A May 13 rally organized by white nationalist Richard Spencer called on officials to halt the removal of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, VA.
“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” – Albert Einstein
The disturbing announcement that avowed white supremacist David Duke registered his candidacy to run for the U.S. Senate last summer caused great anxiety. While the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan did not come close to winning, his political visibility – and potential viability ― was alarming to any conscientious citizen. Many wished, like they had for decades, that he would just go away.
And yet, Duke, and his message of white nationalist supremacy, remains ubiquitous within several pockets of the U.S.
This past weekend proved that.
Richard Spencer, another bigot, led a group in Charlottesville, Virginia’s Lee Park. Spencer and his followers chanted, “You will not replace us” in response to the city’s plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. In April, the Charlottesville City Council voted to sell and move the statue from Lee Park, and the council also voted to rename the park following controversy over its commemoration of Lee, a man who fought for the right to own slaves.
“What brings us together is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced from this world,” the 39-year-old said on Saturday. “Whites have a future. We have a future of power, of beauty, of expression.” They held another rally later that night, which prompted Charlottesville citizens to stand up and confront them, drawing in police to break up the fracas.
In the past, Spencer repeatedly quoted from Nazi propaganda, which oft-times denounced all minorities as an affront to the white race. He drew media attention following the 2016 presidential election when he spoke at the National Policy Institute in D.C., and his supporters gave the Nazi salute. Spencer said they exhibited “irony and exuberance” to Donald Trump’s victory on Election Day.
Spencer’s continued vitriolic rhetoric has feared potential ethnic violence. “As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession,” he said. Spencer also castigated Martin Luther King as “a fraud and degenerate in his life; [he] has become the symbol and cynosure of White Dispossession and the deconstruction of Occidental civilization. We must overcome!” Spencer coined the term “alt-right,” a small far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state. He launched AltRight.com this year, a site that the Southern Poverty Law Center described as largely a forum for white supremacists.
Richard Spencer is this generation’s David Duke, and his hatred remains a huge blight on an already imperfect union, and should force socially aware Americans to reevaluate the limits and extremes of free speech.
Anne Levy, an educator and Holocaust survivor in New Orleans, confronted David Duke many times during the 1980s when he ran for political office. Levy was instrumental with exposing Duke’s overtly racist platform, as he lost in his bid to be Louisiana governor.
“Everyone is talking about it,” Levy told me as Duke prepared his candidacy to succeed David Vitter. “It brings back 20 to 30 years, when he started running for office. He’s doing it for money, and he feels it’s the right time for him. It’s really beside myself he’s doing it... I think people have learned more, because of history. [But] In today’s world, you just don’t know.”
Indeed, Ms. Levy, we “don’t know,” and it remains vital to follow her lead to speak out against Duke - and now Spencer’s - warped ideologies.
Fortunately, Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer said in a statement that Saturday’s protest was either “profoundly ignorant” or meant to instill fear in minorities “in a way that harkens back to the days of the KKK.”
“I want everyone to know this: We reject this intimidation,” continued the mayor’s statement. “We are a welcoming city, but such intolerance is not welcome here. I think it was meant to inspire fear and even terror with our vulnerable populations.”
What remains to be seen is whether Spencer will continue to exploit the limits of free speech to rationalize his racist aims, in hopes of a potential involvement in politics.
After all, it was the Ku Klux Klan that replaced white robes for business suits in the late 1970s, and championed their “pro white” and “pro-Christian” to promulgate their agenda. By 1980, Duke left the group and formed the National Association for the Advancement of White People, a white nationalist organization. Duke was elected to the House of Representatives in 1989 where he served just a half a term.
'Vote for the Crook: It's Important' was a slogan during the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial campaign, in hopes of reminding voters that while Edwin Edwards may have been a corrupt politician, he was not an avowed white supremacist like David Duke.
In 1991, Duke lost to Edwin Edwards in his bid for becoming Louisiana’s governor. The next year, he was on the ballot for president where he garnered nearly 9% in the presidential primary in Louisiana. Duke pled guilty to mail and tax fraud charges stemming from illicit fundraising activities in 2002. He also expressed support for Ernst Zunder, a Holocaust denier, and also organized weekend gatherings of “European Nationalists” in the vein of white nationalism.” He has spoken at anti-Israel, and Holocaust denial conventions where he railed against “the ultimate racists, the Jewish, Zionist tribalists.”
Duke praised Spencer for this past weekend’s rally. “Modern day leftists have turned our younger generation into the imaginary boogieman [sic] they have always feared aka openly proud White men/women,” tweeted Duke. The Daily Stormer also called Spencer’s rally a “glorious torchlight procession” and the day of hard-right activism “an impressive showing for our side!”
I am confident that most Americans do not subscribe to Spencer’s warped views; after all white supremacists viewpoints are universally accepted as being on the fringe. During the civil rights movement, this was not necessarily the case, however, and political action was indispensable for America to live up to its creed of equality.
In his seminal 1963 song “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” Bob Dylan implied that government, and law enforcement, was either complicit or helped to light an impressionable KKK member to commit a heinous crime.
“The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid/And the marshals and cops get the same/But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool/He’s taught in his school/From the start by the rule/That the laws are with him/To protect his white skin/To keep up his hate/So he never thinks straight/’Bout the shape that he’s in/But it ain’t him to blame/He’s only a pawn in their game”
Things have changed mightily since Dylan wrote and sang “Pawn In Their Game.” And just because white supremacists who stage a rally may appear to be an anomaly, it hardly means that it does not percolate elsewhere. On social media, racism, ugly vitriol, harassment and nasty epithets hurled at blacks, Jews, and other minorities, as well as journalists who fight against this bigotry, have been subject to attacks. They have gotten worse in recent months.
Well-adjusted members of society, like the Charlottesville’s mayor and those ordinary citizens who stood up to Saturday’s rally, must fight back through messages of tolerance. These imperfections within our union must be confronted head-on, and be quashed sooner rather than later, or else David Duke, Richard Spencer and their ilk, will dominate headlines, and an indifferent public, will continually bear witness.