Nazis are marching in America

And we need to stop them.

This President's Day weekend, Nazis marched in Nashville. Men wearing red and black hopped out of a U-Haul, walked through the streets, and assembled in front of the Tennessee General Assembly. They carried large flags with swastikas on them. I’m not interested in talking to you too much about these men today, because we know who they are. They’re open about their Nazism and all it entails. They hate immigrants and queer people and Black folks and Jews. They hate me and odds are they hate you. We know this. So today I want to talk instead about the responses to these men, or the lack thereof.

Via Seth Asher

This isn’t the first time Nazis have marched in America, and it won’t be the last. The fact that fascists are getting bolder, and marching in Boston and Disney World and D.C. and beyond, strikes me as one of the more important stories in the country today. Avowed Nazis are attacking schools and libraries and openly rallying in our streets. And yet the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal didn’t mention this weekend’s swastika waving assembly in Nashville. The biggest publications in America, which generated dozens of headlines from college students chanting “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea” and from hearings featuring Ivy League presidents that followed in the wake of the controversy they helped manufacture, were silent on Nazis in the streets.

I have said again and again and will continue to emphasize that the real threat to Jews across the West comes from the right. It comes from Nazis and other fascists who will not stop unless they’re stopped. These same men threaten people of color, queer folks, anyone who doesn’t fall into their narrow definition of an acceptable person, and whatever semblance of democracy we have here. That is why our response to these Nazis matters so much. That is why ignoring them is not an option. They have to be stopped one way or another, and a whole lot of the people who ought to be stopping them are doing nothing at all.

Immediately after the Nashville march last weekend Democratic Rep. Aftyn Behn said, "These groups once relegated to the dark corners, now feel empowered to spew their noxious ideology out in the open due to our state’s leadership REFUSING to condemn their speech and actions.” And she’s right. Right that the Republican leadership of her state, and of the country more broadly, is working to shift what’s acceptable dialogue and belief further and further right, shifting what constitutes acceptable behavior and action further and further into fascist territory, and ultimately enabling and even encouraging outright Nazis.

Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash

Across the aisle from Behn, GOP Rep. William Lamberth responded to the fascist marchers with. “Go away Nazi thugs. This is Tennessee and you are NOT welcome here,” but then he followed this seemingly clear statement with “I would be willing to bet that none of you are from anywhere near here.” Suddenly the clarity in the first segment of his statement is lost. Instead of a straightforward rebuke of Nazism, his comment shifted from disavowing these men to distancing himself from them in a way that doesn’t emphasize criticizing them. And Lamberth also added in a modern classic, “Why not show your faces so we can all see who you are?”

Now this last part of his statement brings in another variable, and hints at a popular conservative response to Nazis marching in the streets. The far-right has popularized the idea that every time obvious fascists publicly assemble, it must really be feds attempting to make the right look bad. If this is your first time coming into contact with this right-wing trope, you might find it hard to believe — because it is. The idea that the FBI gets 40 guys in a U-Haul every couple weeks to make the right look bad is farcical enough, but what’s simultaneously more alarming and more revealing is that this nonsense allows the far-right to never actually disavow Nazism. Instead of attacking the beliefs, the swastikas, the men marching in the streets, they can instead label it fake, fed, false flag, and then keep supporting the exact same beliefs as the Nazis.

You might be thinking that this approach sounds an awful lot like what Tennessee Rep. William Lambeth resorted to, ultimately. And you would again be correct. While he did say the Nashville Nazis weren’t welcome there, he immediately pivoted to calling them out-of-towners and commenting on their masks, rather than their genocidal and hate-fueled beliefs. It’s a dodge, a cop-out, a rhetorical vehicle that allows some willing moderates to believe that the modern GOP would oppose Nazis, while these Republicans don’t actually have to disavow fascism to their loyal fanatics.

But to everyone else, the truth is increasingly plain. As Rep. Justin Jones said in the wake of the hate march, “These groups are being given a green light by people in suits.” And that couldn’t be more true. A Tennessee House committee recently passed a bill banning pride flags in schools and any other flags that represent a “political” or “ideological viewpoint.” According to the Daily Beast, critics of the bill pointed out that the legislation does not specifically prohibit the Confederate flag.

It goes even further than legislation, however. Last year, GOP Rep. Paul Sherrell publicly stated that “hanging on a tree” could become a new execution method in Tennessee, intentionally referencing the state’s history of lynching. This escalating trend of dog whistles (and bullhorns) from conservative politicians to the far-right has grown louder, deafening. Oklahoma recently appointed stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik, the woman behind Libs of TikTok, to an official position in the Department of Education. Yesterday it emerged that a non-binary 16-year-old in one of the school districts she targeted was murdered by older students. In Oklahoma.

Photo by Baudouin Wisselmann on Unsplash

I could list the escalating rhetoric that promotes violence, Nazism, and domestic terrorism from Donald Trump on down to low-level officials on the right. I could list mass shooters who have taken inspiration from the far-right leaders, and I could list numerous other acts of violence. Of domestic extremists documented on U.S. soil, 95% are far-right. The numbers are clear, just as the swastikas waving in front of the Tennessee General Assembly were clear as day.

This relentless push by the right to keep moving the Overton window farther and farther right, to keep shifting what is acceptable, is an intentional breaking and tearing of the social contract. Fascists want radical change, just in the opposite direction of democracy and caring for others and humanity itself. They want an ever-more authoritarian and supremacist capitalist system and are eager to use violence to get there. Obviously this threatens everyone who opposes them, and yet our institutions are still failing to respond to the threat they pose. Our political and journalistic and civic institutions are hampered by a combination of not knowing what to do with people who bring a gun to a knife fight, and a desire to fight the left harder than they fight the right. Namely, the politically powerful and the wealthy see more of a threat from the left, which is interested in abolishing (or in this country often reforming) capitalism, than they see from fascists who want a violent and even less democratic version of this capitalist society.

So it’s on us. We need to initiate social repair. We need to fight for real democracy and a caring society and a truly free country, and ultimately world. And to begin with, that looks like protecting our communities. It looks like making Nazism unwelcome in our cities, towns, and statehouses. In Nashville, these cowardly men left and hopped back in their U-Haul after a small but growing crowd started to confront them. Despite their bravado, Nazis know that they’re unwelcome and outnumbered in every city in America. They know a whole lot of people would rather knock them out than give them an inch.

And that’s exactly how it should be. Now we just need to pair those desires with community organizing and community defense. We outnumber them, but we can’t let them out-organize us. No one is coming to save us from the Nazis in our streets or from their enablers in statehouses across the country. We are the heroes we’ve been waiting for. We have to fully internalize that, and act accordingly. Together we can move towards a better world free from hate, and free from fascists goose-stepping down our streets.