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White Nationalists Storm Bookstore Reading in Washington D.C.

By May 2, 2019Bookshops, News

Last week a small group of white nationalists stormed a bookstore in Washington D.C to protest a book on racial politics and how it’s effecting lower and middle class white Americans.

The group stormed Politics and Prose bookstore last Saturday afternoon while a scheduled talk by Jonathan Metzl was taking place. The speaker is a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and has just released ‘Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.’.

Videos filmed by some of the audience showed the protestors chanting ‘This land is our land’, which kind of proves the book’s point, but there you go! Twitter user Catherine Wigginton tweeted this:

The man with the megaphone identified the group as Identarians, a far-right white nationalists group, listed as an extremist group by South Poverty Law Center, or as we in Europe like to call them ‘bloody Nazis’.

Metzl is said to have handled the interruption well, asking the group “Does anyone want to process that before I get back to what I was saying,” before continuing with his speech. Metzl said that when the protest broke out he was speaking to a man who had helped Metzl’s father flee Nazi Austria, telling him ‘This is how great America can be when it is bold and generous’. He said the protest was very symbolic and stated “In case anybody’s wondering what’s happening right now, they’re illustrating my point” as the protest took place.

The bookstore protest happened on the same day as a white supremacist opened fire on a Synagogue in California, but thankfully the bookstore protest ended without any injury or damage.



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