New York Times: Charlottesville Extremists Lose in Court, but Replacement Theory Lives On
By Alan Feuer
Read the full article here.
The jury verdict on Tuesday holding a dozen white supremacists liable for the violence at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., was a victory for those who have long inveighed against far-right extremists and a rare example of hate group leaders being held responsible not only for the language they use, but also for the bloodshed they are accused of causing.
But even though the planners of the rally lost their civil trial and now confront the prospect of $25 million in damages, their legacy lives on.
Four years after the event, the same ideas that made “Unite the Right” a lightning rod for hate groups are increasingly being echoed, albeit in modulated tones, by prominent figures in conservative media and politics. Chief among them is the great replacement theory, which holds that Democrats and others on the left are trying to supplant white Americans with immigrants and others for their own political gain.
This ideology’s shift from the margins toward the center was one of the leitmotifs of the nearly monthlong trial. Its spread suggests why it was crucial to have brought legal action against the defendants in the first place, according to those who helped to plan the case. “Precisely because their ideas have become more mainstream, it underscores why it is so important to hold these extremists accountable,” said Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America, a civil rights group that underwrote the suit.
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Perhaps the best example of political violence going mainstream was the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Though members of extremist groups played a role in the assault, the rioters who acted most violently that day — those, for instance, who fought with the police — were, in large part, also the most ordinary. They were church deacons, substitute teachers, military veterans and State Department aides.
“Jan. 6 was the inevitable manifestation of this ideology,” Ms. Spitalnick said. “What is ‘Stop the Steal’ if not the idea that the country was stolen from the people it supposedly ‘belonged to’ and that there was a conspiracy to effectively replace a largely white, Christian country.”