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.

Takeaway: Don’t ever let the Pacific-blue geopolitics of California surprise you. Dismay or appall you, sure, but never surprise you.

Like a taut earthquake fault that too often unbelts itself and cuts loose with repellent force, a deep lode of hate and racist one-upmanship undergirds Southern California. This is not of recent stamp only. The slow-walk destruction of Native Americans, Los Angeles’ 1871 Chinese massacre and the marginalizing and demonizing of Latinos and Asians don’t square with the kumbaya California vibe.

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.

Metzger lived in Fallbrook, in San Diego County, and unlike the hooded Klan and present-day masked supremacists, he didn’t hide his face; he put it out on cable TV and for news cameras.

In 1993, after the FBI arrested white supremacists accused of planning to bomb a Black church and kill Rodney King along with Jewish community leaders, Metzger told The Times that Southern California, with its deeply diverse population, was a target-rich environment for their beliefs. “This may not be the mecca of white separatism, but it is the breeding ground.”

The skinhead wardrobe and Nazi tattoos were counterproductive, Metzger came to believe, and it was high time they went undercover and dressed “normally” to blend in. “A lot of them,” he said, “have integrated themselves into the business community and the military, so you don’t know they’re skinheads any more.”

Over the years, Metzger waded into Democratic electoral politics — not too deeply nor successfully — then turned in frustration to assembling his own group with its own angry acronym, WAR, White Aryan Resistance.

He and WAR eventually went broke paying off a civil judgment of $12.5 million ordered by an Oregon court. Skinheads associated with WAR had killed an Ethiopian student there and Metzger and WAR were on the hook for his wrongful death. (A tasty dollop of karma here: Metzger got one judge booted from the trial because he thought his surname sounded Jewish. His replacement, whose last name, Haggerty, was Irish, turned out to be Black.)

For most of the 20th century, you didn’t always have to go looking for these people. In La Crescenta’s onetime Hindenburg Park, Americans showed up for rallies staged by the Bund, an American-varnished iteration of the Nazi party. The park is now the Crescenta Valley Community Regional Park, and a historical marker describes the park’s “Aryan superiority” past along with its earlier innocuous German cultural and social connections. In the 1930s, neighbors in the Westside’s Rustic Canyon reported seeing men wearing the Silver Shirt uniform of the fascist Nazi-style group on “patrol” in the canyon.

The tactics, then as now, were about attention, and provocation. Protesters show up at the rallies, and if someone can get baited into a shove or a punch, the neo-Nazis wave that as proof that they are the victims.

In El Monte, hateful history went far deeper. Years before the Civil War, a disorderly, sometimes bloodthirsty, vigilante local militia known as the “Monte boys” made the town a kind of sanctuary for hair-trigger Confederate sympathies and racist sentiments.

El Monte was still trying to shake off this reputation a hundred and more years later; right there on Peck Road, the American Nazi Party opened for business in 1966. Its bloodiest episode wasn’t an attack on its enemies; it was a Nazi-on-Nazi killing.

Typically of these groups, the neo-Nazis quarreled over something — dogma, money, tactics — and shed some members. El Monte neo-Nazi Joseph Tommasi once ran the whole shebang, but he’d been given the boot by the national HQ, and went off to start his own outfit. In August 1975, in some confrontation outside his old HQ, Tommasi was shot to death. The neo-Nazis who were there said he was charging up the steps with a club and that it was self-defense.

Tommasi wouldn’t rate much notice except for this convoluted plot: He had insisted that in 1972, he was handed $1,200 from a secret Nixon reelection fund to bankroll a weird assignment.

Under arcane California rules, if a party’s statewide voter registration numbers dropped below a certain threshold, that party’s candidates couldn’t be on a ballot. By 1972, then President-Nixon’s people were worried about the prospect of segregationist former Alabama governor George Wallace drawing votes from Nixon as the potential nominee of the AIP, the right-wing American Independent Party.

Tommasi said he was paid by operatives for the Nixon campaign to get his fellow Aryaners to change their party registration from AIP, which curiously assumed they were registered to vote in the first place.

Tommasi’s story is not completely far-fetched: there was reportedly money set aside for such an effort.

But Wallace didn’t become the nominee and Tommasi evidently spent the money on trying and failing to secure the Peck Road property.

