Fascists in our Front Yard

When the Patriot Front marched in Boston earlier this month and assaulted Charles Murrell, a Black artist and activist, city officials and residents alike were taken by surprise. The Patriot Front was back in Boston over the weekend, this time in Jamaica Plain, spewing their vile ideology on the LGBTQ community. We can’t claim to be surprised any more. According to the Boston Globe, the Patriot Front has been building a constituency right here, in one of the supposedly most liberal states in the country. And they have spent more time in Massachusetts than other places over the past few years. This isn’t in our “backyard” folks. This is the front yard, where we can’t deny it any more.

I used to think of the visible, vocal, and sometimes violent displays of racism as the death throes of a dying beast. But white nationalism is reproducing itself, finding support among a whole new generation of young people. We’re told that these extremist groups offer the allure of physical discipline, gun-toting machismo, community, and ideological unity. It’s frightening to me, though not surprising, that this ideology has such allure; an ideology laden with hatred and lies that obscure the real drivers of economic insecurity and political polarization and instead scapegoat people of color and LGBTQ people. It’s literally a page from the Nazi’s playbook.

If nothing else, January 6, 2021 should have taught us that it’s time to get behind efforts to prevent and intervene on the radicalization of young white people. Since 911, law enforcement has had a relentless focus on monitoring radicalization of young Muslim men, trampling civil liberties and demonizing whole communities in the process. Police have been monitoring Black and Brown street gangs for generations, also often trampling civil liberties and justifying police violence in the process. When young white men become radicalized, the strategy seems to be “do nothing,”  and to explain away any crimes they commit by focusing on their mental health and social marginalization. I’m not calling for a trampling of their civil liberties, or justifying the abuses of Muslim, Black and Brown youth at the hands of police. But I am calling on us as a society to take the radicalization of young white people seriously. In the words of Wajahat Ali, author of Deradicalizing White People, “I have lost count of how many times I have been asked as a Muslim, ‘Where are the moderate Muslims?’ So allow me to ask, ‘Where are the moderate whites, and what are they doing to combat extremism?’” 

What are we – those of us working for social justice – doing to combat extremism in our communities? It’s not a problem over there, in “red America,” it’s right here, in our front yard.