We Sent Someone To An Alt-Right Rally & Hot Fuck, America’s In A State

You may or may not have noticed, but politics in America seem to have gone somewhat off the rails since, oh, I dunno, maybe around November 8th-ish last year. For a series of infuriating reasons, the 55.5% of Americans that turned out to vote elected a president who would have been a struggling Gil Gunderson-esque used car salesman if he wasn’t born into a level of privilege that insulated him from the consequences of being a blundering dumbass with unearned unassailable self-confidence. Shockingly, this has caused some tension in the country.

Empowered by Trump‘s murky, tacit support of their racism and his substantially less murky, less tacit support of their xenophobia, transphobia, and assortment of other -phobias, elements of American conservatism have felt confident enough to drop the thin veneer of bullshit they use to make their more bigoted opinions sound palatable and respectable. Thus, the alt-right.

2017 has seen the rise of a number of groups that still distance themselves from white supremacy but are happy to openly embrace white nationalism, a distinction, they claim, that means that while they don’t see white people as superior, they still believe white people should have their own country and that ‘white culture’ (I assume this refers to Enya and the sport of curling) should be celebrated and protected. The rise of these right-wing groups has not gone unchallenged, with the left resisting them in a spectrum of means that ranges from tweets about the size of Trump’s hands to smacking racists in the chops.

While Australia has got its own egregiously dipshittish political discourse, America’s has manifested in fraught, often violent real-world confrontation, recently culminating in a man being charged with second-degree murder after allegedly intentionally driving into a crowd of left-wing protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring scores more.

These clashes have occurred with an alarming frequency, spurred on by things like the appearance of vacuously contrarian fuckwit Milo Yiannoupolis at colleges or the removal of Confederate statues in southern states. Since I find this all very alien, and apparently hate doing holiday things when I’m on holiday, I decided to check one out first-hand. It was weird.

I happened to be in PortlandOregon on a weekend when local right-wing group Patriot Prayer would be holding a rally, joined by various groups of left-wing counter-protesters who all agree they should kindly fuck off.

Patriot Prayer are a little hard to get a handle on. Lead by Japanese-American (this comes up a lot) Portland local Joey Gibson, on the surface, they present a very lovey-dovey, ‘let’s all get along’ rhetoric that doesn’t really hold up to close inspection. As David Neiwert (writing for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups in the US) describes, their MO is to gather specifically in left-wing cities for rallies of very nebulous purpose in the hopes of provoking a response:

Patriot Prayer is an antigovernment “Patriot” group based originally in Vancouver, Washington, and now in Portland, Oregon, that has organized a series of protests in the Pacific Northwest that have all been held in places that are established centers of liberal/left politics, all with the clear intent of attempting to provoke a violent response from far-left antifascists.

While getting relentlessly dunked on might seem like an unpleasant task to undertake, it’s part of a broader push to flip the script on the oppressive nature of far-right conservatism. While, with Trump in office, this ilk of right-winger is backed by both the status quo and the state, they still try to maintain that they are the underdog, being bullied at the hands of the left-wing people who control everything (except, y’know, the country).

A very similar parallel can be drawn with the folks conducting the ‘No’ campaign in Australia’s marriage equality debate: despite having the government on their side and despite having successfully stymied the rights of queer people in Australia for decades upon decades, they still attempt to project the ‘poor me’ image of an oppressed minority simply trying to stop the homosexuals from getting too uppity. It is not difficult to see through.

To that end, the ultimate message of the rally was pretty difficult to figure out. Mostly, I suspect, this was because it didn’t have one. All Patriot Prayer need to do to achieve their goal is portray themselves as plucky, jovial underdogs at the mercy of angry, rude, violent leftists. This is not that hard to do, because the left is angry. They’re angry for a reason.

Using the sort of reductive analysis that would only really fool someone who already wanted to believe it, the right frames the anger of the left as an intrinsic product of the left itself, not as a response to the things they are protesting. This is, again, quite similar to Australia: it’s easy not to be angry when the status quo already supports you and you have literally nothing to lose if things don’t go your way. Will Lyle Shelton‘s life change if marriage equality passes? Other than maybe he might have more time to golf, no. It’s easy to remain calm when you have nothing at risk. For queer people, this is their actual lives: the marriage debate is a hugely important milestone in seeing gay people be given equal status in Australian society.

