Far right plans next move with ‘new energy’

CHARLOTTESVILLE: The white supremacists and right-wing extremists who came here together over the weekend are headed home, many of them ready and energised, they said, to set their sights on bigger prizes.

Some were making arrangements to appear at future marches. Some were planning to run for public office.

Others, taking a cue from the event here, were organising efforts to preserve white heritage symbols in their home regions.

Calling it “an opportune time”, Texas-based white nationalist Preston Wiginton declared on Saturday that he planned to hold a “White Lives Matter” march on Sept 11 at the Texas A&M University — with a keynote speaker, Richard B. Spencer, who was featured at the event here. Wiginton was not the only one capitalising on the weekend’s events.

On Monday, Austin Gillespie, a conservative Florida lawyer known as Augustus Sol Invictus and attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Virginia, said he planned to seek Florida’s Republican nomination for the Senate.

And at a news conference on Monday, Spencer, a prominent white supremacist, promised to return here for another rally.

“There is no way in hell that I am not going back,” he said.

The far right, which has returned to prominence in the past year or so, has always been an amalgam of factions and causes, some with pro-Confederate or neo-Nazi leanings, some opposed to political correctness or feminism. But the event here, the largest of its kind in recent years, had exposed the pre-existing fault lines in the movement.

On Monday, Texas A&M announced that they were cancelling Wiginton’s event. But he pushed back, saying he would fight the university in court.

“It seems like the First Amendment doesn’t apply to white people,” he said. NYT