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The rally was sparked by Charlottesville's decision to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park. (ABC7)

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) -- The organizer of a weekend rally that's expected to draw hundreds of "alt-right" activists and white nationalists is suing a Virginia city over its decision to relocate the event.

Attorneys for right-wing blogger Jason Kessler filed the federal lawsuit Thursday against Charlottesville.

The city says Kessler's Saturday event can't take place in its downtown Emancipation Park. Citing safety considerations, they ordered it moved to a park about a mile away.

The rally was sparked by Charlottesville's decision to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park. Kessler's lawsuit argues moving the rally will "dilute" his message, violating free speech.

The Rutherford Institute and American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia are representing Kessler.

The so-called "alt-right" movement generally espouses a mix of racism, white nationalism and populism.

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'Alt-right' rally organizer sues city over location change - WJLA

In recent months, numerous campuses have been rocked by student protests sparked by the scheduled appearances of alt-right figures such as Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos.

The alt-right activity is part of a larger surge in campus organizing and recruitment by white nationalists. Now, the movement is seeking to capitalize on the publicity and momentum it gained amid its strong support of the Trump campaign.

Some of the recent protests, at Berkeley and elsewhere, have attracted far-left activists known as anti-fascists and have turned violent, igniting a debate over freedom of speech on campus.

In its new publication The Alt-Right on Campus: What Students Need to Know the SPLC advises students to avoid direct confrontation with alt-right speakers and their supporters, many of whom are young white supremacists eager to engage in street fighting with students and anti-fascist protesters.

The guide is a project of the SPLC on Campus program, which currently has chapters at 30 colleges across the country.

The rise of the alt-right has left many students deeply concerned about hate on campus and asking what they can do to make a difference, said Lecia Brooks, SPLC director of outreach. This guide provides answers. It not only shows students how to respond to a possible alt-right event, but how to inoculate your campus against such extremism before these speakers appear on campus.

In addition to offering step-by-step instructions for students to counter the movements influence, the guide explains the racist ideology of the alt-right and profiles its leaders.

As the guide explains, public universities that have a policy allowing student groups to host outside speakers cannot legally bar alt-right speakers except under the most extreme circumstances. The SPLC urges students to hold alternative events that celebrate diversity, inclusion and cultural awareness. In addition, they should speak out against hate and encourage university administrators to issue statements condemning the views of alt-right speakers.

SPLC President Richard Cohen testified in June before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary about the obligation of universities to uphold not only the First Amendment rights of controversial speakers but to speak out against hate and bigotry.

We need to fight speech that threatens our nations democratic values with speech that upholds them, Cohen said in his oral testimony. Its an obligation that university officials have and one that everyone in public life, starting with the president, has as well.

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SPLC releases campus guide to countering 'alt-right' | Southern ... - Southern Poverty Law Center

Something is rotten with liberalisms reigning manifestation, its stench discernible to everyone but itself. A sterile managerialism signposted as what Oscar Wilde decried as the monstrous worship of facts distilled in the form of policy wonkery and modish Vox explainers, had the rug yanked from under it on Nov. 8. It was an unexpected stumble across the Rubicon one in which the ruling consensus was forsaken, crestfallen, and discombobulated within a ruptured sociopolitical milieu that was no longer recognizable.

In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Emmett Rensin diagnoses liberalisms paralysis as one plagued by the censorious impulse of technocratic reason. Donald Trump was the expression of the id, animated by libidinal whims, repressed desires, and resentments; the liberal establishment was the moralizing superego, directing commands toward appropriate conduct and policing discourse. Upon losing control of the id, the compulsion to fact-check and bellow This is not normal! into the post-truth abyss turned liberals, Rensin proclaims, into the blathering superego at the end of history.

In this political order, transgression and libertinism appeared as cathartic outlets. Irony was weaponized, and guileful wordplay camouflaged bigotry. Such was the transgressive thrill of Trumpism: the enjoyment of publicly stating what is not said openly, which tapped into what Jacques Lacan termed jouissance the desire to go beyond the limits of publicly accepted discourse.