In America, the same goes for the people who will lose healthcare, the trans people affected by Trump’s dog-whistling, the children of immigrants who will be deported if DACA is repealed, and the people who will be turned into radioactive ash if Trump keeps trying to start Twitter beef with a volatile nuclear power. They are angry because the actions of their opponents are at their expense in a very immediate, very impactful way. The right has the luxury of appearing calm, composed and reasonable because they have no skin in the game.

For weird tactical reasons (all these guys consider themselves to be the MAGA-hat-wearing equivalent of Sun Tzu), the rally I attended was, at the last minute, split into two: one at midday at a park in Portland and one a few hours later just across the river in Vancouver, Washington (not to be confused with the Vancouver in Canada).

According to Gibson, the Patriot Prayer attendees at the first rally would consist of his “inner circle“. This inner circle, it turns out, is a few old blokes, a few not-as-old blokes, congressional candidate Mark Callahan, one Proud Boy (google it, it is sad and hilarious), and one dude dressed as a cross between a vampire hunter and a database admin.


Pictured: Your mates. 

Significantly outnumbering this rag-tag group of flag-wavers was the counter-protest. Composed of some 400ish people of wildly varying affiliation: local religious leaders, black bloc-clad Antifa types, members of the local Democratic Socialists of America chapters, mums, dads, dogs, and, obviously, Juggalos.


Pictured: Socialists and journalists.


Pictured: A pretty even mix of combat boots and running shoes.


Pictured: A Juggalo with what appears to be possibly a mandarin, maybe a tangerine.

In addition to the rally-goers and counter-protesters, there were cops. Lots and lots of cops. Holy shit, there were so many cops. Local Portland cops, Oregonian state cops, cops from the county sheriff’s office – most them armoured and many carrying pepper spray, pepper ball guns (the things that look like paintball guns), and tear gas launchers. When you are used to Australian cops, it’s easy to find all of this a bit overwhelming.


Pictured: Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

Unsurprisingly in such a charged environment, the rally was not without confrontation. Left-wing protesters clashed with cops after a barrier between them either fell over or was pushed and the crowd took a step forward, which the police responded to by shoving them back and ripping banners out of their hands. Almost immediately, pepper spray was deployed on the crowd and some cops in heavy riot gear who had been waiting in the wings grimly jogged onto the field like an extremely menacing League team.


Pictured: The ‘shit is about to get real’ squad and a dude who forgot to bring long pants.

A number of people were taken into custody (I personally saw five people arrested, Portland Police Department claim seven arrests were made on the day) and everyone – right-wingers, counter-protesters, journalists, and tourists – was told to leave the square or they, too, would be arrested.

Deciding that that would be a great time to leave, we headed back to the car to travel to the Vancouver portion of the rally, passing a march from the peaceful protest delegation of counter-protesters that featured this dog. Look at this dog.


Pictured: A good dog. Not really important to the story but, still. Look at it.

Shit got even weirder in Vancouver. When we arrived, Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson and an odd mixture of speakers were holding forth to an audience of around 100 in a riverside amphitheatre as counter-protesters chanted from behind a police line immediately adjacent.


Pictured: A cop wishing he had finished his marine biology degree.

As I mentioned earlier, Patriot Prayer makes something of an attempt to nominally distance themselves from being explicitly alt-right. They do this primarily by making proclamations denouncing white supremacists and playing host to speakers of a variety of viewpoints, some of which run contrary to the religious conservatism that is their bread and butter. This does a solid job of confusing the journalists who write about them and the readers who read about them, but it also does a solid job of confusing the people who attend their rallies.

One speaker, which The Guardian‘s Jason Wilson described as a ‘Christian anarchist’, drew a mixed response of silence and hesitant, confused clapping from the assembled audience after quoting a number of Bible passages that proclaimed we should open our homes to immigrants and leading a prayer which asked for the decolonisation of the US and freedom from the tyranny of capitalism.

Another woman (who described herself as a veteran and a Bernie Sanders supporter) similarly perplexed the audience, most of whom were heavily decked out in Trump merch and probably consider the socialist-leaning Sanders to be the first soldier in a commie takeover of America.

