Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  Among them was the League of the South. The group had further radicalized in the years after Jack Kershaw’s death. No longer did its members troll commuters with Dadaesque roadside art or sue the government for white reparations. (Wait, that’s not entirely true. Every week in the spring of 2014, I would drive to a dive bar on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa with the woman who is now my wife, to drink Bud Light, eat patty melts, and fall in love. And every week we would pass under a billboard, stark white with plain black text in the center that read, simply, secede. The billboard was paid for by the League of the South.) But the League had bigger, more malevolent things in mind, too. In an effort to boost membership, Michael Hill recruited more extreme white nationalists to replace the professors and artists who had left or died. This included people like Michael Tubbs, a former Green Beret who was arrested in the 1990s on federal theft and conspiracy charges for robbing two soldiers of their weapons, yelling “This is for the KKK,” as he fled. Soon, the League of the South began to form paramilitary groups. The year after Kershaw’s death, Hill urged members to arm themselves with everything from automatic weapons to “tools to derail trains.” With increased militancy came a harder ideology. In 2013, Hill went on the “Political Cesspool” radio show, where he declared, “We are for the survival, well-being, and independence of the Southern people,” he told listeners. “And when we say ‘the Southern people’ we mean white Southerners. We are an ethno-­nationalist movement and we want a free and independent South for our people, as our homeland.”

  Then came the Charleston Nine murders—what Dylann Roof hoped would be the opening salvo in a race war. Roof had been radicalized, in part, by reading far right websites, and his actions were a clear example of leaderless resistance: an independent actor tapped into a network of fellow radicals, his ideology was forged around an online campfire but his actions attributed to a lone wolf. As early as 1984, Louis Beam had created a proto-­social-media network, Aryan Nations Liberty Net, to provide a digital platform for far-right cells to connect. In recent years, the ubiquity and speed of the internet had only made Beam’s strategy more relevant.

  Two weeks after the murders in Charleston, Michael Hill wrote on the League of the South’s recently updated website that the attacks on Confederate monuments in response to Roof’s violence represented “cultural genocide” against white people. It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider Hill’s response, as it provides some insight into the deep ties of identity to which these monuments are bound. That someone would claim, in the aftermath of an act of domestic terror committed with the explicit purpose of starting a race war, that his race was the one under attack, reveals the narcissism, the paranoia, the utter fragility of the white identity represented in these statues.

  As the campaigns to remove Confederate monuments intensified in 2017, an idea began to spread among the far right: the possibility of moving from leaderless resistance to something more united. Pre-Wi-Fi groups like the League of the South were finding common cause with digital-natives who had taken to calling themselves the alt-right. Richard Spencer, a white nationalist and Neo-Nazi who runs a think tank, coined the term back in 2010. It’s an anodyne term for a diffuse and shifting group of white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, men’s-rights activists, and internet trolls, that had coalesced in 2014 in places like 4chan, Reddit, and Breitbart News, and their irony-laden internet presence charged into the mainstream of American political discourse during the 2016 presidential election. Mostly white, mostly men, mostly bitter, the alt-right generally believe America is a white, Christian nation and that the forces of multiculturalism, immigration, and political correctness are out to undermine white control of a white country. As Spencer likes to say, “Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity.” Spencer, like many in the alt-right, rejects the idea that race is a social construct, and instead believe, based on debunked science, that white supremacy is a biological fact. In keeping with such beliefs, they also believe that “Radical Islamic terror” constitutes to them an existential threat, and legal immigration is the beating heart of the country’s problem. They fear what they call “demographic displacement”—the census projections that by 2042, white Americans will become a minority of the population. They hold a deep fear of change, driven, more deeply, by a fear that should nonwhite people take power, they will subject white people to the same oppression and violence and alienation from power that white people have for so long practiced.

