Los Angeles Times: A series of violent clashes this weekend involving neo-Nazis permitted to rally at the state Capitol was initiated not by the white nationalist group but by counter-protesters, a law enforcement official said Monday.
“If I had to say who started it and who didn’t, I’d say the permitted group didn’t start it,” said California Highway Patrol officer George Granada, a spokesman for its Protective Services division. “They came onto the grounds and were met almost instantly with a group of protesters there not to talk.”
The Traditionalist Worker Party had a permit to hold a rally on the Capitol grounds at noon, Granada said.
Waiting for them were counter-protesters, including members of the anti-fascist organization Antifa Sacramento, which had promoted a “Shut Down Nazi Rally” event on its website leading up to Sunday.
A similar melee broke out in Anaheim earlier this year when members of the Ku Klux Klan announced they were holding a rally at a park. Counter-protesters showed up early and waited. When the first Klansmen arrived, they were set upon by the group.
Three people were stabbed at the Anaheim rally. At the Sacramento rally Sunday, seven people were stabbed and nine were hospitalized.
Granada said more than 100 CHP and Sacramento police officers were at the park to keep the peace, but the ground spans five city blocks and violence broke out intermittently. Sacramento police found a loaded gun but the CHP didn’t recover any knives or other weapons, Granada said.
“It’s not like all that stuff is visible up until it’s about to be used… a lot of that stuff comes out of wherever,” he said. “We were prepared… it could’ve been much worse. Luckily there were no injuries to officers, tourists or people of the general public.”
All the injuries were sustained by white nationalists or counter-protesters though specific totals weren’t available, Granada said.
The Traditionalist Worker Party said on its website that it had planned a Sunday rally in conjunction with the Golden State Skinheads “to make a statement about the precarious situation our race is in” after “brutal assaults” at Donald Trump events in California.
When the groups met Sunday on the Capitol grounds, news media were on hand to bear witness and law enforcement was out to maintain control.
The violence erupted around 11:45 a.m., when word spread that roughly 30 people had shown up. Counter-protesters swarmed them and a fight immediately broke out, Granada said.
Robert Bautista, 65, said he saw a handful of white supremacists and skinheads arrive two or three at a time only to be immediately mobbed and chased away by the counter-protesters, who hurled water bottles and the wooden stakes that bore their signs.
“They beat the heck out of a couple guys,” said Bautista, a retired construction worker who was among the counter-protesters. “You could see their adrenaline was running high.”
Bautista also said he saw one counter-protester, a black man who appeared to be in his late 20s, convulsing on the ground with stab wounds to his chest and abdomen.
“He was a bloody mess,” he said.
Dozens of counter-protesters remained after the injured had been taken away, watching over the Capitol steps in sweltering heat. On the grounds, a lone white nationalist supporter approached with a cellphone and shouted about his constitutional right to be on site and shoot video. After exchanging heated words with the protesters, people erupted into a chorus of “Nazi, go home.”
For much of the afternoon, the historic domed Capitol was locked down, with staffers and tourists inside. Police swarmed the park-like grounds, but by Monday there had still been no arrests.
Police are scanning websites, social media accounts and videos online to find people involved in the violence, Granada said. Many of the counter-protesters wore masks, making them difficult to identify on video by law enforcement.
Counter-protester Yvette Felarca, 46, said the marchers had been driven away and had not been able to recruit members.
“The Nazis are the violent ones — we are acting in self-defense,” said Felarca, who sustained a bloody blow to the head. “We need to take them head on, confront them, but with as many people as possible.”
The Traditionalist Worker Party vice chairman, Matt Parrott, blamed “leftist radicals” for instigating the violence. Videos and photos of the rally posted on social media showed the white nationalists vastly outnumbered by protesters from anti-fascist groups.
“We stood our ground. We will be back,” Traditionalist Worker Party Chairman Matthew Heimbach, who was not at the rally, said in a phone interview.
Both sides declared victory on their respective websites Monday morning.
Violence in Sacramento shows old and new faces of white extremism:
The Tradtionalist Worker Party is a white nationalist group emblematic of a surge in “intellectual racism” that has pervaded across extremist circles in the last decade. The group they held the rally in conjunction with — the Golden State Skinheads — are among California’s oldest, largest, and most violent white supremacist organizations, experts say.
Joanna Mendelson, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center For Extremism in California, said the event seemed to follow a strategy used frequently by white power groups in recent years. The groups will often announce a rally, seemingly bait counter-demonstrators into violence, and then use video footage of the attacks as further evidence of the “white genocide” they use as a rallying call.
The pattern was similar to an incident in Anaheim earlier this year, where three people were stabbed after protesters attacked a small band of Ku Klux Klan members.
“Their biggest kind of whine right now is the idea that white people are being subjected to genocide,” Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report magazine said of the violence in Anaheim. “That kind of video simply illustrates how white people and particularly white nationalists are under attack.”
The Traditionalist Worker Party had obtained a permit for the Sunday event, and the California Highway Patrol said the violence was sparked by counter-protesters.
“If I had to say who started it and who didn’t, I’d say the permitted group didn’t start it,” said CHP Officer George Granada, a spokesman for the agency’s Protective Services Division. “They came onto the grounds and were met almost instantly with a group of protesters there not to talk.”
