12 August 2018 — 1317 mdt

How much should we worry about right wing
demonstrators when they’re outnumbered by the police?

Not much, in my opinion. Later today, the Unite the Right Rally 2 will be held in Washington, DC. According to The Hill, as many as 400 will attend, waving American and Confederate flags. They’ll be outnumbered by the police and counter-protesters.

There could be trouble. Black-masked Antifa thugs reportedly are in town, intent on starting fights and giving the political left a bad name. And some of the Unite the Righters will be the same people who gathered in Charlottesville, VA, last August, where one counter-protester was killed and another beaten badly.

Because the rally is exotic, it will be colorful, attracting news media attention that tends to greatly magnify the importance of the Unite the Righters and their reprehensible advocacy of white supremacy and racial discord.

But are they a threat to the nation? No. They’re scarcely a nuisance.

Today’s event needs to be kept in perspective. In a nation of 325 million, it’s not hard in the age of the internet to recruit a few hundred crackpots to attend a racist rally. On 8 August 1925, when our nation numbered 115 million, a far more worrisome march occurred in Washington, DC. More than 30,000 white robed members of the Ku Klux Klan strutted down Pennsylvania Avenue carrying American flags.

At its greatest strength, the KKK had three or four million members. Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates the KKK’s strength at 5,000 to 8,000 members, comprising approximately 70 groups, many at odds with each other. Undoubtedly, some of the Unite the Righters assembling in Washington, DC, today belong to the KKK. They’re not our finest citizens, and they may be personally acquainted with our criminal justice system, but they wield perishing little political power. They’re vastly outnumbered, and their numbers do not seem to be increasing.