On a pristine September morning, a riverfront park in Louisville called Cox Park was filled with guns. Four security guards stood watch at the entrance of the parking lot. They dressed in full camouflage, body armor, helmets and rifles. Another thirty or so fanned out into a security perimeter where the grass met the road. As dozens of similarly armed attendees filtered in, I walked alongside a smiley elderly woman with a blonde bob dressed in a pink shirt and hoisting a blue Trump flag. We exchanged jokes about all the weapons, and she assured me there was nothing to be afraid of. “Father’s got his shield over us,” she said.
A crowd of largely white men, teenage to elderly, and the occasional woman, were piling out their trucks to see Dylan Stevens, the self-proclaimed “Angry Viking,” for a so-called, “Patriot Rally.” The Viking is a pro-gun rights, pro-police, Internet persona, bulging with veiny, tattooed arms, a thick bushy beard, and shiny pink skin. As I meandered through the crowd, I tracked the graphic tee-shirts: US flags made out of guns, 9/11 remembrance, “I <3 global warming.” One guy wore a plastic Viking helmet with horns. If attendees weren’t carrying an American flag—on a pole, tucked into cargo shorts, Velcroed onto a backpack—they had a weapon: a side arm, a knife, a rifle. Some one. Some all.
“They can smell fear,” my partner, Adam, whispered to me as we ventured into our first far-right rally, and the first stop along our road trip. “Be confident.” A second set of car keys jingled in my pocket.
It was also the morning of the Kentucky Derby over Labor Day weekend, a time when, in a normal year—a time before Covid—Louisvillians would be well into their third mint julep. But since the killing of Breonna Taylor in March, Louisville has been consumed by protest. And on the 101st day, the day slated for #NoJusticeNoDerby demonstrations, the Viking was here to lead a counter-rally, followed by a march downtown to confront them.
Denial of justice. Nationalism as a guise for racism. An explosive collision of realities. This is America right now.
Once the crowd swelled around me to about 300 and my world turned into a video game, the Viking took to the stage on the bed of a pick up truck. It was about 9 am, and he wore a backwards black hat, black sunglasses, black gloves, and a black bulletproof vest. Four armed men guarded him from below—more in an act of show than any genuine need for protection. The Viking kicked off with a pledge of allegiance, then orchestrated a chorus of “USA! USA!” The crowd waved Trump caps as the Viking pumped his fist along.
“Y’all fed up?” he said. “Yeah!” the crowd thundered back. The Viking went on to proclaim that despite what the press was saying—despite Facebook blocking his page three times now—that he, and his followers in the crowd, were not white supremacists, members of a hate group, or right wing extremists. “What I see here is a group of fellow American patriots saying, ‘I'm ready to be counted.’” The crowd roared back with a “Yeah!”
Motorcycles revved as more attendees poured in and crowded under the shade of three trees with few masks and no distancing. The Viking praised his fellow patriots, and implored them to “stand up” otherwise nameless “they’s” would for their cul-de-sacs and businesses. He said he was “fed up” with violence in the cities and here to “stand up” for the Louisville Police Department. He called Black Lives Matter “absolutely, 100%, a fake social justice movement,” and called Kyle Rittenhouse the “perfect example of a patriot,” (to which rally-goers responded with whoops and “I am Kyle!”).
“They can call us racists and white supremacists,” the Viking said. “But when the history books are written, patriots will be on the right side.”
Over and over, the crowd celebrated themselves as god-worshipping, country-loving patriots, as if nationalism and racism were mutually exclusive. But the only thing all their revery revealed was their own tenuous grip of history, nationalism as an enabler, and America today.
A second speaker hopped on the back of the truck, a man named Josh Ellis, the founder and owner of mymilitia.com, a far-right platform for organizing militias. With Taylor at the mic, their heroism cratered into victimhood. Ellis, who said he’s had 5-6 Facebook pages and more than 110 groups removed, bemoaned Facebook’s crackdown on militia and anarchist groups. “They wanna stop us from coming together,’ he said. “We can’t stay silent.” Ellis then denounced the “domestic terrorists who are destroying our cities” and touted vigilante justice. “A corrupt system is not gonna fix itself,” he said. “Who’s gonna fix it?
“We are!” yelled the crowd. “We the people,” Ellis echoed.
