Anaheim Brawl, Endorsements of Trump Put KKK Back in Spotlight

Hundreds of people attended a peace vigil in Anaheim the other night. It was in response to a Ku Klux Klan rally over the weekend, one that turned bloody after anti-Klan protesters started throwing punches.

The Klan rally was a provocative move from a once-powerful white supremacist group -- long ago the KKK was the dominant political force in Anaheim, holding multiple City Council seats until their ouster in 1924.

The KKK tends to stay well below the radar these days, and certainly doesn’t wield as much influence as it once did nationally.

“And frankly, there is not a great Klan presence at all in California,” says Cal State San Bernardino criminology professor Brian Levin. Levin also heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino.

“There are only a few Klan chapters, they are very small and generally they just resort to leafletting, but they’ve had significant growth nationwide," he says.

The Klan members were barely out of their vehicle Saturday before they were swarmed by about two dozen counterprotesters punching, pushing and kicking the outnumbered Klansmen.

Levin was put in the unusual position of trying to shield the Klan’s state leader, Bill Quigg, from being assaulted.

“And thank God the police showed up. It was just under three minutes from start to end, but it was the longest three minutes that I have experienced,” says Levin. “And I can tell you that I noticed in the eyes of the Klansmen complete terror and fright.”

Levin was able to record video the whole time he was attempting to shield Quigg from counterprotesters.

Three counterprotesters were stabbed in the melee, and more than a dozen people were arrested. Several counterprotesters face criminal charges.

It's unclear what exactly spurred the handful of Klansmen, dressed in black shirts festooned with Confederate flags and other white supremacist insignia, to try and stage the rally at Anaheim’s Pearson Park on Saturday.

But Levin says the group’s leader, Quigg, expressed a few reasons -- tropes that course through current white supremacist ideology.

“And it was ‘white lives matter’, illegal immigration, and (so-called) white cultural genocide. And this is pretty much the theme we’ve been seeing,” says Levin. “What’s scary is that this stuff has entered the political mainstream.”

A number of high-profile white supremacist groups and individuals have expressed support for leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. That includes a couple of Klansmen who attended Saturday’s event.

On his radio show last week, former national Klan leader David Duke told his white listeners that voting for any candidate but Trump amounted to “treason to your heritage.”

“He’s made it OK to talk about these incredible concerns of (white) European-Americans today,” Duke told Politico in December. “He’s meant a lot for the human rights of European-Americans."

Last week, the American Freedom Party continued its pro-Trump robocalling campaign in numerous states in the lead-up to Super Tuesday, an effort carried out without the consent or approval of the Trump campaign.

The AFP refers to itself as a white “nationalist party interested in defending our borders, preserving our language and promoting our culture.”

“White Americans should push back!” says its website.

“The white race is dying out in America and Europe because we are afraid to be called racist,” AFP’s director, William Johnson, says in the pro-Trump robocall which includes a veiled swipe at Cuban-American Republican candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

“Donald Trump is not afraid. Don’t vote for a Cuban. Vote for Donald Trump.”

“I have not seen an array of hate groups come forward so much so in favor of one candidate in many, many years,” says Levin.