When police call out your name
The Pride festival last weekend in Coeur d’Alene. Idaho included music, dancing, food and children playing amidst clouds of bubbles. Anti-hate researcher David Neiwert, staff writer at Daily Kos, came to watch for Nazis:
Drawn by a loud campaign of vicious rhetoric by far-right extremists depicting the organizers as “groomers,” pedophiles, and satanists, a motley crew of white supremacists, “Patriots,” Christian nationalists, and hate preachers circulated around the lakeside city park where the event was held. Some entered the event and mingled menacingly. At least three of them carried AR-15s.
Their intentions weren’t entirely clear until late in the day, when police, a block away from the park entrance, pulled over a U-Haul van full of men—all 31 of them members of the explicitly fascist Patriot Front organization from around the country, faces covered with white masks and dressed in the group’s uniform. According to Coeur d’Alene police, the men planned to start a riot at the Pride event and then continue the rampage into the city’s downtown.
[…]
Among the men arrested was 23-year-old Thomas Rousseau of Grapevine, Texas, the youthful founder of Patriot Front, which itself is the offspring of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America whose contingent Rousseau helped organize for the August 2017 “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Among the men he admitted to the group was James Alex Fields, who subsequently plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and maiming dozens.
A local citizen witnessed the group looking like “a small army” loading into the back of the van and phoned police. Hate groups hate being arrested and unmasked almost as much as they hate the people they hate:
“For many in the neo-Nazi and extreme-right communities, few punishments carry as much weight as being identified and held accountable for their online activities and racist activism,” writes Mack Lamoureux at Vice News.
Neiwert’s account concludes:
One of the veterans of the anti-Nazi battles of the 1980s in Coeur d’Alene, Tony Stewart, praised the zero-tolerance message sent by Saturday’s arrests. Stewart was a cofounder of the local Human Rights Task Force that responded to the Aryan Nations menace.
“I hope the message going out today is, ‘If you’re going to commit a crime as a hate group, don’t come here. You’re not going to find a receptive audience here,’” Stewart said.
I tell ya, brownshirts these days.
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