As the "Unite the Right 2" rally approaches in Washington, shaping up as a spectacle of racial tension if not hatred at the least, it's worth assessing the counter-protest – its role and effectiveness in such events. In Washington, on Sunday some 400 white nationalists are expected in Lafayette Park for their "Unite the Right 2" rally, a follow up to last year's deadly, tense Charlottesville rally. At the same time, about 1,500 counter protestors are expected at various downtown Washington locations, including the same park where the white nationalists will be. Washington police and officials have been planning for the event for months, with safety strategies planned, including dozens of blocked streets and cordoned off sections of the Lafayette Square Park. Officials understand that the closer two sides get, the more chances of violence increase. "We have seen in the past where these two groups have been in the same area at the same time, it leads to violent confrontations," Peter Newsham, chief of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, said at a press briefing Thursday. That's why the counter-protest, though well-intentioned, can become part of the problem if posed as direct, up-close and personal taunts at racist demonstrators – it's giving them exactly what they want, after all. That's what's happened two times this year in Portland, and authorities there are still trying to explain police action while citizens are trying to understand it. Some counter-protestors were so upset by last weekend's rally-gone-bad that they stormed Portland City Hall to complain about the police, injuring a guard. And we know what happened in Charlottesville last year, where wounds remain raw after one of the largest gatherings of white nationalists and far-right extremists in years gathered. Some were dressed offensively, others shouted racial slurs. Counter protestors clashed with them in response as tensions raged and cameras rolled. The nightmare ended when a white nationalist plowed into peaceful protestors. The white nationalist protestors were so offensive they only wanted to elicit one response: Inflame counter protestors to confrontation, giving oxygen to their simmering violence. Check. So, Washington, consider what one expert with the Southern Poverty Law Center said as words of wisdom for counter protestors in advance of the "Unite the Right 2" rally scheduled in the city on Sunday. "One of the things that people who are considering counter-protesting need to think about is that if they do hold an event, whether it's in the immediate vicinity of the other rally that's planned, frequently it's counterproductive because it inflames the situation and it may put you at risk of danger," Keegan Hankes, who's researched right-wing extremism for five years for the SPLC, told The Washingtonian. In other words, a protestor may be offensive, but yelling and screaming directly at them only provokes the situation. "For instance, if you're one of the white supremacists who are going to be protesting with Jason Kessler (Unite the Right 2 organizer), it will definitely escalate the situation if you are confronted by a counter-protester and there's a yelling-and-screaming match involved," Hankes said. Easier said than done, of course. Most people could not have stood by in Charlottesville watching racists parade, hurling insults. Maybe that's why when the KKK visited my small Southern community in the 1980s most everybody stayed home. The white supremacists were upset that the University of Mississippi was disassociated with the Confederate battle flag, so they planned a march. Other than some journalists and a few curious onlookers, a small group of KKK marched and went home. Today, the Confederate battle flag is decades removed from the university and it is not an issue whatsoever. We didn't give them oxygen, snuffing them out. Hate doesn't hurt so much when you don't see it, or hear it. This isn't to say that the counter-protest isn't productive. It is valuable, without question, standing up for core principles of humanity, like equality. But how the counter-protest is done, and where can make all the difference. Those KKK members from the 1980s revealed themselves as irrelevant when nobody showed. This Sunday in Washington, officials are expecting that counter-protestors will outnumber protesters by three-to-one. It's hard to turn the other cheek or to angrily respond in another location, of course. America is deeply divided and hate incidents involving race seem to be on the rise in frequency and intensity in recent years. It's just that despite temptation, or deliberate provocation, counter-protestors best serve their cause by keeping a safe distance. "My go-to response for these kind of things is that it does tend to take the oxygen out of these kinds of events if you don't directly confront them," Hankes said. It's worth a try Washington. Don't give hate the air it craves. David Magee is a contributing editor, a former newspaper publisher, and the author of a dozen books including The Education of Mr. Mayfield.