Cantwell participated in the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11–12, 2017. He was featured prominently in "Charlottesville: Race and Terror", an episode of "Vice News Tonight" about the rally and the groups who were present. He is first pictured marching through the University of Virginia campus among a group of white supremacists carrying tiki torches and chanting "Jews will not replace us." He later is shown bragging about carrying guns, working out, and "trying to make [himself] more capable of violence," later saying "We're not nonviolent. We'll fucking kill these people if we have to." In the same interview, he called the murder of Heather Heyer "more than justified" and claimed that "a lot more people are gonna die before we're done here, frankly".