The pretense of being a loving, non-alt-right-affiliated group is apparently one that is tough to maintain. When speaker Mark Callahan rhetorically asked what Patriot Prayer should say to the counter-protesters, a vocal portion of the audience responded with “Fuck you!“, before Callahan could answer his own question with the much more on-message “We embrace them with love.

For a group supposedly focused on love and tolerance, they keep some very strange company. Both the rallies prominently featured members of the Proud Boys (no, that name will never stop sounding dumb) and the Hell Shaking Street Preachers; the former a proud proponent of ‘Western chauvinism’ (*cough* white nationalism *cough*) and the latter a group who, according to The Oregonian, “regularly speak against the gay and lesbian community, immigrants and Muslims, and have incited violence at previous rallies.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a rally held by Gibson at the start of August featured a showing from Identity Evropa, a white supremacist organisation that struggles with the letter ‘u’ and has been declared a hate group by both the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League. While Gibson might seemingly decry white supremacists and the alt-right, Patriot Prayer certainly seems to align enough with their values for them to continue to attend and take part.

The rally itself was uneventful and awkward: a series of people who had never given speeches before apologised for being nervous and held a microphone too far away from their mouth for the small PA system to effectively deliver their meandering talking points to the sparsely filled amphitheatre. The audience was full of characters, though: for the most part a mix of middle-aged religious conservatives and young men who had clearly been mobilised into right-wing activism by Reddit or 4chan or both.


Pictured: The internet, IRL.


Pictured: Someone’s mum is wilding out.

Thanks in part to it being an easier space for crowd control and the smaller crowds, the Vancouver rally passed without incident. The counter-protesters that were there when we arrived seemed to be taking it pretty easy, although the tone changed towards the end as others who had been at the Portland rally began to arrive.


Pictured: Get it, it’s a play on words.

After finishing up, the Patriot Prayer contingent was escorted to the parking lot by police. This, too, remained uneventful, with the exception of a right-winger getting laughed at after he stalled his motorbike trying to peel out. Smooth.

Shit, however, started to get hectic once participants from both sides left, becoming too spread out for police to keep apart. Almost immediately after entering downtown I saw counter-protesters running. Obviously, I followed them, arriving just in time to see a police car block the path of a large four-wheel drive festooned with American and Confederate flags. Police arrested the driver, also briefly detaining the rider of the motorbike mentioned above, who was following the four-wheel drive at high speed.


Pictured: Those ‘I am being arrested’ feels.

Shortly before I arrived, the driver – who has since been released without charge – allegedly reversed into the crowd of counter-protesters after the car was reportedlypelted with water bottles and other missiles.” According to The Guardian, it and another four-wheel drive, driven by attendees from the Patriot Prayer rally, had been “driving at high speed through the streets, reversing and veering dangerously close to protesters,” with one witness claiming that the occupants of the second vehicle (one of which was wearing the uniform of a Proud Boy) had been throwing things from the car at counter-protesters.

According to the Willamette Week, the men in the second car had been spraying pepper spray at counter-protesters and were detained (mostly, it seems, for their protection) as police kept the crowd of counter-protesters back. I got there just in time to see them attempt to drive off when they were released, after which they immediately ran into the running boards on a police four-wheel drive modified to carry officers on the outside of the vehicle. They managed not to crash on their second attempt.

Just like in Portland, people in the area were told to rack off or they would be thrown in the slammer (paraphrasing). Residents who had filtered out onto the street often audibly picked sides. I saw one woman telling counter-protesters to “go back to Portland“. I saw another man saying “Fuck Nazis!” as a sort of hello to counter-protesters who walked past him. It was a weird vibe.

In terms of something to do on a holiday: it was definitely an experience. Between the militarised police and the masked people running through the streets like something from ‘The Warriors‘ chasing flag-draped guys in big trucks like something from ‘The Purge‘, it felt almost (almost) comically surreal – a feeling that I could only entertain because no one got hurt, thank fuck.

In terms of its actual real world implications, though, this shit is depressing as hell. There is a deep, intractable cultural and political rift in America that only seems to be widening and it’s hard to imagine how something like this could be resolved. Resisting bigotry is absolutely vital but we are by our nature social animals who dislike conflict (in person, at least) and I think there’s always going to be a tiny part of the brain that looks at ugliness like this and thinks ‘Can’t we all just get along?’

The answer seems very likely to be ‘No’.

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