bearing torches gave the Nazi salute at a march the night before the rally—an event Kessler called an “incredible moment for white people.”
There was at least one guy with one swastika flag at Saturday’s rally:
And protesters attending the Saturday rally chanted the Nazi slogan “blood and soil”:
Further, Kessler invited Richard Spencer, a white supremacist Alt-Right activist, to headline the rally, after Spencer had infamously led a crowd in the Nazi salute at an event in November, yelling “Hail Trump!” And yet Kessler claims there was just one neo-Nazi at his event.
James Allsup, a Washington State University student who had made a racist video about Black Lives Matter, was set to speak at the rally. As photos of him participating in Unite the Right events began to circulate, Allsup tried to backtrack, saying: “They have no proof that I’m racist. They are slandering me and that I’m racist without evidence because I talk about history and I talk about American politics.”
On top of the photos of Allsup walking in the torch march and the simple fact that he was a named speaker at a white supremacist event, Allsup posted a video of himself and friends walking around Charlottesville, yelling slurs at people while surrounded by their own security detail.
Unite the Right organizers can’t get their stories straight on other aspects of the day, either. They don’t want to be responsible for the act of terror that killed counter-protester Heather Heyer and other instances of violence, but are also proud of themselves for organizing an event that got national attention.
Militia members marched in wearing camo and carrying weapons, but Spencer claimed the protesters gathered in peace:
If the rally was going to be peaceful, why did the League of the South show up in helmets and carrying homemade shields?
And why was self-declared “god among men” and eugenicist Augustus Invictus clearly prepared for battle?
Several of the rally leaders retweeted the “LucidHurricaneX” Twitter account, which blamed the vehicle attack that killed Heather Heyer on liberals—claiming that lefties were attacking the terrorist’s car and that’s why he drove into the crowd:
Matt “the next David Duke” Heimbach, founder of the Traditionalist Worker Network, appeared to celebrate Heyer’s murder:
And League of the South’s Dr. Michael Hill was proud of his team’s behavior at the event:
Twenty-year old Deandre Harris was beaten with poles by a group of white supremacists in a parking lot while Kessler, Spencer, and disgraced former-Business Insider CTO Pax Dickinson all tried to co-opt the language of the civil rights movement (Dickinson’s Twitter account has since been suspended):
Of course, these tweets from Pax about civil disobedience are at odds with his pro-lynching tweets from the day before the rally:
There is one part of the story that the rally participants and their supporters aren’t trying to hide, however. They agree that Jewish people are to blame.
Some extremists want people to think the violence was committed, or funded, by Jewish people. After the Charlottesville violence made national news, Alex Jones insisted that Klan members at racist events are paid Jewish actors and Trump ally Wayne Allyn Root wrote that the white nationalists in Charlottesville were “hired by Soros.”
Outed rally participant Peter Cvjetanovic tried to clear his name but not make his racist friends too angry by using the “infamous neo-Nazi” code phrase known as “14 words”: “As a white nationalist, I care for all people. We all deserve a future for our children and for our culture. White nationalists aren’t all hateful; we just want to preserve what we have.”
And Dr. Michael Hill and white supremacist blogger Johnny Monoxide retweeted blatantly anti-Semitic messages:
