Neo-Nazis Parade Around Florida Chanting "Jews Will Not Replace Us"

Neo-Nazi groups paraded around Florida last weekend with swastika flags and “Heil Hitler” chants, a trend that has become alarmingly common around the country.

Over Labor Day weekend, a coalition of extremist groups held a “March of the Redshirts” rally in Orlando.

Those who participated dressed in red and black, including a neo-Nazi group leader, are shown standing on an area overpass in a video posted by documentarian Ford Fischer. Some neo-Nazis also gathered outside Disney World.

Founded by former Marine Christopher Pohlhaus, his Blood Tribe group previously demonstrated in Ohio and Wisconsin. He lives in Maine.

As well as Blood Tribe, White Lives Matter, Goyim Defense League, and Vinland Rebels Fascist Action all had representation among the dozens of white supremacists present, Fischer reported.

“We are everywhere,” the group can be heard chanting in the videos shared. They also shouted antigay slurs at people, calling them “fa**ots.”

Far-right extremists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and some Republican politicians have recently found themselves aligned against everything perceived as “woke,” including recognizing LGBTQ+ people and their existence.

The Advocate spoke with Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, where he studies domestic violent extremism and homegrown violent extremism. He believes that an alarming level of hate simmering in American society that the extreme right exploits and should not be normalized.

“In both the white supremacist and the anti-LGBTQ spaces, you have seen these very similar patterns where the fringe has become embraced by an increasingly large subset of Americans,” Lewis said. “Concepts like the great replacement theory that 10 years ago were fodder for these closed white supremacist chat rooms and niche online spaces are now in the past couple years are all over Tucker Carlson’s show.”

He continued, “Whenever you have this kind of mainstreaming, this kind of seeding of these ideas out to this number of people, it’s always going to increase the likelihood, not that hundreds of thousands of people are all of a sudden going to have that cognitive shift, but 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 of them are going to be radicalized, are going to think, ‘Hey, this makes a lot of sense. I should go down this rabbit hole.’ And then at the end of that is where you see individuals who, for any combination of ideological reasons, personal grievances, whatever, are willing to commit mass violence because of that.”

Lewis explained that this radical ideology is a threat and has always been. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the threat posed by violent white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anti-government, and anti-LGBTQ+ actors as society embraces many of the narratives that have consistently dominated those spaces, he said.

Last week, a deadly racist attack in Jacksonville in which a white supremacist with swastikas painted on his assault rifle shot and killed three Black people was reportedly motivated by his hatred of African Americans, according to police.