Friday 1:30pm McIntire Park

    Friday’s events began with smaller gatherings, like the one Cantwell is leading during the VICE interview, however, the day culminated with the infamous “Torch Walk”, shown in the images.The same divisive, Othering language seen at the rally on Saturday was present in Cantwell’s speech a day earlier during an interview with VICE. Yellow marking denotes dehumanizing/Othering language and red marking denotes language of war.

    At the beginning of the interview, Cantwell launches into a tirade about the roots of his interest in the “whole race thing”. He cites the rash of police shootings: “When the Trayvon Martin case, Michael Brown, Tamir Race and all these things happened —every single case— it’s some little black asshole behaving like a savage and he gets himself in trouble, shockingly enough.” He diminishes the consequences of their deaths, and blames them for being murdered. The circumstances of many of the crimes do not suggest that the victims were doing anything wrong, let alone behaving like “assholes” — he even resorts to the old language of slavery by relating the victims to “savages”. In reality, Tamir Rice was a 12 year-old boy holding a pellet gun. Trayvon Martin was walking home with a bag of skittles, wearing a hoodie. Michael Brown was walking the street after supposedly stealing a pack of swishers. He goes on to say “Whatever problems I might have with my fellow white people, they generally are not inclined to such behavior. And you have to take that into consideration when thinking about how to organize your society.” This insinuates his desire to create a white-only society. He views white and Black people as fundamentally different, with white people being the naturally better and more-behaved class.

    This division of white and Black people continues with his next statement. The interviewer lists white terrorists, one of them being Elliot Rodger, the man responsible for the 2014 Isla Vista Massacre. He says “I’m pretty sure Elliot Rodger was not explicitly white though.” It is unclear what he means by this. It does not appear that he is distancing himself from white violence — he has made it clear that he is comfortable with violence. Later, he says “Of course we’re capable [of violence]. I carry a pistol, I go to the gym all the time, I’m trying to make myself more capable of violence.”. It may be that he’s trying to create more distinction in a racialized hierarchy, and doesn’t believe that Rodger is pure enough ethnically to be white, as his mother, Li Chin Rodger was Malaysian.

    Cantwell states that part of his mission is to “spread ideas, talk, in the hopes that somebody more capable will come along and do that.” The insinuation being that he wants someone capable on a grander scale. He cites Donald Trump as a possibility, but discounts him, because he “[gave] his daughter to a Jew”, a reference to Ivanka Trump’s marriage to Jared Kushner. Either the President is not a strong enough office, or as Cantwell suggests, Donald Trump is not racist enough. When he suggests this, the interviewer asks him to clarify. He says confidently “A lot more racist than Donald Trump”. This is disconcerting in many ways. Not only has Trump already alligned himself with racist ideology and known racist groups like the KKK, but that that is “not racist enough”. It appears as though Cantwell is in search of the next Hitler, someone to reassert whiteness through violence and take America back as a “white country”. He is not even uncomfortable with the term “racist”. Previously, to be called racist was bad, something to shun away from and renounce, but this man, and other Neo-Nazis and Alt-Righters proudly wear the term like a badge of honor, along with the symbols of racism, such as swastikas.