Charlottesville 2017 (Unite the Right)
“Unite the Right” rally; August 12, 2017; Charlottesville, Virginia; organized in part by Richard Spencer; murder of Heather Heyer by James Alex Fields Jr.; marked both the alt-right’s apogee and the beginning of its public collapse; Steve Bannon ousted from White House same month
What Happened
The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017 was the culmination of the alt-right’s post-Trump-election momentum, and simultaneously its turning point.
Background: Richard Spencer had led earlier rallies in Charlottesville in May 2017 to protest the planned removal of a Confederate statue of Robert E. Lee. These featured chants of “Russia is our friend!” and “You will not replace us.”
The rally: Spencer organized the August rally in part and featured as a speaker and leader of the tiki-torch march. The event faced opposition and counterprotests.
The murder: James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio intentionally drove his car into a crowd of protesters on August 12, 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring nineteen others. Fields pleaded guilty in 2019 to twenty-nine federal hate crimes and received a life sentence.
Aftermath
Steve Bannon: Ousted from the White House. He had already been scheduled to leave, but Trump’s new chief of staff John Kelly insisted he leave immediately after Charlottesville.
Jason Jorjani: Spencer’s AltRight Corporation co-founder; suspended from his academic job at the New Jersey Institute of Technology after a New York Times exposé on his extremism (September 2017); fell out with Spencer; left Arktos.
Julius Krein: His New York Times op-ed disavowing Trump — “I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It” — was published August 17, 2017, five days after Charlottesville.
Alt-right decline: “In many respects, Charlottesville marked the decline of the alt-right and the holding to account of some of its key figures.” Spencer’s public profile was substantially diminished.
The Paradox: Decline and Mainstreaming
Field’s key observation: Charlottesville simultaneously marked the alt-right’s public decline AND the beginning of a new process — its ideas being mainstreamed through more respectable channels. “Some of its key figures merely migrated to, or invented, other platforms; others worked their ideas into more conventional-seeming outlets. Bannon was out, but Miller would remain in the White House. The ‘alt-right’ was on the way out, but the ‘dissident’ Hard Right was rising.”
The Claremont Institute subsequently published Michael Anton’s sympathetic review of Bronze Age Mindset, and Claremont president Ryan Williams went on the Jack Murphy Live podcast to explain “why they engaged with Bronze Age Pervert, Curtis Yarvin, and Jack Posobiec.”
Cross-References
- Richard Spencer — key organizer
- Steve Bannon — ousted from White House afterward
- Julius Krein — disavowed Trump five days after Charlottesville
- Hard Right — the event that both exposed and catalyzed the Hard Right’s relationship to the MAGA New Right
- The Claremonters — subsequently mainstreamed Hard Right ideas through BAP review etc.
- National Conservatism — movement that had tried (imperfectly) to exclude the alt-right
- 2016 Election — the Trump victory that had emboldened the alt-right pre-Charlottesville