<doc-sep>A year after the deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., white nationalist groups are treading cautiously into the anniversary weekend. The violence in Charlottesville sparked damaging lawsuits against the organizers and a crackdown from tech companies that has complicated recruitment and fundraising efforts, splintering the movement just as it's trying to show solidarity heading into Sunday's "Unite the Right 2" demonstration in Washington. Jason Kessler, a lead organizer of both events, is discouraging participation by the more hard-core elements of the white supremacist movement, and some are happy to sit this one out. ADVERTISEMENT “These post-Charlottesville marches have no purpose, other than to make anyone who supports white self-determination look like a fringe lunatic,” Andrew Anglin, publisher of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, wrote this month in a blog post disavowing Sunday’s rally. “We do not want the image of being a bunch of weird losers who march around like assholes while completely outnumbered and get mocked by the entire planet.” Richard Spencer, a key organizer of the Charlottesville rally, is even steering clear and urging others to do the same. “I know that many have good intentions in going, but a rally like this [doesn't] make sense at this time. I don't know exactly what will happen, but it probably will not be good,” tweeted Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute, which aims to “give voice to the interests of white peoples." The long-term effect of the Charlottesville violence on the larger white nationalist movement is still unknown. But the initial consequence, experts say, has been a new degree of internal discord that’s expected to dampen turnout at Sunday’s rally across the street from the White House. “I don’t know that’s it’s substantially grown or shrunk,” said Keegan Hankes, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which tracks hate groups around the country. “What I can say is, since the previous Unite the Right, it is far more disorganized.” “Every one of these groups is afraid they’re going to be associated with any potential violence, but also be further associated with the violence last year,” he added. Don Black, founder of Stormfront, a white nationalist website, said the reverberations of Charlottesville — financially and strategically — are still being felt a year later. “A lot of people have reevaluated the tactic,” Black told The Hill on Saturday in a phone call. "I don’t have a problem with Jason Kessler. … But some other people do because he’s a … very recent convert to our side and they feel that … his events haven’t been properly planned." “Most of the organization leaders who supported the Charlottesville event are not supporting this one,” he added. The division and infighting suggests a movement still licking its wounds in the aftermath of last year’s demonstration, when hundreds of white supremacists gathered to protest the city’s removal of a Robert E. Lee statue — the largest march of its kind in decades. The event quickly devolved into a series of violent clashes between marchers and counterprotesters. Amid the tumult, a car sped into a group of counterprotesters, injuring dozens and killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. James Alex Fields Jr., a then-20-year-old white nationalist from Ohio, has been charged with first degree murder. Separately, two Virginia state police officers monitoring events from the air were killed when their helicopter crashed. The backlash came quickly. Numerous lawsuits, still pending, were filed against the organizers, including Kessler and Spencer, who are accused of promoting violence. And the giants of the technology world — Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube — also intervened in an effort to cull racist voices from their platforms. “That’s probably been one of the most damaging things that’s happened to the movement in the last couple years,” said Hankes. “They can’t disseminate propaganda as easily [and] it’s a lot harder to raise money.” Black, of Stormfront, confirmed the trend. After Charlottesville, his website was frozen for a month, and in December he was kicked off Twitter — an event he called “the great purge.” “A lot of people depended on social media, and they still use it but it’s always iffy. Their accounts are regularly canceled and posts deleted,” he said. “It’s hard to even find a credit card processor now." “We’re more under siege than we’ve ever been," Black said. Kessler had initially sought to stage the anniversary rally in Charlottesville. The city denied his petition, and last week he dropped a lawsuit seeking reconsideration, saying he would focus instead on the demonstration in Washington. It’s unclear how many people will attend Sunday’s march, which will follow Pennsylvania Avenue from Foggy Bottom to Lafayette Square. Kessler has taken steps to avoid a repeat of last year’s violence, prohibiting shields, weapons of any kind and “non-approved flags,” all of which were featured elements of the Charlottesville marches. American and Confederate flags, however, are welcome. Torches, another prominent feature of the Charlottesville marches, are also forbidden, given the National Park Service’s ban on fire in Lafayette Square. “No fire allowed,” Kessler wrote on Facebook in May, in a post obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). “We need to forget about the torch thing.” Peter Montgomery, an expert on right-wing extremism at the liberal advocacy group People For the American Way, said the changes reflect a rebranding effort on the part of some white nationalists following “a real blow to their public relations” with the death of Heyer. “You had people who wanted to disassociate themselves from who they saw as more embarrassing manifestations — people who come to these rallies holding Nazi signs and swastikas,” he said. “There’s a part of the movement that wants to be a kinder gentler face of the alt-right, but as a result it’s kind of splintered.” Unite the Right 2 organizers did not respond to questions posed through the rally’s website. Questions