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Between 2016 and 2018, Americans witnessed a major upswing in street mobilization by far-right groups, making it one of the most active periods of on-the-ground extremist activity in decades.

In a new report, we've documented 125 rallies, marches and protests organized and attended by far-right extremists including white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, the “alt-right,” and right-wing reactionaries during these three years. There were 74 of these events in 2017 alone. 

Those years represented a high point in the movement’s faith in the political process – a faith that has wavered as far-right extremists have increasingly lost confidence in President Donald Trump. Many have retreated from the streets entirely, joining more clandestine extremist cells that believe America’s multiracial democracy is headed for inevitable collapse. These so-called accelerationists call for violence to speed the process along.

For example, while members of the far-right “boogaloo boys” took to the streets in 2020 during the nationwide protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, their aims are fundamentally different from radical right groups that did so during Trump’s candidacy and the early years of his presidency. The boogaloo boys do not plan their own rallies and do not intend to act as an insurgent political force seeking mainstream power.

Instead, they hope to exacerbate larger political tensions and push the country toward a second civil war. For the boogaloo boys and similar groups, taking to the streets is not a return to the far-right politics of protests that the nation previously witnessed, but a shift toward more authoritarian, anti-democratic – and even violent – tendencies within the radical right.       

As our report demonstrates, there have been two distinct periods of far-right activism within recent years, with the latest period harboring an increased threat of violence.

Before the Trump era, far-right public rallies were infrequent. Members of the radical right favored suit-and-tie conferences and used the internet to spread their message, hoping it would bleed into the mainstream. The rise of Trump, a political figure who relied on much of the same divisive rhetoric the far right has historically used to galvanize its followers transformed the political landscape.

The radical right suddenly felt a connection to mainstream politics and a realistic hope of gaining political power, which drew more adherents – and a wider variety of adherents – to the movement. Unsurprisingly, the movement saw an upswing in rallies and other activism. 

These rallies promoted white nationalist conspiracy theories, while some members of the radical right pitched their rallies as a way to address a broad swath of right-wing grievances and conspiratorial beliefs that antifa posed an authoritarian threat to the nation. At their core, these rallies were about propaganda. Participants and spectators bonded over a perceived victimhood and claimed they were opposing violent leftists.

White nationalist organizations were also taking to the streets, energized by the activism of the broader political right opposing calls to remove Confederate memorials. More than 360 rallies backing the Confederate battle flag occurred shortly after June 2015 and through the end of that year. It was June 2015 when nine Black people were killed by a white supremacist at a Charleston, South Carolina, church. Photos later surfaced of the gunman with the Confederate battle flag. The eruption of support for the racist symbol and subsequent rallies created a space for hate group members to inject explicit white racial grievance into the mix of anti-government, pro-Confederate and pro-Trump discourse.

The overall level of activism the radical right was able to sustain between 2016 and 2018 would not have been possible without the ties that extremists forged on social media. Facebook and Twitter, in particular, allowed them to coordinate easily, promote events, spread propaganda and recruit new followers – often anonymously. They built a sense of shared purpose and community online, an indispensable part of why people left their keyboards for the streets and parks of Sacramento and Berkeley, California; Portland, Oregon; Charlottesville, Virginia; Washington D.C.; and other cities.

“Basically, it makes me feel part of something bigger than myself and it doesn’t make me feel so alone and so … atomized,” one self-described “red-pilled” man told a HuffPost reporter in 2018 as he stood outside an event organized by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who came to prominence during Trump’s campaign. “Red-pilling” refers to the adoption of far-right beliefs on race, gender and ethnicity.

While it didn’t cause rallies to cease entirely, the deadly rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, proved to be a turning point in far-right activism. Before the rally, the radical right was, to an unusual degree, able to look past ideological and tactical differences that have historically divided the movement. The unity and networking the radical right had experienced as a result of its public activism resulted in hundreds of people with tiki torches marching through the Virginia college town. The next day, one of those extremists rammed his car through a peaceful group of anti-fascists, killing activist Heather Heyer.

Read more here.

In solidarity,
The Southern Poverty Law Center