A couple of outliers of note here:

The John Birch Society was the post-WWII fringe group so committed to rooting out its perceived Communist menace here at home that it saw Commies and their conspiracies even where there were none.

Its Western headquarters was for about 40 years in the rich, discreet city of San Marino. Its founder believed President Eisenhower was an agent of the Communist conspiracy, and although its mission was political, its critics were persuaded that many Birchers — the Venn diagram again — also happened to be antisemitic and racist. The JBS steadfastly and publicly kept itself as far as it could from the vulgar, violent likes of neo-Nazi groups that, for their part, would have been glad to piggyback on the JBS’s country-club gravitas and its piggybanks.

The Times’ fourth publisher, Otis Chandler, had two relatives who were prominent Birchers. Not long after he became publisher, Chandler fired a shot across the JBS bow, assigning a five-part series on the extremist society and its “Blue Book” bible of principles.

Chandler capped it with a signed front-page editorial in March 1961.He warned that Birchers’ work undermines democratic institutions “exactly as the Communists try to do. They will sow distrust, and aggravate disputes, and they will weaken the very strong case for conservatism … What are we to think when our last three Presidents, Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, are accused either of being Communists or Communist dupes? . . . What are we to think when we are told that our churches almost without exception are corroded with active agents of Moscow?” Subversion, Chandler argued, “whether of the left or right, is still subversion.”

The JBS is neither the force nor the figure on the political landscape that it was, but it did its work: The present-day radical right has picked up some of its notions and run with them, like hand-wringing over moral decline, big government, public education and conspiracy theories galore.

Left-wing radical groups in California are a blip by comparison. They pretty much flourished and then faded in the 1970s. One, the New World Liberation Front, carried out about a score of terrorist bombings of Bay Area targets like PG&E towers, and in candy boxes delivered to politicians like future Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose daughter found the device before it could go off. NWLF was a revolutionary grab-bag of not even a full platoon’s worth of off-and-on members, nominally led by Ronald Huffman and his girlfriend, Maureen Minton. A few days after Minton was savagely murdered by someone with an axe, Huffman was arrested carrying a sack of cash and part of Minton’s brain.

The most intensely enduring impact of California ‘70s left-wing radicalism grew out of protests over prison abuse. Now we think of right-wing white extremists or Mexican Mafiosi as prison gangs, but in the 1970s, influential prison justice movements on the “outside” arose out of deadly confrontations behind the walls.

George Jackson was one of the “Soledad Brothers,” a Black inmate radicalized by his readings of Marx, Mao and Lenin, and by what he and soon thousands of supporters worldwide would call out as brutal racial and political persecution of inmates by an unjust system. The back-and-forth killings of inmates and guards culminated in Jackson being shot down during a bloody escape try.

Jackson’s death, and his writings, and the forming of the Black Guerrilla Family prison Black power gang, brought the justice system’s racial disparities into general public discussion.

One of its stranger spinoffs was the grandiose, tactically clumsy Symbionese Liberation Army — an army of perhaps a dozen white men and women led by a black escaped convict. In 1973, the SLA assassinated a Black Oakland school chief and in 1974 kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. It said it had it had persuaded her to join the cause and demanded that her millionaire father stage a massive food distribution program for the poor. Most SLA members died in an extraordinary, live-televised, hours-long shootout with the LAPD in May 1974.

I have not overlooked the unrelenting antisemitism that Southern California still shows; I wrote about it early last year.

In 2023, Los Angeles County announced, it recorded far more examples than in any year since the county’s commission on human relations began tracking these hate crimes more than 40 years ago. Anti-Jewish offenses spiked startlingly — by 91%, the biggest number of such crimes recorded by the county.

And now a new year and a new tally begins. It may be awkward for law enforcement to suggest a connection, but the nine-year rise and resurgence of Donald Trump does seem to have encouraged ugly urges in some people. Hate crimes have risen markedly since 2015, the year Trump launched his presidential campaign to succeed Barack Obama. Insults follow crimes; anonymous texts sent to Black people after the election ordered them to report to the nearest plantation to pick cotton.

And Metzger’s characterization of California, a state strung tensely between deeply conflicting visions of what it should look like, comes back around like a recurring virus: “This may not be the mecca of white separatism, but it is the breeding ground.”

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