  Yes, for some these grievances and paranoia stem from diminished economic prospects. This sentiment is perhaps best captured by a popular blogger’s screen name: “Millennial Woes.” But similar to their predecessors—men like Jack Kershaw who literally lived in a country club or Michael Hill who was a tenured professor before leaving to run the League of the South full time—the younger generation come from all classes. The millions of dollars that conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich made from his Facebook stock did not temper his views on gender and race. Proud Boys leader Gavin McGinnis had cofounded internationally influential Vice Media, while the ascendant alt-right leader Richard Spencer’s family owns thousands of acres of cotton fields in Louisiana, where they receive millions of dollars in subsidies from the federal government. This racial entitlement cuts across class lines, as it was invented to do.

  And the mainstreaming of so many of the alt-right’s ideas, attitudes, manners, and methods led to a novel idea: coalition building. Move from the computer to the concrete, from leaderless resistance to something more united. For so long the undertow in national politics, they were now the tide. “We’ve crossed the Rubicon in terms of recognition,” Richard Spencer told those gathered at his National Policy Institute convention just after the 2016 presidential election. Trump, buoyed by their movement, had reached the highest echelons of power. What might they be able to do? What if they did some real-life coalition building? It seemed like it was now or never.

  Instead of a meeting at a place like the Maxwell House Hotel, they found a Confederate monument to rally around.

  • • •

  By early 2017, Confederate monuments were a prominent theater of political war. In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered a speech on the occasion of the removal of the city’s monuments—a candid, scathing analysis of the statues’ meaning: “These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.” Removing them, he said, was an effort to “Making straight what was crooked, making right what was wrong.”

  To the far right, those were fighting words. Companies contracted to remove the statues in New Orleans received a barrage of death threats. The Daily Stormer, a prominent neo-Nazi website, referred to those months of monument debate as “the summer of the black sun,” deploying the approaching total eclipse as the emblem of the rise of Nazism amidst increasingly frequent and violent standoffs. Members of disparate far-right groups kept running into each other at protests in St. Louis, Gainesville, and San Antonio. Neo-Confederates gnashed teeth, brandished weapons, and shouted down anti-fascists alongside anti-government “Patriot” groups. In such close proximity, they began to feel each other out. Already that April, the League of the South, along with two other militarized far-right groups, had hosted a weekend retreat to train and organize, solidifying the bonds of what they called the Nationalist Front. Antifa groups were confronting the far right at many of these demonstrations, supplying a boogeyman and adding an urgency to the groups’ possible alliances. Brad Griffin, the public relations chief for the League of the South, who uses the pseudonym Hunter Wallace, wrote on his blog that spring, “Groups and individuals who don’t have a history of working together perceive a common threat now . . . The movement has always been divided over National Socialism, religion and countless other wedge issues.” But, with Confederate monuments under threat, Antifa
standing them down, and an opportunity to consolidate a growing political power, Griffin felt they should “organize a larger and even meaner gang.”

  With the so-called “hard right” united, could the broader alt-right unite, too? Many felt their fates were tied to the monuments—an alarmist symbolic logic that connected the removal of the statues to the decline of the white race. The “cultural genocide” that Hill diagnosed in 2015 had only intensified, they felt. Statue preservation was self-preservation. Their blood, their soil, their statues. For as much as they snarl about the left’s constant invocations of identity politics, they, too, are practitioners of this very thing, it’s just that theirs are the identity politics of the white male. From anti-PC trolls to Western Chauvinists, Neo-Confederates to Patriot militias, they all now had a stake in Confederate symbolism. Brad Griffin of the League of the South articulated the terms of alliance on Facebook after a monument protest in Houston that summer: “Patriots and Rainbow Confederates believe we can all get along. We can become a minority in our lands and somehow everything will be fine. The removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans, San Antonio, Orlando, and St. Louis suggest otherwise.” A little later in the exchange, after a commenter suggested that their removal is the will of a democratically elected government, Griffin responded, “So, it turns out that the result of a multiracial democracy and becoming a racial minority is the destruction of our monuments. Who could have predicted that?”

