Southern Poverty Law Center

Exclusive new reporting released today by the SPLC's Hatewatch details the evolution of the key personalities and groups that staged the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville five years ago this week.
 
“We don't use the term 'alt-right' anymore, and the statue these racists came to defend is gone. By the measures they set for themselves, they lost,” said Senior Investigative Reporter Michael Edison Hayden. “And yet the threat posed by the radical right has never been more dire in my lifetime. The so-called 'great replacement' rhetoric these men espoused has become commonplace. That's why it's so critical to look deeper at what happened in Charlottesville that August. It helps explain how we got here.”
 
Since before the deadly Unite the Right rally, Hatewatch has monitored and tracked many of the key players involved that day. This new report provides a summary of where they are as of August 2022.

Five years after white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, the statue they came to protect is gone, and the “alt-right” coalition they embodied has imploded. At the same time, the existential threat that far-right extremism poses to the U.S. has arguably never been more severe.

Such is the complex fallout of Unite the Right, where hundreds of extremists immersed a college town in violent conflict, generating shocking images that news organizations continue to broadcast as symbols of the nation’s struggle with hate and authoritarianism. They also helped bring the “great replacement” conspiracy theory into mainstream right-wing discourse by chanting, “Jews will not replace us” in viral videos staged on the eve of Unite the Right.

Hatewatch has continued to monitor the personalities and groups who staged Unite the Right, even after street-level activism, investigative reporting and legal battles blocked the rise of those figures, forcing the radical right movement to shuffle beyond them.

The report includes detailed updates on notable key players including Richard Spencer, Timothy “Baked Alaska” Gionet, David Duke, the Daily Stormer, Nicholas J. Fuentes, the Proud Boys and many more.

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