Charlottesville, Revisited—2017 to 2024
:What Can a Moment of Peril Tell Us about Our Own Dangerous Times?
Seven years ago, anarchists and other anti-fascists converged in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose the “Unite the Right” rally. The organizers of the rally intended to bring together Klansmen, neo-Nazis, far-right militias, and fascists from the so-called “alt-right” to build a unified white supremacist street movement.
Fascists had already been building momentum in the streets for a year. The rally was poised to establish them as a legitimate pole in United States politics. If that succeeded, millions of Donald Trump’s supporters might join them. All that the organizers of “Unite the Right” had to do was get through the weekend without incident.
A few hundred brave people set out to stop them. The anti-fascists were outnumbered, underprepared, and terrified.
It’s important to remember this today—first, because the Trump era is not over. As exhausting and demoralizing as it is, we still face the same threats and challenges we confronted seven years ago, and the outcome remains as uncertain today as it was then. Revisiting the events in Charlottesville illuminates the stakes of our current struggles—when fascists are less active in the streets, but are seeking to take control of the entire country through the apparatus of the state. At the same time, the outcome of the events in Charlottesville shows how much a small number of courageous people can accomplish by putting their lives on the line when it counts, even when victory seems impossible.
We present here a review of the events, drawing on the recollections of some of those who were on the front lines.
Anti-fascists in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.
The Gathering Storm
The 2016 Trump campaign had emboldened fascists of all stripes. Coming out of Trump’s electoral victory, many fascists adopted a strategy in which they targeted locations they considered to be liberal hotspots, such as Berkeley, California and Portland, Oregon.1 In some ways, this approach was savvy: in a polarizing political context, in which hatred of the other was among the chief motivations of their potential supporters, it enabled them to seek recruits by provoking and caricaturing their opposition.
At first, the strategy bore fruit for them. On April 15, 2017, fascists rampaged through Berkeley, recording video footage of themselves beating people to use for recruiting purposes. In retrospect, we can identify that day as the high point of their campaign targeting the Bay Area.
Charlottesville is a liberal college town in Virginia. Pursuing the same strategy his colleagues had employed in Berkeley, the suit-and-tie fascist Richard Spencer led a torch-lit rally in Charlottesville on May 13, 2017 protesting the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Seeking to forge ties between various brands of Nazis and white nationalists, Spencer’s supporters organized another rally for August 12.
Friday, August 11
On the night of August 11, hundreds of fascists who had arrived early participated in a surprise torch-lit march through the streets of Charlottesville. At the conclusion of the march, they attacked a small number of counterdemonstrators at the foot of the statue of Thomas Jefferson while the authorities looked on passively.
Watching footage of the march and the attacks with which it concluded, many people around the United States suddenly understood the threat. The situation was even more frightening for people in Charlottesville itself.
I am one of the people who went to Charlottesville to shut down the “Unite the Right” rally.
On the night of the 11th, many of us went to UVA [University of Virginia at Charlottesville] campus to see if there was something we could do and independently arrived at the conclusion that it was not the night to engage with those fuckers in the way that they deserved. We decided that we just had to take the loss for twelve hours and pin our hopes on the next day. Later that night, there were arguments, accusations of cowardice, recriminations, second-guessing. Personally, I felt that all that would have happened would have been that we would have gotten completely fucked up and possibly worse, making it even less likely that there would be enough people on hand for the day of the rally itself.
I remember somebody saying that some UVA employee in a uniform told them, “You all should get out of here. If they go after you, we’re not going to be able to do anything about it.” That was a classic cowardly law-enforcement thing to say. At the same time, it was not factually untrue.
On the other hand, the night of the 11th, someone I didn’t know at a meeting I participated in said that his best advice for the next day was to “Fake it till you make it.”
That was basically what we did.
I did not sleep on the night of August 11, 2017. I was certain that some of us were going to die the next day.
My friends and I had traveled to Charlottesville in order to put a stop to the “Unite the Right” gathering. We had just returned from the campus of the University of Virginia, and based on what we had seen, I felt that there was no chance that the next day was going to end without bloodshed.