Seven people were stabbed and nine others were injured in Sacramento, according to police, who said that the injured belonged to both the far-right groups and the counter-protesters. Only one of the stabbing victims was among the Traditionalist Worker Party and skinhead groups, according to Matthew Parrott, a spokesman for the party.
Antifa Sacramento, the anti-fascist group that organized the counter-protest, said in a statement Monday that eight of its members had been injured in the melee.
During the Anaheim rally, police also said the Klansmen who stabbed demonstrators did so in self-defense.
The Traditionalist Worker Party “bridges the gap between pseudo-intellectuals and racist skinheads and describes itself as a banner organization to unite white supremacists,” Mendelson said.
The group symbolizes the shift away from organized white extremism, according to Mendelson, who said the party does not have many members. The group may be best known for its chairman, Matthew Heimbach, who is considered “the face of a new generation of white nationalists,” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Heimbach, who did not attend the Sacramento event, does have a history of activism in California alongside the Golden State Skinheads group. Heimbach was one of the keynote speakers at a 2015 gathering of white nationalists in Bakersfield known as “Camp Comradery,” according to Mendelson.
“Our values are normal, they are not fringe. Right now we are living in an environment where the entire western world is, for better or worse, doped up on Jewish propaganda and on this idea of multiculturalism,” Heimbach said, according to a recording of the speech he posted on his YouTube channel.
Other speakers at “Camp Comradery” included William Johnson, a Los Angeles attorney and self-described white separatist who leads the American Freedom Party. This year, Johnson was listed as one of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s California delegates for the Republican National Convention, though the Trump campaign later claimed his addition to the list was a mistake.
Parrott, however, described the Traditionalist Worker Party as a peaceful pro-white advocacy organization and blamed the violence entirely on the counter-protesters, whom he described as a group of “stoner college kids … cutting loose on our guys.”
He did not believe the Antifa group, described as skinheads against racial prejudice, incited the violence.
Experts say the Golden State Skinheads, however, are more illustrative of the traditional white supremacist image. Generally speaking, skinhead groups in California tend to function like criminal street gangs, with their political ideologies secondary to robbery and drug trafficking, according to San Bernardino County Deputy Dist. Atty. Britt Imes, an expert on white supremacy groups.
“They tend to be very loosely affiliated outside the prison structure,” Imes previously told The Times. “Their criminality is based more on associations rather than political ideologies … we don’t see a lot of running around doing robberies of particular ethnic stores or victims.”
Groups like the Golden State Skinheads often claim not to be involved in violence or criminality, Mendelson said. But “what happens in reality is certainly very different.”
Parrott denied the skinhead group had been involved in violence in the past, referring to suggestions they had been involved in criminal activity as “propaganda.”
“If I did believe they were, our organization wouldn’t be affiliated with them,” he said. “Our relationship is contingent upon them having a positive, nationalist, pro-white message.”
Parrott said the point of the rally was to protest what his group sees as police indifference toward violence against “right-wingers,” including the attacks on Klan members in Anahiem and Trump supporters in San Jose and Costa Mesa. His group chose to work alongside the Golden State Skinheads for a simple reason, the need for protection.
“In California, it’s got to be a fight to the death with these people,” Parrott said. “They made it very clear, they were coming there to kill us.”
But although extremist luminaries like Heimbach prefer to call themselves white nationalists, as opposed to the supremacist term that connotes violence, experts say interactions with skinhead groups might serve to pierce that veil.
“What Heimbach was trying to do was to sugarcoat his white nationalist message just enough so he could play both sides of the fence, but eventually that log roll tips over, and when you’re sharing the stage with the Golden State Skinheads, that tells you a lot,” said Brian Levin, director Cal State San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. “If you had to do a hate rally, and you wanted some big people who are capable of punching back, those are the folks you’d invite.”
Levin said the violence in both Anaheim and Sacramento seems to highlight a legitimization of brutality in political discourse, driven by an especially toxic election cycle. Pointing to attacks on protesters at Trump rallies nationwide, as well as protester-incited violence at the candidates’ events in San Jose and Costa Mesa, Levin said incendiary behavior may be the only common ground shared by groups on either side of the political divide.
“Risk of violence shouldn’t just be viewed as coming from one side of the ideological spectrum,” he said. “Once the effectiveness of violence is perceived, particularly in the publicity area, it then crosses the fire lines.”
LUKE COMMENTS: The article does not back up its description of “white supremacist.” I don’t recall these groups arguing that whites are superior to other races in every single thing. That’s absurd. Different races are differently abled at different things.
How does holding a non-violent rally bait detractors into violence?
It speaks well of the neo-nazis that they only fought in self-defense.
Why is a white nationalist rally a hate rally? That’s just a cheap slur. Is a Jewish rally a hate rally? Is a pro-Israel rally a hate rally? It all depends upon your perspective. Different groups have different interests.
It sounds like commonsense that the Traditionalist Worker Party brought along the Golden State Skinheads group for protection. When white nationalists gather, they tend to get violently attacked. Why shouldn’t they defend themselves and their interests? White interests are as valid and worthy as the interests of any other group.
Brian Levin wants to argue that violence does not come from only one side of the political spectrum, but in all the examples listed in the articles, all the attacks were initiated by the Left.
It seems like the Left is starting this violence, but I suspect the Right will finish it.
John Rivers tweets: “Violent Communists who attack Free Speech aren’t the Real Fascists. They are Violent Communists.”