Pride events in small communities across the Pacific Northwest have been disrupted this summer by masked protesters touting extreme right-wing views. OPB’s Jonathan Levinson reports it’s a coordinated effort by a new coalition of groups espousing neo-Nazi and white supremacist beliefs. Levinson joins us with more details on the effort and the impact it’s having on LGBTQ+ communities.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller LGBTQ+ Pride events in small communities across the Pacific Northwest have been disrupted this summer by masked protesters touting extreme right-wing views. OPB’s Jonathan Levinson has been looking into this. He has found that there’s been a coordinated effort by a new coalition of groups espousing neo-Nazi and white supremacist beliefs. He joins us now with the details. Jonathan, welcome back.
Jonathan Levinson: Hey, Dave.
Miller: I wanna start with one particular Pride event that was targeted by neo-Nazi groups. What happened recently in Oregon City?
Levinson: A group called Rose City Nationalists showed up to protest their Pride festival in Oregon City. This is a group that started sometime last spring or summer and they are unabashed racists, right? In their online chats, they embrace Nazi imagery and ideology, they rail against immigrants in the LGBTQ+ community and Jewish people. In Oregon City, they showed up in front of the Oregon City Children’s Theater. That’s a small venue which was initially slated to hold the event. They changed locations at the last minute because of all the threats they had received from the far right and hate groups. And that particular demonstration went a little sideways for the Rose City Nationalists because they wound up getting into a brawl with the Proud Boys,
another far right group who was already there, demonstrating.
Miller: And who could be more hateful? What was the brawl about?
Levinson: I think there was just sort of intergroup personal conflict is the going hypothesis. But police ended up getting involved to kind of shut it down and ended that demonstration. But it was one instance in a string of actions this summer of neo-Nazis targeting Pride events across the Pacific Northwest and Mountain West.
Miller: So these Rose City Nationalists, they are a part of something called the Northwest Nationalist Network. What is it?
Levinson: Yeah. Earlier this year, a cohort of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups formed the Northwest Nationalist Network. They sort of had their coming out, I guess, in February when a Washington-based group joined the Rose City Nationalists and flew a banner over I-5 in Southwest Portland. The next day they announced the network. Today, there are six groups from Oregon, Washington and Montana in there. And again, these are neo-Nazi groups, sifting through their social media, they share this adoration for Hitler and the Nazi regime. This again, this open disdain for anyone who isn’t white, straight, cisgender and Christian.
Miller: At the heart of this new network and the effort to disrupt Pride festivals are something called Active Clubs. What are they?
Levinson: So Active Clubs are, again, neo-Nazi groups who place an emphasis on physical fitness, training, preparing for violence. They were started by a guy named Robert Rundos in southern California, who took his inspiration from European far right extremist groups. And he’s been pretty influential in racist movements the past several years. As a side note, he was just arrested in Bucharest, extradited back to California, where he’s facing federal riot charges from a street brawl he was in, in 2017.
Steven Pickett is a researcher at the Western State Center. He described ‘Active Clubs’ as basically racist fight clubs.
[Steven Pickett]: “It’s essentially an ideology as well around getting fit and preparing essentially for street battles which these groups see as kind of step one in the path towards a race war.”
Levinson: And you’ll see this on their social media. They often post videos of them boxing and doing physical training. They’ve had large get-togethers of different clubs. They’ve gone camping and they’ve had these big MMA cage fights. So it’s baked into their program.
Miller: What’s the larger picture here? I mean, how widespread is this?
Levinson: Well, this particular network started targeting small and newer Pride festivals back in May, the Big Sky Active Club in Montana and members from at least one other group in Washington showed up in Bozeman, where the community was holding their first Pride event in more than 10 years. One of the organizers there, Keldon Joyner said it was, it was very scary.
[Keldon Joyner]: “There were times when I had a megaphone pressed up against my ears with someone screaming ‘pedophile,’ and I was a faggot, an abomination to this world, et cetera. And I think like during that point of time, I definitely questioned like, ‘Is this, am I about to get beat up? Am I going to get shot? Is this my last breath?’”
Levinson: And they showed up at a Pride Festival in Centralia, Washington about an hour and a half north of here in Portland. They went to the Wind River Pride Festival in Lander, Wyoming, a town of about 7,500 people. And then on June 24th, they were in both Oregon City which we just spoke about in Spokane. This level of coordination and driving significant distances, crossing state lines, is new. It’s an escalation, but these groups aren’t isolated in the Pacific Northwest. Active Clubs have been around for a few years, and these networks are emerging in other parts of the US, including the South and the Midwest.