  Soon after, Griffin appeared as a guest on the “Rebel Yell” radio show along with a relative newcomer to the alt-right, Jason Kessler, who was organizing a rally in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. The Charlottesville city council had voted to remove its two Confederate statues, but a court injunction had halted the removal process. The statues in limbo, Kessler hoped to parlay the standoff into a flashpoint for the alt-right. On the show, Kessler explained that, “The number one thing is I want to destigmatize pro-white advocacy . . . I want a huge, huge crowd, and that’s what we’re going to have, to come out and support, not just the Lee Monument, but also white people in general, because it is our race which is under attack.”

  Fittingly, Kessler dubbed his event “Unite the Right.” The general orders for the day encouraged everyone to bone up on the lyrics to “Dixie.” And although the organizers secured permits with the city of Charlottesville with the assurance that the rally would be a peaceful assembly, a series of leaked posts from the message board used to plan the rally included tips to embed screws into hand-held flagpoles and memes about driving cars into crowds. On the list of featured guests at the event: Michael Hill. In a speech back in 2011, Hill had asked the crowd, “What will it take to get you to fight . . . what would it take to turn you into a William Wallace?” The answer for many, it turned out, was the attempted removal of a Confederate statue in a sleepy Virginia college town.

  Seventeen

  This Is Us

  On the morning of June 8, 2018, I emptied my pockets, opened my backpack for inspection, passed through the metal detector, and entered the Charlottesville General District Courthouse. I’d arrived early, about an hour before the day’s docket would begin, wanting to make sure I got a seat. The courtroom was comprised of blonde-wood furniture, brick walls, drop ceilings, and a gallery already starting to fill with journalists and supporters of the defendants.

  I’d arrived in town the night before and had gotten up early to retrace the routes of some of the principal characters from the rally. I was spared the shoe leather, though, as everything I was there to see lay within a quarter-mile radius. In fact, just across the alley from the courthouse stood the parking garage where, the morning of the rally, Michael Hill assembled the League of the South contingent along with the rest of the Nationalist Front. Their line, five abreast, coiled up several levels of the garage. They brandished shields, donned baseball helmets, raised the red and blue of the Confederate flag or the black-and-white cross of St. Andrews (a symbol of Southern nationalism). Michael Hill, in a black utility vest and combat boots, led them down to street-level. At his side were his chief of staff Michael Tubbs, the former Green Beret’s long gray hair tucked behind his ears, and Spencer Borum, the League’s boyish Kentucky chairman, bearded and bespectacled, waving the St. Andrews flag. “Hail Virginia,” Borum called to the hundreds behind. “Fix bayonets,” another cried. Then Hill led them into the late-morning glare of Market Street and the awaiting battle.

  It’s three blocks down Market Street from the parking garage to Emancipation Park, the site of the rally. The park is a square block, situated on a raised knoll of grass, so you can only enter the park via the set of stairs at each corner. Michael Hill had marched down the center of Market Street, with the gang of Nationalist Front marchers at his back stretched out for a full city block. At the corner of the park, about twenty counterprotesters had linked arms across the entrance in anticipation of their arrival. Leading with shields and bats and the points of their flagpoles, the League charged their line. “That was when the biggest part of hell broke loose,” one attendee told me. It was a wave-crash convergence of the two forces, their ranks buckling into an intimate melee of hand-to-hand combat. Tubbs put his head down and barreled into the counterprotesters. Fellow members dragged one woman down and into their line. After the initial charge, Hill reformed the line and they forced their way through the blockade, flanked by a man training his pepper-spray nozzle on the counterprotesters. Once inside, they formed a tortoise-style shield defense on the steps into the park, Michael Hill at the top. Below: taunts and insults, bottles and rocks volleyed back and forth. Nearly fifty years to the day after Jack Kershaw orchestrated a riot over school integration, Hill leaned on his walking stick, his expression placid, as he surveyed his own riotous defense of whiteness. The vision that Hill and Kershaw laid out in the mid-nineties when they founded the League and hoisted their Forrest statue had gained such traction that, twenty years later, it landed Hill as an agent of violence at the nation’s largest white supremacy rally in decades.

