White Supremacists Discuss Impact of Charlottesville Incident
White supremacists debated the impact of last summer’s Charlottesville rallies, another illustration of the lingering divisiveness throughout the white supremacy movement.
On November 2, user Vermont on the Goyim Know forums started a poll asking members if Charlottesville “was a net gain or net loss.”
As of 4:50pm EST, thirty-nine percent of poll participants voted “net neutral” while the same amount voted “net gain.”
Only 22 percent of participants voted that the Charlottesville incident was a “net loss” for their cause.
“I don’t see how it could be anything but a net loss,” smith35 wrote in response to Vermont’s post.
“We were growing before C’ville and now? I’m not sure.”
However, user ionwhitelll begged to differ:
“It was a net gain. The AltRight and Daily Stormer became part of the national conversation, and remains an established part of it.”
Meanwhile, users Cobalt_60 and Che more or less opined that “any press is good press.”
Forum members also talked about the impact Charlottesville had on The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi publication that recently found a new home on the clearnet after being temporarily shutdown by the government of Anguilla.
“For [The Daily Stormer]? I don’t know the statistics but I doubt it will do any good to constantly be changing hosting servers,” voiced user Misos.
“Not for [The Daily Stormer] but for the survival of the white race in general,” replied Vermont.
But perhaps the most disturbing of the responses came from a user named Mosin-Nagant who wrote that from a “militaristic standpoint, 3 enemy combatants are dead. That’s good for us.”
The Goyim Know poll is hardly exhaustive of white supremacist opinions about the Charlottesville rallies, but it is illustrative of the disaccord currently debilitating the movement.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, internal conflict in the white supremacy movement has increased since the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last summer.
White supremacist “factions” are reportedly at odds about how they should act, dress, and “promote their cause” during protests.
One side argues that the movement should embrace “American Nationalism” and support a form of racism that appeals to conservatives with unifying symbols like the American flag.
And the other, the so-called “hard right” faction, proposes a National Socialist approach with militant attire and strong language.
Key supremacist leaders also criticized how last week’s “White Lives Matter” rally in Shelbyville, TN was handled.
Additionally, Hunter Wallace, the public relations chief of League of the South and Evan McLaren, the executive director of the National Policy Institute, have engaged in a rather public argument about the movement on Twitter, which exposes the movement to further criticism from internal and external forces.
The ongoing fragmentation of the white supremacy movement is a sign that the cause is weakening in spite of its versatile use of social media and its expanding role in American political discourse.
Left unaddressed, the painful cycle of fragmentation will continue until white supremacist leaders adequately address their differing opinions in a timely and orderly fashion.
With dozens of groups each claiming to represent white America in a wide variety of ways, it seems that last summer’s “Unite the Right” rally managed to do the exact opposite of its name.