Miller: How are all these groups communicating these days?
Levinson: You know, it seems like Telegram is their favorite platform – that is a messaging App that lets individuals start a channel, it basically is like a huge group chat that other people can join and post messages, photos, videos, memes. They can also forward those posts to other groups so information can spread very easily. Users can have public and private groups so that still facilitates recruitment. And that seems to be their primary method of sharing information and coordinating.
Miller: Why do these groups seem to be targeting Pride events in particular right now?
Levinson: That’s a good question. I haven’t seen anything explicit from the groups that says why they’re targeting Pride events or how they’re choosing the events that they are targeting. Again, they unapologetically hate LGBTQ+ people. This network formed in February, and Pride Month likely presented an easy target for them. The mainstream conservative movement is also putting a lot of attention on LGBTQ+ rights, particularly Trans people. So that might influence where Active Clubs are directing their efforts.
Miller: What are the explicit goals of these groups?
Levinson: White nationalists want to establish a white ethno-state, a country defined by its white racial identity. Active Clubs are certainly white supremacists. They want to restore some vague notion of American-European culture, a return to their understanding of Christian values. They embrace this idea that the white race is being replaced and they need to take action in order to save white people.
Miller: We maybe heard a little bit of this in the tape you played, from Joyner, one of the organizers of a Pride festival. But how do these groups use intimidation or threats of violence to instill fear?
Levinson: I think that’s such a great question we often hear in response to things, like people holding a sign or saying offensive things, espousing hate, “that’s protected speech,” and usually it is, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t instill fear, like your question suggests. It doesn’t mean that it isn’t traumatizing or that there isn’t a lasting impact on the targeted communities. These hate groups know that. They are out there to send the message that we’re in your community and that you aren’t welcome.
Again, Stephen Picket, the expert we just heard from, said: “A success for these groups would be for them to cancel their Pride event next year, to push the LGBTQ community back into the closet.”
An organizer I spoke to in Oregon City said that it’s just exhausting going out to the grocery store, seeing people who are literally protesting her right to exist. But if the goal is to do that to push them back into the closet, it doesn’t seem to have worked. Montana had their state Pride festival this past weekend, and Oregon City is planning a much larger festival in September.
Miller: You mentioned the First Amendment. How much of what we’re talking about here is considered protected speech in the Constitution?
Levinson: Yeah, hate speech isn’t defined in US law, but it is generally understood to be any verbal, written, other forms of communication that attack or denigrate people based on who they are – their race, gender, ethnicity, religion, their identity. Federal courts have repeatedly upheld that it is generally protected by the First Amendment and those protections do end if speech actively incites violence or creates danger. But again, the Supreme Court has said that hateful, offensive speech does not meet that threshold.
Miller: These groups in recent months have been targeting LGBTQ+ events in smaller cities and in rural areas, places where a lot of people in the queer community might already feel under political attack. What has the response been?
Levinson: It’s varied. In Lander, Wyoming, organizers said the mayor didn’t speak out after the event and they really wanted a forceful statement rejecting hate from city leadership. They didn’t get one. In Oregon City, I was told that some business owners had sort of made bigoted complaints ahead of the event. There were apparently some hateful remarks made in some of the planning meetings with businesses, but organizers there were surprised how helpful the police were, both leading up to and during the event.
And in Centralia, the mayor and two counselors were at the event when the neo-Nazis showed up. The mayor canceled plans with out-of-town-family in order to stay, partly to send the message that Centralia is a welcoming community – and they need to continue to do that.
Miller: Is the response to these groups as coordinated and as mobilized as the groups themselves?
Levinson: I think there are a lot of ways to look at that. First, we’re talking about communities that are often having their first Pride event or it’s not an entrenched tradition. And I think that’s the success and a product of years of organization and mobilization. These groups are scary, but they are still quite small. It is easier for them to seem highly coordinated. I also think anytime hate groups show up in public and take up space, there’s a very understandable tendency to say, like, oh God, like how is this allowed to happen? There are neo-Nazis pushing their views on the streets in my town.
Surely someone, somewhere isn’t doing something, isn’t doing enough organizing, mobilizing, educating. But there are organizers, there are advocates and just everyday people who show up and let their presence speak for itself, who are pushing back against these groups and making it very known that they are not welcome. So, that happens in big metropolitan cities. But as we’ve talked about, it is also happening in Centralia and Lander, in Oregon City.
Miller: Jonathan, thanks very much.
Levinson: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Jonathan Levinson is a reporter for OPB.
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