SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA: HOME OF THE NAZI PUNCHERS

I live in Sacramento, the capitol city of California, and we’ve had our share of Nazis in need of face punching. Most recently, the Traditionalist Worker Party attempted to hold a rally at the capitol building, with support from their buddies, the Golden State Skinheads. They were met by protesters, many associating themselves with the Antifa (antifascist) movement, and violence ensued.

Several police officers, who seemed to mostly just stand by and watch the melee, were quoted in the papers as saying it was not the “permit holders” who initiated the violence. The clumsy and robotic phrase “permit holders” is how far the police will go to avoid calling them white supremacists, skinheads, or Nazis, all things these groups call themselves. The other side started it? They somehow missed the opening blows of this fight, I guess, where white supremacists enslaved black people, burned crosses in fields, hung black people from trees, made a strong effort at wiping Jewish people from the face of the earth, along with the disabled and homosexuals, and caused the bloodiest conflicts this world has ever seen. It’s worth noting that a sweet little Nazi skinhead did all the stabbing that day.

Why did Sacramento respond so strongly?

Maybe because in the eighties and early nineties our downtown became a war zone as SHARPS (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) and others started fighting back against white-power skinheads who had taken over our music scene.

The danger in ignoring Nazis is that they don’t give up ground easily. Once they’d made a Nazi safe space of Sacramento’s streets, trying to push them out saw them escalating. There were shots fired, at least one fatal stabbing, a local music promoter put in the hospital with a broken back.

A group of scooter enthusiasts called the Burgundy Tops may have seemed an easy target for our local skinheads when they were spotted hanging out by Tower Theater, but the Tops instead delivered a thorough beatdown to the bald bullies outside of a local café. If this rumble had taken place a decade later, it would have been filmed from multiple angles and posted on Youtube. This fact brings a tear to my eyes. How cool would it be to see members of the best-dressed scene in town beating up a bunch of Nazi skinheads outside of a classic movie theater?! Ron Howard, call me.

Eventually, enough of the Nazi boneheads either grew up enough to move on or went to prison and lost their grip on our town. They’re still here, for sure. A few years back a group of them all got out of prison around the same time and reunited with their buddies on the outside, and it was like old times again for a week or two. On the night when a local band got their asses kicked after a show, mostly just for being poor examples of proud, masculine, white men, I was sitting with my own bandmates at a diner as four Nazi skinheads walked by. They spotted us through the window and started blowing kisses and inviting us outside. It just seemed so clear that they loved one another’s company and pretending to be gay in ironic and homophobic ways. Maybe it’s oversimplifying the cause of their violence, but at that moment I couldn’t help but think that if they could just fuck one another openly and proudly, it would make life better for all of us. A squad car rolled by and the Nazis hoofed it.

After a series of parole violations and weapons charges, and rumors of bomb-making material as well, they went back behind bars once again.

Here in Sacramento, we’re pretty determined not to see them roaming about our downtown, posting up on corners and otherwise making our town feel safe for Nazis and no one else.