LAT: ‘A year after Charlottesville, many white supremacists are keeping a lower profile’

From the Los Angeles Times:

Several leaders of white supremacist groups have said during the last year, often via social media, that their followers should avoid such public events.

Michael Hill, who leads the Alabama-based pro-Confederate group League of the South, told his followers in a May podcast that they do not have “anything to gain” from another Charlottesville, a common sentiment on fringe message boards and chat networks.

Brad Griffin, a prominent blogger who has pushed for a “Jew-free, white ethnostate in North America” on his website Occidental Dissent, recently wrote that racists should be careful about showing up at public gatherings.

“I don’t believe we should engage with them at all anymore,” Griffin wrote last month of counter-demonstrators…

Instead of Charlottesville, organizer Jason Kessler plans to hold a “white civil rights” anniversary rally Aug. 12 in Washington across from the White House. The event will not be “about hating anybody,” but rather about supporting a race that “is becoming a minority in the United States,” he said.

Nevertheless, even some of those who agree with him have disassociated themselves.

“I have nothing to do with it, and I have nothing to do with Jason Kessler,” Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who marched with tiki torches on the University of Virginia campus last year, wrote in an email.

Spencer, who helped promote last year’s rally, shunned Kessler after he celebrated the violence. Spencer encouraged other racist groups to no longer follow him.

Facing growing protests and thinning crowds as he traveled the country, Spencer recently disbanded his college tour. Last month, white nationalist Christopher Cantwell was banned from entering the state of Virginia for five years after pleading guilty to assault for using pepper spray on a crowd last year on the University of Virginia campus.