In Charlottesville, Virginia, August 11 and 12, 2017, there was a large rally conducted by a white supremacist organization. This rally, consisting of members of the alt-right community, was a white supremacist march complete with Nazi and KKK imagery and chants and was one of the darkest moments in recent history here in the United States.

This was just the first news story proving that the white supremacist problem in the united states was reaching a very public peak. Those who were more politically inclined and aware of all the goings-on via various platforms on and offline, across various social media, knew that the alt-right was more than just an ultra-conservative political movement like they claimed.

As early as 2015, the phrase "alt-right" had become popularized across the internet and directly equated with the rise of various hate movements.

Originally gaining traction during the cycle leading to the 2016 election, and utilizing 4chan and then later Reddit, the alt-right movement started to quickly gain traction and band together as Donald Trump and various political pundits started to casually throw around hateful language during the election cycle.

As the alt-right gained more and more traction, the movement became increasingly more radicalized.

Being less and less of a far-right ultra-conservative movement based in the Republican platform and being more and more of an insanely hateful movement based in anti-semitism, homophobia, and racism, the alt-right shifted from an uncomfortable political movement into a full-blown hate organization akin to the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis.

While not classified as a hate group by the United States Government, the alt-right movement is getting increasingly close to reaching that classification at least according to the general public.

Charlottesville was the first true showing of the alt-right's hateful forces. The first public display of their unified power, through and through the ugliest and bigoted display the States had seen in a long time.

In response to the aggressively hateful march on Charlottesville, in response to the torches and white power chants, in response to this vulgar display of the alt-right's true message, there was a counter-protest the next morning.

A peaceful counter-protest that ended in tragedy. During the peaceful march protesting against the hate spewed the night before, someone who was part of the alt-right movement drove a car through the crowd, injuring 19 and killing Heather Heyer.

After this display, the tensions rose even more than before and the general public became shockingly aware of what the shift further and further right was doing to people. Rather than shunning and shutting down many of these people, however, many of them were given platforms.

Whether through Twitter verification and the refusal of the app to suspend or ban people for their hate speech or through national airtime on various news shows, many leaders of the far-right and alt-right got to continue spreading their message.

When speaking about the Unite the Right rally, rather than denouncing White Supremacy, President Trump instead stated "I'm sure there are good people on both sides," which essentially gave validation to the actions of those involved in the Unite the Right rally.

This validation of hate, rooted in white nationalism, led to the surge of membership of the Antifa (anti-fascism) movement.

As tensions continued to rise and more and more rallies and protests occurred throughout the summer and fall of 2017, the political climate became heated in ways that didn't make sense.

Why was the United States not coming together to completely denounce Nazism, a force that we had fought against socially and politically overseas for decades? Why was there at all a debate about whether or not this was wrong?

Eventually, the conversation fell out of the mainstream media, as everything does, and many people forgot or brushed aside the issue at the core since it was no longer as the present.

In political circles, however, it was still painfully obvious that this hate force was large and loud and gaining more and more traction.

Twitter still had refused and still does refuse to suspend or ban Nazis, white nationalists, and even KKK members from the platform they had been given, still handing out verified badges to all sorts of hateful people, while actively suspending outspoken activists or average people for a myriad of trivial reasons, sometimes with no explanation at all.

Hate was and is still spreading, increasingly so, but was being ignored or trivialized because of its lack of active presence in the media. Behind the scenes, we could all see people gaining massive followings simply for "speaking their minds" about hateful and violent ideas and concepts, but in the foreground, it was all talk of whatever minor scandal was harnessing the most views.

Such is the media, and many important headlines never get coverage at all beyond the occasional online article with no real promotion, because the media is all about generating a buzz but not too much of a buzz.

This media silence leads frequently to shock and outrage at events that could have been predicted or even prevented had they acted otherwise and covered other events.

The media became silent, but the voices of hate never slowed down or hushed at all, in fact, they continued to get louder and people became radicalized at an exponential rate. Hate, nurtured by reassurance from people in influential positions and a misplaced sense of self-righteousness, spreads like wildfire.

And spread it did. And spread it does. Almost uncontrollably so, as it is aided and abetted everywhere by both action on the side of hate and inaction from those against it. We must recognize it, we must acknowledge it, we must actively fight against it.

The hate and the radicalization have spread so much that just last week, a shooting happened inside the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA. During morning Shabbat services, a gunman, who had been regularly posting hate against Jewish people and against immigrants on social media, walked into the synagogue and opened fire using four different guns.

He killed 11 people, including 97-year-old Holocaust survivor Rose Mallinger. It was the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the United States in history. The shooter utilized Gab, a social media akin to Twitter but with a user base consisting almost entirely of those on the far-right, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis.

With an entire social media network dedicated to spreading their hateful, nationalist, anti-Semitic messages, it was only a matter of time before hate groups re-entered the mainstream, but this kind of tragedy should not have been what was needed to push the media's attention.

This shooting was a hate crime on a massive level, it was one of the darkest days in American history and will be remembered as such, and it stemmed from the world choose to ignore the impact of hate speech and the spread of truly disgusting levels of hate until it was too late.

The United States has a white supremacy problem, a neo-Nazi problem, a nationalist problem, a far-right problem. The United States has a hate problem, and almost nothing is being done to stop it on any level. We are doing too little too late, and we need to band together and fight against the hate and its spreading forces.

We cannot find peace in the world when hate and violence run so rampant within our own borders, and we cannot fix hate within our own borders simply by ignoring it.

Hate is never going to go away without a fight, there is no "out of sight, out of mind" here. If you are not actively fighting against hate, if you are not actively part of the solution, you are part of the problem.