White Supremacist Terrorism in Charlottesville:
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Writen byEmily Blout; Patrick Burkart - PublisherTaylor & Francis (Informa UK)
- Year2023 (print volume)
This article reconstructs the planning, execution, and aftermath of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, employing a repository of over 5,000 primary texts and digital artifacts and applying symbolic interactionism and levels‑of‑analysis theory to show how the event was orchestrated as a military‑style campaign combining physical violence, digital propaganda, and cyber‑operations. The authors introduce the concept of “immersive terrorism” to capture this multi‑theatre, trans‐mediated mode of far‑right terror where symbolic, systems‑technical (cyber/hacking) and kinetic domains are tightly intertwined. The relevance to the current era is high: as domestic far‑right extremism increases globally and digital‑media‑driven mobilisation becomes more sophisticated, this study offers a timely lens on how white supremacist movements strategically integrate offline violence with online and hybrid tactics. Its findings have direct implications for counterterrorism practitioners, policymakers, and analysts by highlighting how to detect, disrupt, and prevent such immersive campaigns by domestic extremist actors.This article is a critical and highly relevant contribution to the study of far‑right terrorism, especially in domestic contexts. Its rigorous empirical basis and novel conceptual framing make it a valuable resource for both scholars and practitioners.Strengths: The work stands out for its large dataset of primary artifacts, its interdisciplinary analytic framework, and its introduction of the immersive terrorism concept, which advances the literature beyond conventional models of lone‑actor or isolated events. It links digital media, propaganda, hacking/cyber disruption, and mobilised street violence into a cohesive analysis of far‑right organising. Weaknesses: Because the subject is one specific event (Charlottesville) and heavily reliant on reconstructive data, the generalisability may be somewhat limited. Also, while immersive terrorism is a compelling concept, the article may not extensively map out preventive intervention pathways or compare across multiple case‑studies. Compared with other scholarship on far‑right terrorism (e.g., work on Christchurch or El Paso), this article offers deeper process tracing and a refined theoretical model but remains rooted in a single case. Unique contribution: The immersive terrorism framing and the systematic archival approach to far‑right digital‑physical convergence differentiates this paper from more traditional analyses that treat violence and online activity separately.

