How To Ruin Your Life In One Photo!

The face of MAGA. Don't let them gaslight you into not believing it.

Peter Cytanovic will forever be the face of an iconic picture. 

In 2017, the Charlottesville, Virginia city council approved the removal of a handful of confederate memorials around the city. It riled up the far right.

They organized a rally to protest the removal and a slew of extremist concerns.

It was the infamous Unite The Right rally.

Of course, this happened in President Donald J. Trump's first chaotic term.

He is predictably failing. The second term curse came very quick for a twice impeached, habitual liar, warm found liable fruadster, ajudicated sexual predator, gun violence victim struggling with cognitive mental decline.

The Unite The Right was the first test of a president in the time of unrest and injustice.

Counterprotesters met the Unite the Right members and it became a full scale riot.

The rally occurred amid the controversy which was generated by the removal of Confederate monuments by local governments following the Charleston church shooting in 2015, in which Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, shot and killed nine members of a black church, including the minister (a state senator), and wounded another member of the church. The rally turned violent after protesters clashed with counter-protesters, resulting in more than 30 injured.

On the morning of August 12, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency, stating that public safety could not be safeguarded without additional powers. Within an hour, at 11:22 a.m., the Virginia State Police declared the rally to be an unlawful assembly. At around 1:45 p.m., self-identified white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters about ½ mile (800 m) away from the rally site, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 35 people.

Fields fled the scene in his car but was arrested soon afterward. He was tried and convicted in Virginia state court of first-degree murder, malicious wounding, and other crimes in 2018, with the jury recommending a sentence of life imprisonment plus 419 years.

Incel claims to denounce white supremacy. We don't believe you.

The following year, Fields pleaded guilty to 29 federal hate crimes in a plea agreement to avoid the death penalty in this trial.

Trump's remarks about the rally generated negative responses. In his initial statement following the rally, Trump condemned the "display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides". This first statement and his subsequent defenses of it, in which he also referred to "very fine people on both sides", were criticized as implying a moral equivalence between the white supremacist protesters and the counter-protesters, despite his clarification in the same defense that he was not referring to the neo-Nazis and white nationalists as fine people, "because they should be condemned totally".

The rally and resulting death and injuries resulted in a backlash against white supremacist groups in the United States. A number of groups that participated in the rally had events canceled by universities, and their financial and social media accounts closed by major companies. Some Twitter users led a campaign to identify and publicly shame marchers at the rally from photographs; at least one rally attendee was dismissed from his job as a result of the campaign.

While the organizers intended for the rally to unite far-right groups with the goal of playing a larger role in American politics, the backlash and resultant infighting between alt-right leaders has been credited with causing a decline in the movement.

Cytanovic is the angry face that held a torch.

Now everyday he regrets it.

His father died of cancer. He is banned from many nightclubs in Reno and Sun Valley. Cytanovic is often having trouble keeping jobs. Anytime someone recognizes him, he is immediately terminated.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters briefly employed him whose image was synonymous with the infamous rally that brought white supremacists to Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

The Teamsters hired Cytanovic for an administrative job at the union’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., before firing him during his probationary period, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. The union was unaware of Cytanovic’s past when he came onboard, the source said.

The Teamster leader Sean O'Brien spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention and endorsed Trump. O'Brien publicly declined to endorse him or former vice president Kamala Harris. We all knew that was a fucking lie.

More than seven years earlier, Cytanovic, then a college student, traveled from Reno, Nevada, and marched among neo-Nazis in the “alternative right” demonstration on the University of Virginia grounds. The dramatic Getty photo of a screaming, white-polo-clad Cytanovic — then 20 years old, his face lit by tiki torches — became perhaps the most iconic image from the rally. He has since said he is not a white nationalist.

Cytanovic declined to discuss his stint with the Teamsters during a brief exchange outside his home on Wednesday.

Union president Sean O'Brien is Teamsters worst leader.

“They can suck dick,” he said of the union, “and you can get the fuck out of here.”

The Teamsters declined to comment on the matter.

HuffPost has learned that Cytanovic told the Teamsters he had previously worked as an organizer for the Service Employees International Union, another powerhouse in the labor movement. SEIU declined to comment.

Cytanovic’s hiring at one of the largest and most powerful U.S. unions first surfaced publicly in an anonymous Reddit post last month. Someone who identified themselves as an employee at Teamsters headquarters said they learned about their new co-worker’s Charlottesville trip after googling his name. The poster said they reported their findings to a manager, and Cytanovic was terminated.

On Tuesday, John Palmer, a member of the Teamsters’ executive board, shared on Facebook a letter he had sent to O’Brien, asking critical questions about the hire, including how the background check was done. Palmer is a vocal O’Brien critic who’s announced a run against the incumbent president in the union’s 2026 election.

“When we hire somebody at the international, they vet people and it takes at least three or four people signing off,” Palmer told HuffPost, referring to the main union, rather than its local affiliates. “I can’t speak to the vetting process.”

Cytanovic has maintained since the days immediately following the Charlottesville rally that he is “not the angry racist [people] see in that photo.” He said he was drawn to the rally in large part to defend the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as a symbol of white, European heritage. Anti-racist activists had urged local officials to remove the Lee monument from a Charlottesville park.

“I hope people acknowledge that being a party to the alternative right does not make me an evil Nazi, and that being pro-white right now is dangerous, and being pro-white doesn’t mean I’m anti-anyone else,” he told Nevada’s Channel 2 News after the rally.

That article described Cytanovic as a “self-proclaimed white nationalist,” a label he disclaimed in a 2019 interview with The Beaver, a publication at the London School of Economics, where Cytanovic was studying for a master’s degree at the time.

“I thought white nationalism at the time was American nationalism, being proud of our history without condemning,” he said. “Without being an atomised individual, being part of a wider community. I’m ethnically American.”

Cytanovic also said he and other rally participants bear blame for the death of Heather Heyer, the counterprotester who was killed when a far-right demonstrator drove a car into a crowd the weekend of the rally.

“I caused hurt. There’s nothing I can do to change that now,” he said.

The viral 2017 image of Cytanovic has dogged him professionally and academically for years, long before his brief time with the Teamsters.

As HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias reported in 2021, Cytanovic joined the Nevada National Guard but was quickly booted before attending basic training. Although he had passed criminal and fingerprint checks, a guard spokesperson said Cytanovic was expelled due to his “affiliations.”

Before that, fellow students at the University of Nevada, Reno, had pushed for his expulsion, though the school’s administration resisted such calls on free-speech grounds. However, Cytanovic did end up resigning from his job with a campus escort service that provides free rides to students at night.