Senseless HATE: The Far Right's Deep Roots In Southern California
- SENSELESS HATE: The Far Right's Deep Roots In Southern California. By Jason Wilson in Portland, Oregon, The Guardian, May 5, 2019. The murderous attack on the Poway synagogue in San Diego last weekend may have shattered some people’s image of southern California as a sunny, liberal enclave. But the region has for decades been an incubator of far-right politics, and it’s far from the first time its Jewish communities have faced violent threats.*EXCERPTS:
“Hate groups and hate activity run pretty deep in southern California, and have for a very long time,” said Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “This activity is deeply rooted in Orange county and northern San Diego,” she added. Origins of the far right in southern California: In the 1920s, far-right groups had a strong presence in San Diego and Los Angeles. The KKK committed several acts of violence in the region in those years. A Klan member was elected to the Los Angeles city council in 1923. In San Diego, violence, harassment and organized discrimination against Mexican immigrants, alongside Jews and Catholics, was a major focus of the Klan in the 1920s and 1930s.
Beirich puts the rise of the far right in the region down to two major factors. The strength and vibrancy of immigrant culture has often drawn a racist reaction from white people on the far right, she said. That is reflected today in the anti-immigrant groups that still operate in the region – such as the Californians for Population Stabilization group in Santa Barbara and anti-Muslim groups such as Jihad Watch in Sherman Oaks and the David Horowitz Freedom Foundation in Los Angeles. Beirich also attributes a significant role to organizing by the John Birch Society (JBS) in the 60s, 70s and 80s. The conspiracy-minded anticommunist group was, for many, “a gateway drug into other forms of extremism..”
By the 1960s, Orange county had become a popular recruiting ground for the JBS, whose founder, Robert Welch, infamously identified former president Dwight Eisenhower as an agent of Communist Russia, and was eventually excluded from mainstream conservative circles. Some of the most prominent far-right organizers in the 80s and 90s, including Tom Metzger, the founder of the White Aryan Resistance, had been JBS members or had contact with the group.. From the 1960s onwards, “Orange countians swelled the ranks of the John Birch Society, opened numerous rightwing bookstores and worked within their churches, schools and communities to roll back liberal gains that, in their eyes, threatened the nation”, according to Lisa McGirr’s classic account of the birth of the New Right in southern California, Suburban Warriors..In recent decades, antisemitic violence has terrorized some of southern California’s local Jewish communities...
Modern era: Today, the region is home to prolific and influential white nationalist “intellectuals” such as Kevin McDonald, the editor of the Occidental Observer. During his career as a professor at CSU Long Beach, McDonald published a trilogy of antisemitic books. With the rise of the “alt right”, he has appeared on podcasts and conference stages alongside the movement’s younger influencers. His blend of racial pseudoscience and far-right activism was not enough to deter the Donald Trump Jr from retweeting him in the lead-up to the 2016 election. The Trump era has coincided with violent attacks and political campaigning from a new crop of far-right groups in the area. In 2018 a member of Atomwaffen Division, a militant neo-Nazi group, murdered his 19-year-old Jewish classmate, Blaze Bernstein, in Orange county...
Read More, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/05/far-right-southern-california-history
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