On that night, if a necromancer had presented me with the following prophecy, I am sad to say that I would have accepted it with relief:
“One of you will die tomorrow, but your opponents will leave town in disarray. Public opinion will turn sharply against them both locally and nationally. They will cannibalize each other and this event will be remembered as the nadir of the Trump administration. In three years’ time, young people will topple the government that these murderers serve.”
The truth is, I was certain that we were in for something much worse than that. I lay awake until dawn, running through scenarios in my mind. Then I got up and prepared to go confront the fascists.
Looking back afterwards, one anarchist who was in Charlottesville recounted,
Friday night seriously shook people, but it probably made us more determined and smarter on Saturday. I almost want to say wiser. We knew exactly what kind of victory we needed to deny them, and we knew we would have to do it without the advantage of physical superiority.
Saturday, August 12
On August 12, angry locals, religious leaders, and other opponents of fascism squared off against the fascists amassing in downtown Charlottesville. Police looked on, permitting intense confrontations to take place between the two groups without doing anything. Anti-fascists found themselves in a volatile and perilous situation.
I had no interest in dealing with an out-of-state gun charge or getting into a situation in which I might be tussling with police with a gun in my pants. Those are two things I prefer to avoid under any circumstances. For that reason, I left my gun in my vehicle on the morning of the 12th. But later that morning, as it became inescapably clear what sort of situation we were dealing with, I went back and got it. At that point, I was less concerned about an out-of-state gun charge than I was about being unprepared for something worse.
Never before or since have I been involved in a day so fucked up that I sincerely felt that the least-bad option was to be messing around with a gun in a chaotic situation involving United States police officers. Not only did it feel certain that some of us were going to die, I also feared that it was entirely possible that one of us might have no choice other than to employ lethal force.
There were quite a few anti-fascists with guns that day, not all of them open-carrying. One of the under-reported aspects of the day was that a large number of anti-fascists exhibited a fair degree of restraint and decent situational awareness in regards to gun safety. Many of us will always regret not managing to be in the right place at the right time to stop the fascist who killed Heather Heyer, but it’s easier to perpetrate a mass casualty incident than it is to prevent one. Despite the considerable stress and uncertainty of the situation, no one on our side has anything to regret in that department.
By contrast, there was one neo-Confederate guy who fired his gun in the immediate vicinity of the crowd. That did not speak highly of his judgment. If we did not kill anyone, it was because we decided not to, despite having been directly provoked.
Ultimately, the street confrontations forced public officials to rescind the permit for the “Unite the Right” rally, and the same police officers that the fascists had been courting were forced to drive them out of the park in which they were gathered. This aroused consideration agitation and dismay among the participants in the rally, who had hoped to hold an orderly event while projecting an image of strength.
In a subsequent interview, one anarchist who fought in Charlottesville argued that the rally was defeated by the diversity of tactics that anti-fascists employed and by the contradictory goals of the participants:
Unite the Right was all about image. They wanted three things: to look like victims of antifa/”SJW” aggression, look like friends of the police, and look like they were winning the physical battle in the streets. I think all those wires got crossed in Charlottesville because of the diversity of their opposition…
A lot of these alt-right people are scared of confrontation, even though they fantasize about power. You could tell that made it hard for them to psychologically switch gears; by the time they figured out how to deal with one kind of counter-protestor, the situation had changed and they had to go back to square one. They had to think too hard. They didn’t know if they were going to get punched or prayed at. And the whole time, they’re getting pelted with paint balloons, and they just look silly.
Then you had macho types who reacted to that paralysis by just going ham, charging in swinging by themselves. That was scary, because these were big dudes who understood violence, but it didn’t really serve their larger goals, and they lost fights because we would surround them and beat them back. It didn’t help those guys that their official rally was up a hill behind barricades.
Finally, there were the guys in full-on riot gear, plexiglass shields and clubs and face-shields, stuff like that. They had a hard time early in the day, marching into the park, because they couldn’t figure out what kind of confrontation they were in; they wanted to beat us up but they wanted it to look like our fault, and they came out worse on both counts. Later, they regrouped, and it seemed like they were ready to crack some skulls in a more paramilitary style—charge out of the park in formation and just trample whoever was in their way. I think that would have happened more if the rally had gone on longer, because they were starting to give up on the whole image thing. We should have had more tools to obscure their vision and keep them at a distance. But the cops dispersed the rally before it went there. I think we can take some credit for that.
