First Came High School Swastika Party Then Came White Power Posters

Triggering incident?

About a week after students turned up in Snapchat photos last month giving the sieg heil salute to red Solo cups arranged in the shape of a swastika, white supremacist propaganda turned up on the Newport Harbor High School campus.

That revelation came in a Monday report on the LAist website and KPCC (89.3-FM) radio with the headline, “How White Supremacists are Recruiting Educated ‘Normies’ Around LA.”

The same story reports that white-power posters have turned up at UC Irvine and Saddleback College in Mission Viejo as well as on the streets of Orange and Anaheim.

These incidents have more to do with a national trend than they do with the Harbor High scandal—which my colleague Gabriel San Roman covered with followups on a solidarity rally by Orange County JewsHolocaust survivor and Anne Frank’s stepsister speaking with Harbor High parents and students; and a swastika partygoer’s mother sending the Weekly an open letter.

 

Up in Orange (Patriot Front)

The Anti-Defamation League says white supremacist posters, fliers, banners and other propaganda increased from 421 around the U.S. in 2017 to 1,187 in 2018.

“There’s been a major recruiting effort in the white supremacy, white nationalist movement over the past few years, especially in California,” says Lowell Smith, a former Orange County Probation Department terrorism liaison officer who’s now a criminologist studying extremist groups at La Sierra University in Riverside, in the LAist/KPCC piece.

“They’re looking for the educated people, not the uneducated, and not the criminals. You’re talking about people who have legitimate jobs, or college students, college graduates. And then, they try to use that base to legitimize their movement.”

5 Replies to “First Came High School Swastika Party Then Came White Power Posters”

  1. I’m confused. So an arrow through the swastika saying no to communism and another saying “money doesn’t rule you” is a white supremacist thing?
    That’s the same mentality that claimed all the Southern symbols of the “democratic South” were actually republican icons. That’s backwards.

    1. Patriot Front is a white supremacist group. They are putting up the posters with their website listed so people will check them out. Maybe the story should have said posters advertising for a white supremacist group have been placed around town so we can be on the lookout for white power signs thinly despised as patriotism. Either way, I would want to know so I can tear them down when I see them.

  2. Ummmmm. This article seems like it is trying to cause a ruckus Involving some extremely disappointing highschoolers playing swastika beer pong…. but just to clarify the poster of the The hammer and sickle (Unicode: “☭”) is a symbol of proletarian solidarity that was first adopted – as Russian: серп и мо́лот, translit. serp i mólot: “sickle and hammer” – during the Russian Revolution. It’s also the symbol of the Soviet communist party, and communists elsewhere. The hammer is for industrial workers and the sickle represents agricultural workers. Soooo for reference just look at the Russian flag….. or maybe just google it…. but it has nothing to do with white supremacy.

  3. There needs to be a take back our county movement for kids. Civil rights and human rights is just as powerful and sexy as white suprematist movements.

  4. ““There’s been a major recruiting effort in the white supremacy, white nationalist movement over the past few years, especially in California,” says Lowell Smith, a former Orange County Probation Department terrorism liaison officer who’s now a criminologist studying extremist groups at La Sierra University in Riverside, in the LAist/KPCC piece.”

    Note how the propagandist who spewed this hit piece equates White nationalism with terrorism and criminality by quoting an “expert” in these areas who just so happens to have an opinion on White nationalism.

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