VERY FINE PEOPLE

In August 2017, Neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, White Nationalists, and Aryan Identitarians gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. They marched carrying tiki torches and chant “Jews will not replace us.” One attendee drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one woman and injuring dozens. President Donald Trump said that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

 

Then in October 2021, the rally organizers were sued in civil court. The legal question: can the leaders of the Alt-Right be held responsible for the violence their followers commit? Is violence the inevitable result of ethno-nationalist rhetoric? The trial was a baffling, chaotic farce, revealing our legal system’s impotence in the face of white nationalist organizing.

 

This performance is part of an ongoing series of workshops adapting the trial’s transcripts for the stage. This showing centers sociologist Peter Simi, who is called in to decode the Alt-Right’s internal communications.