Airbnb boots white nationalists headed to ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville
After a series of raw-throated public confrontations earlier this year, Charlottesville is bracing for an influx of white nationalists from across the country to Saturday’s “Unite the Right” rally.
But visitors might have a problem nailing down accommodations. As city leaders worked overtime Monday trying to defuse an increasingly tense situation, the room-sharing company Airbnb quietly booted users planning to use the service to find housing.
The company confirmed they had taken action in a statement to NBC29: “When through out background check processes or from input of our community we identify and determine that there are those who would be pursuing behavior on the platform that would be antithetical to the Airbnb Community Commitment, we seek to take appropriate action including, as in this case, removing them from the platform.”
That stance didn’t sit well with the rally’s organizer, Jason Kessler.
“This is outrageous and should be grounds for a lawsuit,” Kessler told The Washington Post in an email Monday night. “It’s the racial targeting of white people for their ethnic advocacy.” Kessler added the rally “is opposed to the historical and demographic displacement of white people. Would Airbnb cancel the service of black nationalists or Black Lives Matter activists for their social media activity? Of course not!”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors “hate groups and other extremists,” warns that the rally could be “the largest hate-gathering of its kind in decades in the United States.”
The location for the rally, Emancipation Park, is no accident. Until February, the 45,435-square-foot green space was originally known as Robert E. Lee Park. When renaming the public park, the Charlottesville City Council also voted to remove the statue of the Confederate general, but it remains in place because of a court injunction that halted its removal, The Washington Post has reported. Another hearing on the matter is slated for later this month.
In recent years the park has become a hot spot for controversy. Municipalities across the South have moved to scrub Confederate symbolism from civic life following the 2015 racially motivated killing of nine black church members in Charleston, S.C.
In July, a Ku Klux Klan group held a rally at Emancipation Park in support of the statue. Charlottesville law enforcement spent nearly $33,000 keeping the 30 or so Klansmen separated from the 1,000 counterprotesters who arrived to challenge the group’s presence. Following the rally, police used gas canisters to move counterprotesters from the area. Twenty-two arrests were made.
“Unite the Right” is a further escalation of the culture war street theater that city leaders worry may be drawing more notice and participants.
“This is an event which seeks to unify the right against a totalitarian Communist crackdown,” the rally’s Facebook page noted, “to speak out against displacement level immigration policies in the United States and Europe and to affirm the right of Southerners and white people to organize for their interests just like any other group is able to do, free of persecution.”
The event’s speakers list is full of free speech provocateurs such as white nationalist Richard Spencer and Augustus Invictus, the self-professed “most dangerous Libertarian in America.” High-ranking members from the National Socialist Movement, the Traditionalist Workers Party and the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer have also indicated they will attend.
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