Unite the Right Tiki Torches

2017

Date: 11 August 2017 · Place: University of Virginia campus, Charlottesville · Figures: Jason Kessler, rally organizer · Richard Spencer, speaker · Tiki Brand, citronella-torch manufacturer (involuntary) · Tags: Iconography, Procession, Brand-Hijack 01. Citronella as Costume On the night of 11 August 2017, several hundred white nationalists march across the University of Virginia campus carrying lit Tiki-brand bamboo garden torches, chanting 'Jews will not replace us' and 'blood and soil.' The torches are bought at hardware stores; they are normally used to keep mosquitoes off suburban patios. The image, photographed and broadcast by every wire service that night, becomes one of the defining American photographs of the decade. The visual choice is meme-fluent: garden citronella torches as Klan-procession cosplay, ironic distance and sincere intent fused. 02. Brand Disavowal Tiki Brand issues a statement two days later distancing the product from the event. The next morning Heather Heyer is killed when a marcher drives a car into a crowd of counter-protesters. Trump's 'very fine people on both sides' press conference follows on 15 August. The episode marks the moment the imageboard alt-right takes corporeal form on a public street and discovers that the cosplay aesthetic is illegible at the scale of physical violence. Within two years most attendees of the march have been doxxed by name; many have lost jobs, families, futures. Sources • Hawes Spencer, 'White Nationalists March on University of Virginia,' New York Times, 11 August 2017 • Tiki Brand, official statement, 12 August 2017 • Vegas Tenold, 'Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America' (Nation Books, 2018)