This sounds weird, but I think anarchists might have better discipline than Nazis, at least in this kind of situation. Fascists had the advantage when things were really scripted, and a lot of them would have had the advantage in a one-on-one fight, but they were just clumsy when it came to navigating a complex situation. I guess I mean self-discipline. But it has this real communal aspect to it, because we actually care about each other and pay attention to each other, like not just our cliques and affinity groups, but also strangers. You can’t fake that. You can’t squeeze that out of an authoritarian ideology.
The urgency of the situation drove many people to take risks that they would not ordinarily have taken.
The standard liberal narratives—”Don’t feed a cycle of violence” and “Leave the police to handle public safety”—strike me as particularly out of touch with reality in relation to what happened in Charlottesville. First, the police told us on Friday night that when push came to shove, they were not going to be protecting anyone if doing so actually meant putting themselves in harm’s way. We’ve seen the same thing in Uvalde since then. Second, it seemed very clear to me that if the fascists got away with doing this in Charlottesville, they would be doing the very same thing in my own town soon thereafter. I felt like, Well, I guess it’s better that we do this now in Virginia, or we’re just going to be even more screwed when we have to do it at home a month from now.
From my perspective, throughout the weekend, everyone who took on the rally sort of shared a sense that we had not voluntarily picked that fight. It wasn’t easy to tell either by appearance or by people’s actions who was from Charlottesville and who was from somewhere else.
Bullies and sadists frequently get themselves into trouble by underestimating their opponent and overestimating their own strength, whereas people who—for whatever reason—become psychologically accustomed to being bullied or dominated can get themselves into trouble by overestimating their opponent and underestimating themselves. In Charlottesville, the fascists took us lightly, and it didn’t work out for them.
In a subsequent retrospective, participants in the events in Charlottesville argued that the police only took action after it became clear that the fascists could not win on their own:
During the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the police largely stood back and let the confrontations play out. They only interceded to declare an unlawful assembly and clear the park when anti-fascists forced their hand, after the city and state authorities had announced a State of Emergency. This is consistent with a pattern that goes back at least a century. When white supremacists have the upper hand, police tend to give them free rein; when anti-fascists gain the advantage, police step in aggressively.
After Unite the Right, Charlottesville police faced a great deal of criticism for their hands-off handling of the demonstration. The response of police departments around the United States has been to shift to a more aggressive strategy involving massive multi-agency mobilizations and preemptive crackdowns.
Had the police been sufficiently prepared for the situation in Charlottesville, the rally would have gone through as planned—and as a consequence, a great deal more violence might ultimately have taken place.
A tragedy took place in Charlottesville that day, nonetheless. That afternoon, as angry neo-Nazis and Klansmen fanned out from the park, James Alex Fields, a participant in the fascist mobilization, drove a car into a crowd of people, killing Heather Heyer and grievously injuring nineteen other people.
Nothing could make up for the loss of Heather’s life. Many more people could easily have died in that attack; as it is, its consequences linger in the lives of hundreds of people. We honor Heather’s courage and the courage of all the others who knowingly put themselves in harm’s way that day for the sake of protecting others.
Afterwards
In response to the rally and the attack, people immediately organized solidarity actions around the world. At least twenty took place on August 12, and well over sixty the following day. These brought a new energy to the movement against fascism.
For example, anarchists in Chapel Hill, North Carolina organized a report-back from participants in the events in Charlottesville at the Confederate monument in the center of downtown. The next day, activists in the neighboring city of Durham pulled down the Confederate monument there, then faced down a threatened response from the Ku Klux Klan. A year later, people tore down the monument in Chapel Hill, setting a template for the wave of statue topplings throughout the country in 2020.
Meanwhile, corporate media outlets were caught flat-footed by the tragedy in Charlottesville. Their previous narratives about clashes between “extremists” had not prepared their audiences for the murder of Heather Heyer. For a few days, while corporate editors scrambled to reformulate their narratives, journalists had their hands free to simply tell the truth about what had happened in Charlottesville—and this drove some people to participate in their first anti-fascist mobilizations. These events brought Trump’s approval rating to its lowest point in the first years of his presidency, compelling him to fire his white nationalist advisor, Steve Bannon.