A third speaker followed Ellis, a man named John Clark, introduced as a 13-year commander the Three Percenter War Dogs. He was dressed in a camo hat, camo shirt, and vest, and read an angry speech from his phone. Hollywood, academia, the media—they’re all “preying” on us, he said. “All they want to do is destroy stuff.” Clark implored the audience to never “let them tell you this nation isn’t great” and rejected being called a racist. He even invited up a Mexican speaker to prove it. He was from Cuba.
Three times, Taylor called out into the crowd for journalists to identify themselves. “If you’re press without credentials, you’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “If you’ve got em, we’ll look at em.”
I froze. I could feel the eyes on my back. I don’t have American credentials because that’s not how the First Amendment works. But that’s not exactly an argument to be had when you’re surrounded by assault rifles. I was there as a writer—not on assignment—collecting insight for this newsletter, which I hope to turn into a book. So I decided it’d be better to lay low and not take too many photos. I pretended not to hear him, wander through the crowd, and observe other journos first.
Every time a reporter conducted an interview, heads jerked to listen in. On three separate occasions, one-on-one interviews drew jeering crowds with phones, turning a conversation into a live-streamed panopticon. A security guy alerted the radio circuit to a photographer “taking pictures of weapons.” I eavesdropped on an interview to the left behind me between a local journalist and a woman attending the rally:
“[Covid] is nothing but a big lie. I don’t believe the numbers. They’re lying to us,” said the woman.
“It’s documented everywhere,” the journalist replied.
“I see you believe in Covid,” the attendee said.
“I believe in being respectful.”
Behind me to the right, two other guys chatted.
“I’m from Texas and got about 500 guys, they couldn’t come,” said one to the other. “But they’ll come next time. Every time they say ‘reparations,’ that just increases our number ten fold.”
By the end of the rally, as speakers recycled the same sound bites—“the liberal media,” “Blue Lives Matter”—a scuffle had begun to the right of the truck. I looked over, and a middle-aged counter-demonstrator in a wide-brimmed hat and surgical mask arrived at the edge, and silently held up a white sign saying, “LOUISVILLE DOES NOT NEED YOUR GUNS. WE DO NOT WANT YOUR GUNS.” He only identified himself to local media as Bob, a concerned citizen. A tense standoff began, and I moved with the crowd off the lawn and into the car park. The crowd convulsed and clamored around the demonstrator, who stood there silently until a man intervened. “We know there’s gonna be resistance,” said Taylor from the stage. “Let him walk amongst us.” Security surrounded Bob’s car.
The scuffle ended, and rally-goers returned to their cars around 11 am to prepare for the real motive of today: the Viking’s march downtown to Metro Hall, where the Breonna Taylor demonstrations were unfolding. The park was about five miles away, so the plan was to drive closer, reassemble in another parking lot, and march through the city. As a camera crew left, one lanky guy with a scraggly ponytail yelled after them. “Get the fuck out of here ya fake press!” he said, hollering with laughter. “Run doggies run!”
Downtown, a sea of camouflage flooded down West Jefferson Street, one block from Metro Hall. At the intersection of West 5th St stood a handful of black-clad protesters who had been around the corner at Breonna Taylor’s memorial. The protesters stood defiant: dancing, taking videos, taunting the Viking’s gang as it approached. The Viking crew marched in, brandishing their guns and their flags. They pushed the melee to the front of the boarded up metro hall around the Thomas Jefferson statue, where hundreds of armed men descended on what ended up being about 50 protesters.
For over an hour, “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” chants blended into a steady roar. Demonstrators shoved megaphones into faces and occasionally each other. Protestors yelled “Breonna Taylor” and “Why did you come here?!” Protesters smuggled in eggs and more guns as the militia men formed a security line of about two dozen men. When a Black man tried to pass, he was elbowed in the neck and fell to the ground. Someone from the crowd yelled: “We all go home or nobody goes home.”
I stood at the edge of the security line ready to run. Until the gang arrived, the protest was peaceful. There was no looting, no violence. Yet here these guys were, ready to create it. Finally, after an hour of high-tense confrontation, they left. In their wake, protesters danced and sang through the streets, “I love being Black.” The cops were nowhere to be seen during the clash, but no sooner had the Viking gang left than two dozen officers arrived in full riot gear. With the midday sun beating down on the concrete and more protests lined up later in the day, everybody went home. All I could think the entire time was: one shot, and nobody would have.
Editor’s note: On September 23rd, the Kentucky grand jury did not charge any officers with killing Breonna Taylor.