I Went To an Alt-Right Rally So You Don’t Have To
White nationalists are trying to use “free speech” to control the terms of the conversation. Don’t let them.
This weekend — the day after a white nationalist plowed a car into a crowd of protesters, killing one and injuring many in Charlottesville, VA — a small, ragtag group of alt-right “patriots” descended on Westlake Park in Seattle for a rally on Free Speech. The rally was held by Joey Gibson’s Patriot Prayer. Gibson is a guy from Camas, WA who found his “calling” in activism during the election of Donald Trump.
Patriot Prayer recruits from across the conservative spectrum. As you might correctly guess, there were a fair share of beardos in MAGA hats at the rally yesterday, and also some rural folks holding signs about Jesus — the right’s stereotypical/historical “base.”
And then there’s this new thing: people who call themselves “Kekistanis,” residents of a fictional country created on 4Chan.
If you don’t know about “Kek,” please take a moment to familiarize yourself through the hyperlinks. Kek is a meme-based frog deity that helped get Trump elected. The whole thing is tongue-in-cheek, of course, but he’s also a *real* deity, in that he’s an object of attention and devotion for many, and this attention and devotion has manifest into action (things like voting for Trump en…