sent directly to Spencer and Anglin also went unanswered. The Charlottesville violence shone a bright light on a white nationalist debate that was already percolating with the rise of President Trump Donald TrumpTrump lashes out after grand jury seated for New York criminal probe Schumer tees up vote on Jan. 6 commission bill Senators struggle to save Jan. 6 commission MORE in 2016 — a victory cheered by racist leaders who see the president as a vindication of their own views, particularly on issues such as guns and immigration. Trump’s inner circle has featured figures like Stephen Bannon — the Breitbart News executive who has boasted of using the conservative news site as “a platform for the alt-right.” And the president’s equivocal response to the Charlottesville violence — there were “very fine people” on both sides, he said at the time — only fueled the view among white nationalists that they have an ally in the White House. In its annual census of hate groups, released in February, SPLC identified 954 such organizations across the country in 2017, marking a 4 percent increase over the previous year and a 20 percent jump over 2014. More than 600 of those were associated with the white nationalist movement. Anti-hate groups are quick to warn that whatever troubles white nationalists are facing, those political conditions remain. Indeed, a number of Republican candidates with nationalistic, if not outwardly racist views, are running for House and Senate seats this cycle, including Arthur Jones in Illinois, Seth Grossman in New Jersey and Paul Nehlen in Wisconsin. GOP campaign leaders are not backing any of them. Trump has endorsed Virginia Senate GOP nominee Corey Stewart, a controversial figure who is a vocal supporter of Confederate heritage and has said the Civil War was not ultimately fought over slavery. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has not pledged support for Stewart. “In that big-picture sense, Trump’s campaign really electrified and energized white nationalists who had been quite marginalized in American political discourse,” Montgomery said. “He really opened up space for them to move more into the political conversation. And they’ve taken advantage of that.” Sophie Bjork-James, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who has researched the white supremacist movement, agreed, saying “both sides have been galvanized” since the Charlottesville clashes.<doc-sep>The "Unite the Right 2" rally today in Washington had a low turnout from white nationalists, some 10 to 15 as opposed to 400 once expected, causing counter-protesters to celebrate and taunt with chants of "go home." "Unite the Right Rally members have now all left," tweeted WUSA reporter Arielle Buchmann at 5:12 p.m ET. "#ShutDownDC members continue to stand in the rain." "LATEST -- Kessler is OUT of the White House perimeter and back in the Metro system," tweeted WUSA 9 reporter Mike Valerio at 5:20 p.m. ET. The 'Unite the Right 2' counter-protest got underway this afternoon in Washington, D.C, hours before a white civil rights rally was scheduled for the city at 5:30 p.m. (ET) – one year after the deadly Charlottesville incident. But the white nationalist rally had little momentum, leaving before 5:30 with rain falling. The white nationalists' protest was expected to last until 7:30 p.m. (ET) Sunday. Members have been arriving in the city later this afternoon, making their way to Lafayette Square park but the gathering is sparse -- with the AP reporting that "a contingent of about 30 white nationalists" marched down a Washington street toward the White House "surrounded by a protective bubble of police officers and vehicles" while counter-protesters taunted and shouted at them. "It doesn't matter if we have 14 people or, or 1,400 today," white nationalist rally organizer Jason Kessler told WUSA today. "We're going to have a great rally." Live stream information and updates are below in this story. The Washington, D.C. protest and counter-protest also comes one day after tensions flared in Charlottesville and on the University of Virginia campus on the one year anniversary of the deadly Charlottesville protest. The Associated Press Press is reporting that the number of counter-protesters is "expected to dwarf" white nationalists protesters. The protest was scheduled for Lafayette Square Park while the counter-protest is nearby though the counter-protestors "plan to march to Lafayette Square in front of the White House, just before the arrival of the white nationalists," according to the AP. Police have erected a maze of barricades to keep the two sides apart, the news agency reports. You can watch a live stream of Washington D.C.s "Unite the Right 2" protest and counter protest here, provided by Fox 5 TV station. Here is a live feed link from WUSA in Washington. You can see updates on the latest from Washington below. Jason Kessler is the organizer of today's Washington white nationalists protest. He was involved in last year's Charlottesville protest and got the permit approved for the Washington rally. Officials expect about as many as 400 white nationalists, but at least three times that number for the counter-protest. Also, The Associated Press reported that "Kessler's event could be lower than his estimate and likely will be dwarfed by counter-protests. "Some leading figures in the U.S. white nationalist movement have said they won't attend or have encouraged supporters to stay away," the AP reported. UPDATES: *5:04 p.m. ET WUSA reporter Andrea McCarren tweets that, "The 10-15 #UniteTheRight2 demonstrators have left Lafayette Park, under