Far right and far out: Extremists have a long history in Southern California

It’s a white supremacist group calling itself RAM — a swaggering, belligerent acronym for the Rise Again Movement that to all appearances is a cluster of melanin–obsessed men dedicated to the brand of brutish mayhem that white supremacists amp up for. A man who co-founded RAM in Southern California just wound up in court, where he pleaded guilty to conspiring to riot, having attended a Huntington Beach rally in March 2016 where he and others of his ilk “pursued and assaulted” people, including one protester he tackled and punched multiple times. (…) RAM is the latest dot connected on a long, zigzag line that courses up and down the state, from border north to border south. L.A.’s early Confederate sympathies were never extinguished by the Union victory. With the Klan revival in the American South and Midwest in the 1920s, California rode the wave, too. The state had about 200,000 members in the mid-1920s. Locally, a thousand white hoods bloomed, in beach cities, in Inglewood — where KKKsters put up “Caucasian-only” signs around town — and in Orange County, in Anaheim especially, where Klansmen briefly held a majority of city council seats before their recall by mortified voters and civic leaders. In the same city almost a century later, in February 2016, modern-day KKK members staging a “white lives matter” rally brawled with counterprotesters. At least one of them was stabbed with a flagpole topped by an American eagle. There’s a pattern to these white supremacist groups. They rise, fragment, submerge, reconstitute, reemerge, sometimes with different names, different uniforms, but the same cast, and same sentiments. So let’s start off with Southern California’s most notorious white-race crusader — a title some of the new crowd looks to be trying to win for themselves. A Venn diagram of the “career” of Tom Metzger, on-and-off-again Klansman, would be a tangle of overlaps and crossovers.

via latimes: Far right and far out: Extremists have a long history in Southern California

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