“National White Pride Day,” as declared by the Aryan Nations and the American National Socialist Party, was last Saturday. A huge demonstration took place at the Capitol, with hundreds of supporters of white supremacist doctrine. The Aryan Guard came all the way from Canada, and Prussian Blue took the stage to sing some teeny-bopper white-power hits.

Actually, that’s all untrue. There was no demonstration.

There was a counter-demonstration, though.

I found out about it through an event invitation via Facebook. “Outweird the Racists,” it said.

How do you outweird a racist? Well, as the invite explained, one takes a sack of the biggest, floppiest dildos one can find to an Aryan Nations/ANSP rally. Then one proceeds to wave said dildos at said racists while screaming “DILDO” at the top of one’s lungs.

I clicked “attend” in two seconds because really, who’s going to miss that?

Of particular note was the event’s flyer containing the date and location and explaining “All White Nationalist Welcome.” Racist and grammatically incorrect. More on that later. It seemed obvious to me, upon seeing the flyer, that I’d be encountering people at whom dildo-waving was acceptable.

The demonstration against racism on the Capitol Building’s West Terrace bristled with anticipation; here stood free people resisting prejudice crawling into their city under the cover of the First Amendment. But nothing crawled in. The Aryan Nations and the ANSP simply didn’t show up.

It had lined up to be a great day; among the counter-protesters were a group of SHARPs (SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice) and a contingent of the local chapter of Food Not Bombs.

“I think we won,” said Justin, who wandered into the Village Bean that morning and saw the Food Not Bombs group preparing to walk to the demonstration. “They didn’t show and we’re here.” He decided on a whim to join them.

Other protestors told me the Aryan Nations and ANSP were victorious after all. Roughly 50 people stood in the cold for two hours holding up signs and demonstrating against nobody at all.

Preston, the leader of the Food Not Bombs group, was literally left holding the sack.

“I’ve got to tell you,” he said, “I’ve never needed a racist more in my life than right now.”

Two members of the ANSP did in fact show up; they were briefly detained by police just in front of the counter-protestors thanks to a missing tail light. As I later found out, they’d come down from the Twin Cities to be there for the demonstration, only to be stood up by everybody else on their side.

Why didn’t anyone else show up from the ANSP or Aryan Nations? Rumors circulated about an hour into the protest that their permit to use the West Terrace had been pulled. However, I also heard a different theory positing that the first was fabricated to allow the ANSP and Aryan Nations to save face. Whatever the reason, it was a bitter anticlimax.

But it was encouraging to see the number of people showing up to protest the hateful vitriol.

Unfortunately, I found a good portion of the protesters surprisingly immature. Those not affiliated with either the SHARPs or Food Not Bombs held signs that were simply ill-conceived (such as “Kill Whitey”) or were poor attempts at recapturing the aura of the Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear (signs like “The Hamsters Are Stealing Our Jobs”). The relevance of the protest seemed to escape this portion.

Not that I’m far from them; I had shown up to see grown men and women waving fake penises at bigots, and left sorely disappointed.