police escort. The thousands of #ShutDownDC demonstrators cheered upon their exit and are still chanting." *4:45 p.m. ET From the AP: "A group of about 30 white nationalists has marched to a park near the White House for what they call a rally in favor of white civil rights. "Thousands of counterprotesters are in the area, too, and jeered and heckled the white nationalists as they made their way down the street surrounded by police." *4:30 p.m. ET "Far more media in Lafayette Park than #UniteTheRight2 demonstraters," tweeted Andrea McCarren, WUSA investigative reporter in Washington. *3:45 p.m. ET White nationalist protesters are inside Lafayette Square Park and Washington, D.C. police are blocking the entrance to the park, keeping counter-protesters at a distance, according to WUSA. *2:30 p.m ET More than 1,000 counter protesters have gathered near the White House, rallying against the planned white nationalist rally that's supposed to begin at 5:30 p.m. ET.<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON — A handful of members of right wing, white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups holding a rally near the White House on Sunday were vastly outnumbered by crowds of counterprotesters. Dubbed Unite the Right 2, the white supremacist rally was organized by Jason Kessler, a self-described “white civil rights” activist who held a similar event in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12 last year. While that rally sparked massive clashes that brought attention to emboldened right-wing groups, Kessler’s second event failed to draw a sizable crowd of supporters. A young woman named Heather Heyer died during the Charlottesville rally when a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove his car into a crowd of protesters. Many others were injured and two police officers also died in a helicopter crash while they were patroling the event. Because of the past violence, Washington braced for a similar situation on Sunday, with numerous local businesses closing and officials developing a plan for rally participants to be escorted to the event’s location in Lafayette Park with police protection. Protestors march against the far-right’s rally in Washington on Aug. 12 — the one-year anniversary of a similar protest in Charlottesville, Va., that turned deadly. (Photo: Daniel Slim/AFP/Getty Images) But Sunday’s rally did not generate the turnout Kessler might have envisioned, with only about 20 allies joining him. Traveling to the event on the Metro train from suburban Vienna, Va., Kessler’s group arrived in downtown D.C. at about 2:30 p.m. They were flanked by police as they walked a few blocks to the park, which is across the street from the White House. Demonstrators march near the White House on the one-year anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. (Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP) Slideshow: Unite the Right protesters a few – Anti-facists a many >>> Large crowds of counterprotesters encircled the group and tossed objects at them as they marched from the train. At Lafayette Park, police kept Kessler and his followers far from the protesters, who had them surrounded. The counterprotesters included members of a wide variety of groups, including socialists and Black Lives Matter organizations. Maurice Cook, co-founder of March for Racial Justice, which helped plan the counterprotests, told Yahoo News that turnout was “more than we expected. Story continues “This is beautiful,” Cook said. “There’s many more than a thousand people here that have participated in this event today. … Everyone has been just beautiful and a wonderful celebration of our love for each other, just a wonderful expression of what this country is supposed to be.” White nationalist leader Jason Kessler speaks during the Unite the Right 2 event in Washington. (Photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters) Many of the counterprotesters didn’t even get a glimpse of Kessler and his contingent because the police kept them so far away. A man named Ksreem said he saw them only with the help of a pair of binoculars. A woman named Gavi sat on a friend’s shoulders to peer at members of the group and wave a cardboard sign that said “F*** NAZIS.” “I got up here to see how many people are there, and there really are not that many people,” Gavi said of Kessler’s group. Her friend, who said his name was Charlie, described the counterprotests as “overwhelming.” “It’s such an easy cause to be behind, such senseless hate,” Charlie said. “I don’t see how you can’t be a part of this. … I was nervous coming in, honestly, but I just felt really supported by the whole crowd.” A counterprotester holds a sign at the white nationalist rally in Washington. (Photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters) Signs and chants criticizing President Trump featured prominently in the counterprotests. Following the clashes in Charlottesville, Trump provoked outrage by saying there were “fine people” on both sides of the protests. It was one of multiple occasions when Trump has avoided denouncing white nationalists, some of whom ardently support him. Cook accused the president of being “one of the motivators” for such groups. “Folks have felt emboldened by the policies and the rhetoric of that faux president sitting there in our house,” said Cook pointing toward the White House. Cook said he was present for last year’s violence in Charlottesville but that he was “not concerned” about similar chaos unfolding Sunday. “I knew that our love was strong for each other and that we would protect one another,” Cook said.