Image Credit: NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images 
I wasn’t at Charlottesville, at the Unite the Right rally, in 2017.
I was in Oxford, writing up my DPhil on the English Reformation. I was thinking about church-building in the late Middle Ages, Puritan attitudes to religious music, the origins of the English Civil War…
But I was also thinking about Charlottesville.
My main thought, as I remember it, was pretty straightforward: “God, this is embarrassing and will almost certainly be a disaster not only for the people involved, but for President Trump, who will be tarred by association through no fault of his own. In fact, this will give the lying Fake News media exactly what they want: evidence that Trump is emboldening ‘Nazis’ or maybe, worse yet, is an actual ‘Nazi’ himself.”
I didn’t really know anything about the dramatis personae at Charlottesville—I think I’d seen a video of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face—but that was about it. Jason Kessler? Nope. Never heard of him. Nick Fuentes? The Hispanic guy in the Backstreet Boys? Sorry.
I didn’t even know the word “optics” in its current sense of “maintaining best appearances so as not to scare the hoes;” but I understood, intuitively, the principle—as, indeed, I think most people with two functioning hemispheres, a nervous system and eyes and ears would.
Stomping around at night brandishing tiki torches like a low-rent version of Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will, chanting “SHOES WILL NOT REPLACE US!”—it was never going to go over well, was it?
The message, if there was one, was bound to disappear amid the thumping resonance of a symbolism we’ve all been trained, over eight decades, to find as intrinsically foul as a huge steaming pile of dog shit or a toilet bowl full of sick.
The ironic thing, of course, is that nine years later, the most fundamental concerns of the Alt Right at Charlottesville—demographic change as a result of mass immigration, anti-white racism, political correctness and the left-wing attempt to rewrite history—are all fundamental concerns of the US government now. Mass deportations, the militarization of America’s southern border, the abolition of birthright citizenship, an end to the H-1B visa mill, the dismantling of DEI and institutional anti-white racism, a pro-white anti-migration foreign policy: America has the most right-wing government in living memory, and it’s not even close.
Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t serious problems with the second Trump administration, not least of all America’s relationship with Israel and the ongoing war with Iran; but still, anyone who tells you things would have been better off under President Kamala Harris is either stupid or lying to you. Some of you would be in jail.
Anyway, this remarkable transformation in government came about not because of Unite the Right, but in spite of it. Trump has been dogged, even to this day, by his perfectly reasonable attempt to say there were “very fine people on both sides” of the protest—meaning of course that there was nothing wrong with protesting the removal of a statue of an important American historical figure. People still believe Trump was offering explicit support for “Nazis,” and his comments are still brought up at every possible opportunity.
This week, our understanding of the Charlottesville saga took a fascinating turn, with news that the DoJ will be prosecuting the Southern Poverty Law Center for fraud, for funding some of the main “extremist” groups it claimed to be fighting. According to the indictment, the SPLC made payments totaling $3 million to prominent members of the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Alliance and American Front. The SPLC set up a number of different fictitious legal entities, like “North West Technologies” and “Tech Writers Group,” to funnel donors’ money to imperial wizards, exalted cyclopses and obersturmbahnführers of the Upper Midwest.
Oh yes—and to one of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally, who was paid $271,000 between 2015 and 2023.
It’s worth remembering people at the time, not least of all Alex Jones, were saying infiltrators, including the SPLC, had helped organize Unite the Right, and that the main purpose of doing so was to ensure a violent outrage took place. Violence did take place, and one very fat person died, but it could have been far, far worse. A massacre. It’s a miracle that didn’t happen.
Let’s be clear: The indictment does not show that all of the organizers of Unite the Right were in the pay of the SPLC. I don’t believe they were. Nor, indeed, do I believe the Alt Right was some kind of astroturfed, covert leftist operation, even if some of its leaders, like Richard Spencer, now look and sound indistinguishable from leftist trash. Many of the Alt Right’s concerns were undoubtedly organic, the product of genuine popular feeling—genuine popular feeling that has now made them concerns of the US government.
At present, we don’t know much more than that a series of payments was made to a single organizer. We don’t know who that person was—but there are some pretty good guesses. We don’t know what the money was for either, but the amount suggests it was something pretty bloody important. Two-hundred-and-seventy-one-thousand dollars is not pocket change.
Hopefully we’ll find out.
Political capital is already being made of these stunning revelations. Boomercons and Daily Wire-types are lapping them up, saying Unite the Right and the Alt Right itself were fake all along. This message is being repeated with remarkable consistency on social media, which may or may not be reason for suspicion.
Some of the more doom-and-gloom types on the American right, kicking out yet again like Pavlov’s wretched dogs, believe this messaging is a clear sign of an evil ruse. The DoJ’s target isn’t the SPLC: It’s the “dissident right” (i.e. the right that, among other things, dares to criticize Israel). The Trump administration doesn’t really care about fighting the radical left and dismantling DEI and anti-white racism, despite all the evidence to the contrary. What it actually wants to do is to trap the American right on the pro-Israel reservation until the Rapture takes Pete Hegseth up to heaven. The SPLC is a means to that end, to discredit the real opposition. It’s just a continuation of the previous policy with regard to the SPLC, which also aimed to destroy the real right, only in a different manner.
All I can reply at this point is, “If you say so!” Show me some evidence—something beyond your habitual knee-jerk response to transmute every hard-won victory into another stunning world-historical defeat—and then maybe I’ll believe you.
I don’t think the charges against the SPLC reveal anything untoward either, by the way. Yes, it would be nice to be able to charge every single employee with being a racist piece of shit who revels in the prospect of white Americans becoming a minority in their own country, and send them all to some Latrino hell-prison for the rest of their lives; but short of that, charging them with fraud and destroying the organization is punishment enough.
The indictment is already having a huge chilling effect on activist groups. Over 100 of them, including the SPLC, have now banded together to form the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights to counter “abuses of power”—read: further indictments and hostile audits—by the federal government.
If I could post that Starship Troopers meme, I would. But I can’t, so I’ll just say it.
“It’s afraid!”
Good. It’s about time.
