I reported from the “Unite the Right 2” rally in Washington on Sunday. It was a dreary failure that attracted around 30 people in total and literally ended before it was supposed to start. I interviewed one alt-right supporter who had been confused by the poorly updated rally website and ended up missing the entire demonstration; I walked around the crowd of counterprotesters that dwarfed the neo-Nazis by orders of magnitude.
But as pathetic as of all that was, none of it was quite as hilariously humiliating to the alt-right as the video below — in which the rally’s organizer, Jason Kessler, is yelled at by his father to get out of his parents’ room in the middle of a live stream with a fellow alt-righter (the stream first aired some time ago, but recently resurfaced on Twitter).
Kessler says, in the livestream, that he has been forced to move in with his parents after a series of lawsuits stemming from last year’s violence sapped his funds. It’s an arrangement neither he nor his father seems pleased about.
“Hey!” Kessler’s father says, interrupting his conversation with the white nationalist and anti-Semitic former US Senate candidate Patrick Little. “You get out of my room!”
Unite the Right 2 organizer, Nazi failure Jason Kessler gets yelled at by his dad for being a Nazi while livestreaming w Nazi loser Patrick Little, who admits he may have to sell the boat he's broadcasting from at a loss because he needs money. pic.twitter.com/skmlmtdSAE
— FlyingOverTr0ut (@FlyingOverTr0ut) August 14, 2018
It’s hard to count the amusing moments in this short clip. My personal favorite is Kessler complaining that his father is “cucked” (a common alt-right insult) because he watches “constant anti-German propaganda” on the History Channel.
The basic point, though, is that the alt-right movement — which supporters hoped and analysts feared would become stronger and more mainstream after Charlottesville — has actually devolved into farce, with one of its key figures literally living at his parents’ house and sneaking into his father’s room to film his hateful videos.
And while Kessler is a particularly pathetic figure, hated even by many on the alt-right, the movement in general is in dire straits. My colleague Jane Coaston explains why:
Organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right have been embroiled in lawsuits filed by victims of the violence that took place. Many of the alt-right’s biggest personalities, like Richard Spencer, lost funding platforms because, understandably, platforms like Patreon and PayPal didn’t want to be associated with advocates for the return of the Third Reich. Other alt-right figures are involved in legal proceedings related to, for instance, harassing a Jewish woman online, or participation in a trailer park brawl.
One white nationalist attendee (best known for sobbing uncontrollably at the thought of his imminent arrest) was even recently banned from entering the state of Virginia. Kessler himself tweeted insults about the young woman killed during the rally, then blamed his tweets on a combination of Ambien and Xanax when even his fellow rallygoers disavowed him. And politically, the rally only served to, in the words of the New York Times, “empower a leftist political coalition that vows to confront generations of racial and economic injustice” in Charlottesville.
Normally, I’d say it’s wrong to mock adults who are forced to move in with their parents for financial reasons. But most people who do that aren’t railing against “Jewish influence,” or claiming that “our entire country would be better off if the South had won the Civil War.” Given that Kessler has dedicated his life to spreading hatred, including of people like me, I feel pretty okay having a laugh at his expense.
