On Sunday, around a hundred or so white nationalists and alt-right activists gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial above the Reflecting Pool for a “Rally for Free Speech,” drawing followers from Baltimore to Texas. White nationalist Richard Spencer capped the three-hour long event with a disturbing call to action: “Let’s meet a year from now. Let’s have 10,000 people. Let’s five years from now have 100,000 people or a half a million people. Let’s march for us,” he told the cheering crowd. “We are gonna start history all over again.”
This is real. This is happening. And ignoring it will not make it go away.