  Cases are litigated in Charlottesville with all parties standing at the bench, so just after 11 a.m., when Corey Long entered the courtroom, he bypassed the empty defense and prosecution tables and approached Judge Robert Downer’s bench. Long wore a red shirt crossed with black suspenders, fastened to black slacks. He was facing two charges, misdemeanor assault and disorderly conduct, for two encounters that occurred just after the League of the South arrived at the park. When Long arrived at the bench, he, his attorney Jeroyd Greene, the Commonwealth prosecutor Joe Platania, and Judge Downer, all proceeded to do what so many have done in the months since the rally: hunch over a laptop to parse footage from the rally.

  The footage came from a moment about half an hour after the League stormed the stairs of Emancipation Park. The ensuing battle for control of the Market Street entrance had prompted the Charlottesville police to issue an order of dispersal. On the heels of that order, the governor of Virginia declared a state of emergency—anyone remaining in the park would be arrested. Protesters and counterprotesters alike began to stream out of the park. Long had been standing at the next set of stairs down from the League’s position, taking cover under a boxwood hedge. A lanky twenty-three-year-old Black man who worked as a caregiver in town, Long had arrived at the park at eight that morning. “I just went down there to speak my mind,” he explained to me, not knowing exactly what to expect, but not expecting what he found. “It was pure hatred. That’s all you saw,” he said, shaking his head. “It was like a horror movie.” He estimates he heard the N-word fifty times as he roamed the perimeter of the park. People spat on him, threw rocks, and, at one point, a can of spray paint. Long decided to grab the can. Police had done little to intervene all morning, and his nerves were frayed. As the white nationalists left the park, they streamed past him at the foot of the stairs, and the insults continued.

  “Fuck you, n-----,” Richard Preston, the Imperial Wizard of the Baltimore County Klan, said to Long, getting in h
is face. The footage showed Long spraying the can of paint at Preston and two other men who had approached him—“Just to push them back,” he testified. It was enough to turn Preston away and to force a squat man in cargo shorts to retreat up the steps. But the crush of people continued unabated, and so did the threats. So Long put a lighter to the can and sent a rope of flame up the steps to keep the men at bay. In response, the man on the steps swung his furled Confederate flag at Long. Then, the footage showed Preston double back toward Long, pull his gun, and draw a bead on Long’s head. With no bullet in the chamber, Preston lowered and cocked the handgun and this time, aiming lower, fired at the ground at Long’s feet, sending up a clod of dirt. Preston quickly holstered the weapon and receded into the stream of people leaving the park.

  Anyone paying attention to the news at the time probably has seen a photograph of this moment. Everyone was inundated with images and videos from that day, but this one sticks out. It’s a photograph by Steve Helber, an AP photographer. In it, Long stands at the bottom right corner of the frame in a wide-set stance, one arm held out, wielding the aerosol can, the other holding the lighter. Above him on the left, the man in cargo shorts appears dumpy and timid, knees locked. His outstretched flag threatens to capsize him down the steps. The streak of flame burns dead center between them. It is a stunning photograph, full of elemental fury.

  But it has also led to a charge of disorderly conduct. Jeroyd Greene, Long’s attorney, argued that his client’s use of the flamethrower should be understood not as an action but as a reaction. A reaction to chaos, to a lack of police presence, to the fact that these rally goers had chosen to engage Long. “Armed with conviction, belief, and a voice,” Greene maintained that Long was entitled to defend himself. Commonwealth prosecutor Joe Platania countered that his first spray—just paint, not fire—succeeded in getting the two men to stand down. Igniting the can after Preston retreated, however, provoked further retaliation and endangered all those in his immediate vicinity.