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Unsurprisingly, the shift toward social sadism is echoed in online culture, especially with trolling. The so-called alt-right embraced trolling, shrugging off accusations of racism and sexism by adopting a sardonic dispensation to wring its hands clean from charges of prejudice. You just dont get it, went the customary rebuke.

They know their liberal opponents well, homing in on their conscience and sanctimonious virtue-signaling. Witch-hunting and online harassment is employed as a popular strategy to hound feminists, social justice warriors, and other moralists. Equivalent disdain is reserved for establishment conservatives, branded cuckservatives for having stood pat as the positional gains of minorities emasculated White America.

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Trumps unabashed vulgarity, scorn for political correctness, and occasional deployment of alt-right memes made him a unifying symbol for this vanguard. Making sense of the shifting terrain of far-right politics demands an understanding of a fringe movement that was memed into existence after being thrust into the mainstream spotlight during the Trump electoral campaign.

Is architecture ideological? The NRA thinks so.

In Kill All Normies, Irish journalist Angela Nagle attempts to carry out such a task. Nagle documents the meteoric rise of the alt-right through the turbulent online culture wars. While the movements indecipherable jargon led many to portray the alt-right as conservative iconoclasm as opposed to neofascism, its ideas were imported from a diverse mlange the French New Right, the Identitarian movement, and American white nationalism before getting truncated and popularized through anonymous forums like 4Chan.

As Nagle observes, the early iterations of this assemblage was a strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls whose dark humor and love of transgression for its own sake made it hard to know what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz.

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There is an inclination to reduce the alt-rights pranksterism to a pop-cultural spectacle, as opposed to a crucible of virulent ethno-nationalism that needs to be confronted and refuted. While the profusion of irony, memes, and in-jokes does not a movement make, it is important to eschew the revulsion that characterizes much of the response to this nebulous amalgam.

Conservatism, after all, can summon a radical undercurrent when necessary. Fundamentally reactionary as opposed to rigidly traditionalist, it is willing to absorb and redirect the potency of new revolutionary actors toward counter-revolution and new relations of domination. Political scientist Corey Robin identifies this tendency in The Reactionary Mind, where he points out that the right is more than happy to violently upend an anemic ruling class to install a more dynamic one in its place, even if it means using the tactics and rhetoric of their ideological rivals. As Robin notes, While conservatives are hostile to the goals of the left ... they often are the lefts best students.

Indeed, some of Nagles engaging commentary revolves around the emergence of the alt-rights more watered down, media-friendly face that she terms the alt-light. She argues how the alt-right understood the significance of manufacturing an alternative culture and media ecology in response to the establishments cultural dominance.

From Breitbarts Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos to Vice cofounder Gavin McInnes and InfoWars conspiratorial huckster Alex Jones, these digital-savvy alt-light figures flourished in shaping popular culture through new-media platforms. They were the self-styled new punks, fermenting a loyal right-wing fan base that had the benefit of consuming alternative content while steadily accumulating subcultural capital. Managerial liberalisms failure to tackle economic disparities, while paying lip service to a fetishistic form of identity politics, paved the way for virulent forces of reaction to repackage their Weimaresque regalia into an edgier postmodern register.

However, unlike the strategies of the left that they attempt to mimic, the alt-rights meta-politics is saddled with a problem of realization. How do you develop into a mass movement when you are not grounded in organizational struggle? Baiting progressives and racist troll-storms is one thing, but can it translate its success in cyberspace into political power? The evidence so far has been found wanting.

Nevertheless, the alt-right has managed to punch above its weight; the incorporeal battlefield they waged war on has had real consequences. Their mythologized conflict with conformity has them tirelessly hunting for a narrative of self-determination. Yet, by having reached a critical mass without the ability to transfer and regenerate its momentum, it appears that meme magic and Trumps cantankerous tweets will have to suffice for now.

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The limits of the alt-right - The Boston Globe

Julia Robinson for The Chronicle

Richard Spencer, a leader of the white supremacist "alt-right" movement, visited the campus of Texas A&M U. at College Station last fall. The SPLC is offering guidance to students who oppose speakers with views like his.