On Saturday, August 19, many thousands of people converged in Boston to respond to a fascist rally. A week later, on Sunday, August 27, thousands of people converged in Berkeley to make a planned fascist demonstration impossible.
Joseph Biden announced his 2020 presidential campaign with a video about the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. This underscores the importance of that day’s events in United States history. But neither Biden nor his supporters were there. The people who made the difference that day were not politicians or centrist Democrats—they were ordinary locals, many of them poor people of color, and partisans of liberation.
I already faced several felony charges from an anti-fascist march—but that was against Trump, not street Nazis. I wanted to play it cool in Charlottesville and help out however I could without making my legal situation significantly worse. I handed out earplugs to my friends as I watched them march towards the Lee monument. I felt certain that at least one of them was going to die.
Later, I helped report on police movements—which turned out to be useless, as the police were hands off that day. There were fascists in the park, anti-fascists in the street, and police in the parking lot. In other words, anti-fascists sandwiched between uniformed thugs on either side.
I helped take down the license plates of the cars that the Nazis were driving, in hopes of identifying them. I also spent some time outside the jail, in case any anti-fascists were arrested.
After the car attack, I moved to a local church that had opened its doors as a safe space for anti-fascists. Courageous teens from the youth group ran security outside it to make sure no far-right infiltrators made it into the sanctuary.
Inside, I saw one masked-up anti-fascist lower her face covering. It was one of my codefendants. I had been mass-arrested, so I had quite a few codefendants, but this was someone from my trial group. At first, I panicked: “If anything happens to you,” I thought, “it could jeopardize our case.” But that thought didn’t make it all the way to my lips before my heart swelled for my comrade.
Earplugs, notes, radio communication about police movement. That’s not nothing, but—I wish I had fought. Not for the glory. Not to have a good story. There are just moments when it’s time to fight with everything you have before it’s too late.
Going Forward
If we compare their activity under the Trump administration to what they have done under Biden, it is clear that, whatever their pretensions to being “anti-government,” none of these fascists and militia members are particularly motivated when it comes to taking on the state. They are much more interested in serving as the street-level supporters of an authoritarian government. We cannot understand the threat that they pose apart from the threat that state power itself represents.
As we argued in August 2017,
Ultimately, a thoroughgoing anti-fascist movement should not focus on targeting fascist groups that are so marginal that they stick out from the rest of the political spectrum, but take on the infrastructure through which any authoritarian program will be enacted. That is to say, it should focus on the state itself. If we simply fight defensive battles, the fascists will eventually gain the initiative. We should take the experiences of fighting together that we can experience in anti-fascist struggle and use those as points of departure to work together to solve all of the problems that we have.
This applies regardless of whoever is in the White House come January 2025. While Trump promises to deport millions of people—a threat we should take seriously and prepare to confront—we must not forget that, thus far, both the Obama and Biden administrations have deported many more people than the Trump administration did. Rather than letting Trump and his foot soldiers terrorize us into the arms of centrist politicians while they slowly ratchet political discourse further and further to the right, we have to continue to move towards a horizon of real liberation.
Fascists are not the only force standing between us and our freedom.
Further Reading
- Anarchists in the Trump Era: Scorecard, Year One
- Charlottesville and the Rise of Fascism in the USA
- Charlottesville—Triumph and Tragedy in the Struggle Against Fascism
- The Culture of Vehicular Attacks
- A Demonstrator’s Guide to Responding to Gunshot Wounds—What Everyone Should Know
- How Anti-Fascists Won the Battles of Berkeley
- The Insidious Workings of the Political Ratchet
- The Lessons of Charlottesville, a Year Later
- Not Your Grandfather’s Antifascism—Anti-Fascism Has Arrived; Here’s Where It Needs to Go
- Squaring off against Fascism—An Interview
- The Trump Years—The Road from January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021
- To the Charlottesville Anti-Fascists—A Message from the Mothers of Murdered Anti-Fascists in France
- What They Can’t Do with Badges, They Do with Torches
- Why We Fought in Charlottesville
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Donald Trump himself adopted this strategy in summer of 2020, when he sent troops from the Department of Homeland Security to attempt to subdue demonstrators in Portland, Oregon. Like the Nazis he was imitating, he, too, ultimately failed. ↩