A few weeks ago, Colton Merwin, a nineteen-year-old from Maryland who recently dropped out of college, decided to organize a rally on the National Mall. “I got all the permits and stuff myself,” he said. “It was pretty easy, actually.” He called his event the Rally for Free Speech. It was intended as a kind of rebuttal to a series of events that took place in Berkeley, California, earlier this year. In February, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, a violent group of left-wing protesters prevented the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking; in April, anarchists and “anti-Fascists” interrupted a right-wing event in a Berkeley park, sparking a day of street clashes that came to be known as the Battle of Berkeley. “I got tiredMerwin announced a surprise addition to his lineup: the white nationalist and anti-Semite Richard Spencer. Spencer believes that white Americans need their own homeland—“a sort of white Zionism,” he calls it. For years, he had been a marginal figure on the far right; last year, when the alt-right became an object of popular fascination, Spencer used the notoriety to his advantage. After the election, he experienced two moments of viral fame: one shortly after Trump’s victory, when Spencer cried “Hail Trump” during a speech and appeared to lead a crowd in a Nazi-esque salute; and the other on Inauguration Day, when a masked stranger punched him in the face. Spencer is a deliberately divisive figure, and, during the past few months, many on the right have worked to