This is terrifying

A couple of years ago, some members of the Patriot Front - a white nationalist group - spent their Saturday sturming around downtown Boston. I wasn't aware until they had passed through, but they came pretty close to where I live

If I'd known, I like to think that I would have gone out to boo and yell at them. 

But would I have?

Would I have started the booing or yelling at, or waited until someone braver than I began? Would I have just stood on the sidelines, shaking my head in disgust, giving them a malevolent stare?

Would I have had my very own Barbara Frietchie* moment. Shoot if you must, this old grey head, but spare your country's flag, she said. Maybe even goaded one of those masked, cowardly a-holes into shoving me. Haha! Assault on the elderly! FELONY CONVICTION! JAIL TIME!

Or would I have just stayed home, grinding my teeth and wondering whether this bunch was just a few stray racist morons or the tip of a neo-Nazi iceberg?

A couple of times, over the last two years, members of NSC-131 (The National Socialist Club of New England) have demonstrated at the home of our governor, Maura Healey. The demonstrations were anti-immigrant in nature - this unsavory crew has also shown up at hotels housing immigrants - but I'm sure screaming at Maura Healey has special meaning for them, as she's both a liberal and a lesbian. (NSC-131 has also shown up outside drag queen story hours.)

In the course of my day, I don't meet many neo-Nazis. Or maybe I do. Who knows who's behind that mask of hate? Maybe it's someone I've spoken with in tech support, someone who delivered a package to my building, someone I sat beside on the subway. 

The only neo-Nazi I know that I've met was someone I encountered at the homeless shelter where I volunteer. He was checking in, and he asked if I noticed anything special about his birthday. (When we scan a guest's ID, we can see their date of birth.) His b-day was 04.20, which I knew to be a day on which all things cannabis are celebratead. So I mentioned that, and he shook his head. No, he told me, something else. I knew what that something else was: Hitler's birthday.

He told me that it was very special to him that he and Der Fuhrer had their birthdays in common, as he was a great admirer.

I redirected the conversation - did he want a yellow or blue poncho - and that was that.

I haven't seen him again, but it was unsettling to have had this sort of close encounter with someone who identified with Nazism.

Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of Nazism going around these days. 

A recent NY Times article chronicled incidents in Waterloo, Iowa. In Columbus, Ohio. In Nashville, Tennessee. 

Flash displays of hate and white power are happening more frequently in the United States, a trend that experts say is a reaction to changing demographics, political turmoil and social catalysts. More than 750 such incidents have taken place since 2020, according to the Anti-Defamation League, with more than half of them occurring in the last 18 months.

National experts describe a familiar pattern: Small groups of mostly masked men chant and wave swastika or white power flags in public and yell racial slurs at targets as varied as immigrants, Black people, Jews and L.G.B.T.Q. people. They unfurl offensive banners over highways or post racist fliers in communities. The demonstrations are typically captured on video and ricochet across social media to large audiences.

Propaganda incidents are also on the rise. Such occurrences - "which include distribution of racist, antisemitic and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. fliers, banners, graffiti and posters" grew by 12 percent between 2022 and 2023. And those are just the incidents that are known. The number of hate groups rose by a similar percentage (14) over the same peiod. It's not anybody's imagination: there are lot more of these groups out there. And it's terrifying. 

I don't want neo-Nazis marching around my neighborhood, or anyone else's. 

And I draw cold comfort from the knowledge that right wing (white wing) extremist groups are popping up throughout Europe. England, Italy, France, Germany. Even Ireland. Shortly after I was there a year ago, anti-immigrant riots broke out in Dublin, right around the corner from where we had stayed. 

No, as awful as things could get, I don't see the US plummeting into some neo-Nazi maelstrom. I don't see an Auschwitz. I don't see Zyklon B. But I do see a lot of blameless people being hassled and worse - folks guilty of nothing other than being gay, trans, Jewish, Muslim, Haitian, Somali, feminist, or anything other than cis white straight male.

There've been Nazis here before. 

George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, was frequently in the news during my childhood, spewing his anti-Semitic and anti-Black vitriol. 

David Duke of the KKK was inspired by Rockwell. So was white-nationalist, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

So even thought they've been in our midsts for quite a while, I just don't like having any of them around. 

My mother was a German-American, the daughter of immigrants and an immigrant (as a toddler) herself. Her father, my Grandpa Wolf, was no raging liberal. A small businessman, once he started voting, it was Repulican straight ticket all the way. My mother on the other hand...She used to say that, in 1940 and in 1944, when she went to the polls with my grandfather to vote, the two would joke about canceling each other's votes out. 

But Grandpa Wolf had no truck with Nazis.

My mother recalls him telling her that certain folks he knew or knew of in the Chicago German-American community were members of the American Nazi Bund. They were idiots, malcontents, anti-American, people to be avoided. 

Jake Wolf was right about these people being awful. The question is whether it's better to avoid or confront them. 

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*Barbara Frietchie was a Union supporter who, in the early days of the Civil War, allegedly confronted the Confederate soldiers who were invading her town in Maryland, refusing to let them take her flag down. The incident was turned into a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, which was memorized by me in the fifth grade. (Those were the days!)