For universities, the new academic year has nearly arrived. If its anything like last year, controversial speakers will be a consistent challenge for administrators and students alike.

More often than not, the speakers that generate the most controversy are those labeled right-wing reactionaries by their critics. Last fall, Richard Spencer, a white nationalist, launched a speaking tour to recruit college students to the alt-right, a loose group of white supremacists and online agitators. His speech at Texas A&M University at College Station saw protest become physical, a turn that would become common throughout the coming months.

The Southern Poverty Law Center wants to help students oppose hate speech without creating a spectacle that can be exploited.

During a visit to the University of California at Berkeley in February, the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was greeted by masked protesters who smashed windows and set fires on the campus. Weeks earlier, a man was shot during a protest of a speech by Mr. Yiannopoulos at the University of Washington.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization that monitors hate groups, wants to reduce the number of these protests gone awry. To that end, the center, which also monitored cases of anti-immigrant and race-based harassment after the presidential election, has issued a 20-page report with advice for students on how best to respond when a controversial speaker from the alt-right comes to campus. The guide, titled "The Alt-Right on Campus: What Students Need to Know," is geared toward student activists, but it also has relevance to administrators and faculty members on dealing with contentious speakers. Here are a few highlights:

Just ignore the event.

The spectacles created by counterprotesters, says Lecia Brooks, the SPLCs outreach director, only serve to embolden the speakers and allow them to portray themselves as victims.

"The best response is not to show up at all," Ms. Brooks said. "It is the better strategy."

Thats the same advice Teresa Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia, gave to the UVa community regarding a gathering of white-nationalists in Charlottesville, planned for this Saturday.

"To approach the rally and confront the activists would only satisfy their craving for spectacle," she wrote. "They believe that your counterprotest helps their cause."

A similar approach was adopted at Texas A&M when Mr. Spencer came to its campus in December. University leaders organized a competing event, "Aggies United," away from Mr. Spencers speech, though police officers in riot gear still had to stop some protesters from trying to enter the building where he was speaking.

Ask college leaders to denounce the speaker.

While it might be tempting for administrators to try and cancel the event, that could lead to even more attention for the speaker, Ms. Brooks said. Thats what happened at Auburn University when Mr. Spencer visited its campus in April. The university had tried to prevent him from speaking, but a judge ruled against that decision. Ms. Brooks said the event attracted more attention as a result.

Or consider Berkeleys juggling of Ann Coulters ultimately canceled speech. That caused plenty headaches, even though she never spoke at the campus.

Instead, the SPLC report suggests that student activists ask the administration to denounce the speakers message. Michael K. Young, the Texas A&M president, called Mr. Spencers racist message "beneath contempt" when the white nationalist visited that campus.

Talk to the group hosting the event.

Its easy to forget that these speakers dont materialize out of thin air, but rather are invited often by other students, who can have mixed motives. The views of students who invite a controversial speaker may not correspond with those of the speaker.

That was the case when Mr. Yiannopoulos visited the University of Washington. A leader of the College Republicans chapter that had invited him told The Chronicle that student organizers had wanted a tamer conservative speaker, Ben Shapiro, to speak at the college, but they couldnt afford his $10,000 fee. Mr. Yiannopoulos came free of charge.

And the dean of students at Wake Forest University was able to convince the College Republicans there to bring in Roger Stone instead of Mr. Yiannopoulos. The groups goal had really been to get more conservative viewpoints on campus, not necessarily to endorse Mr. Yiannopoulos.

The Southern Poverty Law Center encourages people to try and suss out the host groups motivation for bringing a controversial speaker to campus. For more of its insights, including a whos who in the alt-right and other tips on how to quell the storm a controversial speaker brings, check out the full report.

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.

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An Anti-Hate Group Has This Advice for When the Alt-Right Comes to Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

The tensions escalated this spring, when PayPal restricted the accounts of several prominent far-right figures, including Hunter Wallace, a white nationalist blogger, and Kyle Chapman, an alt-right personality known as Based Stickman. In a statement, PayPal said that its policy was not to allow our services to be used for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance.

