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Nazis 3.0 come to Billings. Will the city push back? – Daily Montanan

['More From Author', 'June', 'Adrian Jawort']

Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00

“The enemy is Marxism. I tried to save you. Read Mien Kampf,” a picture with Adolf Hitler states on the Telegram web page filled with Nazi propaganda, MMA fight clips, and footage of men doing hand to hand combat training.

In another pic, four men in an area Billings’ locals would recognize as Pioneer Park stand in fighting stances. “Big Sky Active Club Billings Crew,” it says. In the upper left corner, an insignia and official motto used by the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or SS, reads translated from German, “My honor is called loyalty.”

The phrase was coined by Heinrich Himmler, the primary architect of the Holocaust who derived it from a letter by Hitler congratulating SS members in 1931. There’s also a large “skeleton key” insignia of the SS Division Leibstandarte—Hitler’s personal bodyguard unit.

Considering themselves the “racial elite” of the Nazi party, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Hitler entrusted the SS first and foremost with the removal and eventual murder of political and so-called racial enemies of the regime.”

In the early 2000s a large group of skinheads of the same ideology of the Big Sky Active Club were also known to roam Pioneer Park doing “park patrols” which basically consisted of beating up people of color. Their leaders had large visible swastika tattoos, and recruits earned suspenders by beating up minorities which resulted in eight of them eventually convicted of federal hate crimes.

As a young Native American in Billings, I personally witnessed a couple of times more than a dozen skinheads showing up at local recreation areas in broad daylight, glaring as if wanting to hurt me while saying slurs to the Asian person I was with. In white supremacist circles, these types of thuggish, open skinheads were considered “White Supremacy 1.0.”

So-called White Supremacy 2.0, or the “alt-right”—a phrase coined by Richard Spencer of Whitefish, Montana—grew popular around 2015. “Edgy,” disaffected, mostly young white males tired of political correctness provided the movement with fertile recruiting grounds as they coordinated to troll and harass people online.

This “owning the libs” mentality would help propel Donald Trump to his Presidency in the 2016 election, and Richard Spencer would tell TIME Magazine in April of 2016, “Trump has opened the door to nationalism in this country—bot American nationalism but the white race. Once that door has fully swung open, you can’t close it.”

Brad Griffin is a Spencer associate and was called by the Southern Poverty Law Center “the gatekeeper for the alt-right and the chief exporter of its most effective tactics to his ideological passion project—Southern nationalism.” He initially heralded the efficiency of offensive memes until realizing this approach was shortsighted for sustaining long-term White Nationalist goals.

“The idiots who wanted to ‘trigger the libs’ cost us dearly,” Griffin tweeted in 2020. “Despite what they have told you, they had no plan beyond ‘triggering the libs.’ In contrast, the libs responded by methodically wiping us off the internet.”

In the wake of seeing White nationalists at the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, much of America became appalled by those deemed “alt-right,” and White nationalists shifted away from optics associated with the term.

Indeed, a forwarded post on the Big Sky Active Club page reiterated Griffin’s points of how “terminally online edge lords” made their movement off-putting to outsiders to the point their troll-ish antics were no longer shocking but repetitive and “boring.”

As such, “White Supremacy 3.0” is about action beyond computer screens and mean-spirited memes, and “Active Clubs” took their inspiration from the Rise Above Movement that Pro Publica describes as “a successor to the volatile and hyper-aggressive skinhead gangs that were prevalent during the 1980s and 1990s.” Three members of the Rise Above Movement plead guilty in federal courts to conspiracy to riot during at Charlottesville.

While using the innocuous popularity of MMA fighting, so-called White Supremacy 3.0 groups strives to offer disillusioned men brotherhood and greater purpose. But the end message is a more sinister and escalated alt-right rabbit hole which usually lead to a gradual shift of White supremacist ideals, openly diving headfirst into open Nazi ideals. It must be noted the Big Sky Active Club oft shares related White Lives Matter Montana propaganda stating a genocidal desire to eradicate non-whites from North America, Europe and Australia.

Perhaps fearing FBI investigation, a Big Sky Active Club post seeming to praise the Buffalo massacre shooter’s manifesto along with screenshots of his words. It says the shooter himself believes—as they do—in “…the Great Replacement Thesis, reaffirming that that (sic) his ideology is, basically based on ‘White Supremacy and National-Socialism.”

More disturbingly, a now deleted video with the title “Combat Preparedness” shows an individual with a modified AR-15 firing rounds followed by the text, “They always say, ‘I’m glad we’re on the same side.’ I always respond, ‘Are we?’” He then live-action role-plays a tactical, military-styled house sweep. The video ends ominously with footage of Hitler yelling, “Seig Heil!” followed by a Hitler portrait with “I tried to save you” text over him.

In the “Combat Preparedness” video, a business decal of a local Billings establishment I frequently go to was in the frame, bringing home the fact this rapid radicalization is not something abstract happening elsewhere with strangers, but with our neighbors.

As an outspoken transgender Native American pacifist, I realize writing this piece potentially puts me in the crosshairs of people set on less talk, and more violence ideals. But I’ve spoken out against racism and intersectional LGBTQ-phobia too long and too hard to see those “Park Patrol” days return.

Our minority youth today shouldn’t have to grow up in fear of violence simply for being born with shades of darker skin or LGBTQ. Our grandfathers, including my own who saw the very worst of war everyday as a field medic, fought an entire world to try and end the scourge of Nazism, yet the stench of its ideals still manages to rebrand itself and linger.

We need to put political differences aside, come together as The Greatest Generation did, and unite against those anathematic to our purported Montanan “Live and Let Live” values and see this as the threat it is before we have our own Buffalo, New York-type tragedy here.

Adrian L. Jawort is the Political Director of Indigenous Transilience.

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