The white nationalist rally in Washington will likely be outnumbered by counter-protesters

Police patrol outside the White House on August 11, 2018 in Washington, DC.

(Image credit: Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)

More people are likely heading to Washington to fight racism than to support it.

Organizers of last year's "Unite the Right" rally, the white nationalist march that turned violent in Charlottesville, Virginia, are holding a second demonstration in Washington, D.C., on Sunday. Only a few hundred participants are expected at the "white civil rights" protest, and they will probably be well outnumbered by anti-racist counter-protesters.

"[These neo-Nazi groups] are pretty famous for overestimating their turnout and backing down when it turns out that there's a really massive response to what they're doing," a Georgetown professor of justice and peace studies, Mark Lance, told The Hill. In addition to the main event permit, the National Parks Service has granted permits to groups including D.C. United Against Hate and New York Black Lives Matter.

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"We have people coming to our city for the sole purpose of spewing hate," Mayor Muriel Bowser said of Unite the Right. "We denounce hate, we denounce anti-Semitism, and we denounce the rhetoric we expect to hear this Sunday."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.