I remember this scene from Joker being way different. pic.twitter.com/aujgMcM7pP
— Forbidden HQ ? (@WearForbidden) August 11, 2026
Here are my thoughts on the nine year anniversary of Charlottesville:
1. I have nothing new to say about Alt-Right activists or the wisdom of Unite the Right. The subject has been beaten like a dead horse. I’m sure everyone involved though will agree that it was the peak of a cycle of radical energy and activity that had been building up for about a decade.
2. After Charlottesville, this radical energy and activity rapidly dissipated and flowed back into MAGA. We entered the post-Charlottesville era during which the Alt-Right was digested and absorbed into conservatism. Scott Greer’s book Whitepill is the definitive account of how the Alt-Right was coopted in the post-Charlottesville years. Tucker Carlson was the main character who used his FOX News show to normalize Alt-Right idea like the Great Replacement, the term anti-White and the goal of remigration. Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was the peak of the post-Charlottesville era. It is worth pausing and noting here that Trump’s defeat in 2020 didn’t change our trajectory. On the contrary, Biden’s presidency reenergized a deflated MAGA and laid the foundation for Trump’s comeback.
3. In retrospect, we can see how this era finally came to an end in fourth stages. The first event was when Tucker lost his FOX News show in 2023 and was pushed off television and into subscription based alternative media. The second was Operation Midnight Hammer last June. The third was Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the witch hunt for “antisemites” that followed. The final stage was when the Iran War began and everyone from Tucker Carlson to Alex Jones was excommunicated from MAGA.
4. In mid-2026, it feels like the radical energy and activity is growing again for the first time since Unite the Right. It feels like that moment in the fourth quarter of a football game when you see fans start to leave the stadium with long faces because the outcome is no longer in doubt. Trump is finally finished and MAGA is unraveling. You can see people looking around and taking stock of the result of the last 11 years of this man wasting our time. He was given two terms and two trifectas to “Make America Great Again” and the result of all of Trump’s chaos was conservatives rationalizing $20 burritos, doubling the national debt, a 30% hit to our standard of living, two corporate tax cuts and a war with Iran for Israel.
5. We’re getting the “Garden of National Heroes” in DC which will feature monuments of Frederick Douglass, MLK and Harriet Tubman. This is result of clamping down on radicalism and “being practical” and gaslighting ourselves into believing that conservatism had changed!
6. Maybe the torch march in Charlottesville was a stupid mistake. We can grant that Unite the Right was ill conceived by Jason Kessler. We can admit that we did all kinds of stupid things in the 2010s. Nine years later though, did we do anything as stupid as getting sucked back into MAGA?
Suppose for a moment that the last nine years of time, energy, attention and effort hadn’t been spent on putting wind in the sails of Trump, MAGA and the GOP … to get us where we are today, which is stuck in another war for Israel and another quagmire in the Middle East. Would we be worse off?
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