A similar fight occurred in July when Patreon and GoFundMe, two crowdfunding sites, banned several accounts associated with the alt-right. One of them was used by Lauren Southern, a Canadian activist and journalist who made a name for herself with inflammatory stunts like disrupting a refugee rescue mission in the Mediterranean Sea. Patreon banned Ms. Southerns account after deciding that her activities were likely to cause loss of life, but emphasized that it was the nature of Ms. Southerns work, not the political views behind it, that had violated its terms.

The decision to remove a creator page has nothing to do with politics and ideology, Jack Conte, Patreons chief executive, said in a YouTube video about the incident.

Some company decisions are more explicitly political. At Airbnb last week, the company discovered that several writers and activists affiliated with The Daily Stormer, a white supremacy website, had used its website to book lodging for a right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., and were planning to use rented houses as after-party venues. Airbnb officials canceled the bookings and deleted the users accounts, saying that the gatherings violated the companys community commitment.

YouTube, which hosts a thriving community of right-wing personalities and, not coincidentally, is owned by Google has come under particularly aggressive criticism from conservative activists, who have accused the site of placing them in a ghetto by suppressing their videos.

This month, YouTube announced a new slate of content policies that subjected controversial religious or supremacist content to additional restrictions, including hiding those videos from user recommendations. The policies did not explicitly mention any political ideology, but conspiracists at sites like Infowars and Breitbart cried foul, claiming that YouTubes true intent was to stop the spread of right-wing views. One far-right journalist, Mike Cernovich, announced on Twitter that he was planning a protest outside Googles offices.

Were just doing what the left has done for a while, Mr. Cernovich told me. You use activist tactics to apply pressure to corporations, and the corporations respond.

Its a tech companys right, of course, to bar whomever it wishes. The First Amendment, often cited by right-wing activists as a bulwark against censorship, does not apply to the activities of companies, and tech companies almost always have terms in the fine print that give them the right to cut off access to users for any reason.

But the latest wave of right-wing activism has still forced the hands of large Silicon Valley companies, many of which have tried to avoid the appearance of partisanship even as they promote progressive values.

The alt-right isnt necessarily wrong when it claims, as its followers often do, that Silicon Valley is steeped in social liberalism. These are companies that emerged out of Bay Area counterculture, that sponsor annual floats in gay pride parades and hang Black Lives Matter signs on the walls of their offices. Silicon Valleys policy preferences arent always liberal, but tech executives routinely side with progressives on hot-button social issues like immigration, the Paris climate accords, and President Trumps recent decision to bar transgender people from military service. In todays political climate, these are partisan positions, and its no big shock that they have drawn suspicion from the other side.

There is a certain poetic justice in the alt-right, largely an internet-based political movement, turning against the companies that enabled it in the first place. Like most modern political movements, the alt-right relies on tech platforms like YouTube and Twitter to rally supporters, collect donations and organize gatherings. In that sense, Silicon Valley progressivism isnt just an ideological offense to the alt-right its an operational threat.

In an attempt to build a buffer against censorship, some alt-right activists have begun creating their own services. Cody Wilson, who describes himself as a techno-anarchist, recently opened Hatreon, a crowdfunding site that bills itself as a free-speech alternative to Patreon. Gab, a Twitter clone, was started last year after Twitter banned several conservative users. RootBocks, a right-wing Kickstarter knockoff, bills itself as a crowdfunding site that wont shut you down because of your beliefs.

These companies are still tiny by Silicon Valley standards, but their supporters say that one day they could serve as the foundation for a kind of parallel right-wing internet where all speech is allowed, no matter how noxious or incendiary.

Its unlikely that any alt-right protest will make a dent in the bottom lines of multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley behemoths. But by forcing these companies to take sides in an emerging culture war, these activists have already achieved a kind of perverse goal. They have found a new punching bag, and they have proved that in the hyper-polarized Trump era, there is no such thing as neutrality.

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The Alt-Right Finds a New Enemy in Silicon Valley - New York Times