Neo-Nazis Swarm Home of New England Governor

Tim Dickinson
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Dozens of Neo-Nazis demonstrated outside the home of Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) on Saturday night, in an intimidating display of hate. Members of the group NSC-131 — which seeks to create a white-only ethnostate in New England — marched Saturday night through the Boston suburb of Arlington, uniformed in khakis, black jackets, face masks, and baseball caps.

The NSC-131 members moved under cover of darkness, co-opting the progressive activist chant, “Whose streets? Our streets!” The neo-Nazis then lined up on the sidewalk across the street from the Healey’s home, which was protected by state troopers. The group’s members lit red traffic flares, and held these aloft with stiff arm Hitler salutes. They unfurled a banner reading: “WE’RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE.”

The action by NSC-131 was an in-the-streets response to civil rights charges brought against the group by the state late last year. A 26-page complaint was lodged by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell (D) in December. Campbell denounced the group’s efforts to “target and terrorize people across Massachusetts and interfere with their rights,” and insisted the state of Massachusetts is dedicated to “holding this neo-Nazi group and its leaders accountable.”

That legal complaint hits NSC-131 for actions that “unlawfully target and disrupt LGBTQ+ events,” including drag queen story hours; “unlawfully target immigrants based on race and national origin,” including by trespassing at hotels where asylum seekers have been offered temporary housing; “unlawfully attack members of the public,” with frequent brawling at NSC-131 marches; and for numerous efforts to “disrupt public peace and safety.”

NSC-131 leaders posted video of the encounter outside the governor’s home on Telegram, a social network favored by many extremists, along with a message declaring that the point of the protest was “to show the world that lawfare will not intimidate New England Nationalists,” as well as to whine about what the hate group terms a “migrant invasion.”

Karissa Hand, spokesperson for the governor, tells Rolling Stone that the NSC-131 action was quickly defused. “Massachusetts State Police, with assistance from local police, were on the scene, and the group quickly dispersed,” she says. “We thank law enforcement for their commitment to ensuring that all communities in our state are safe from hate groups of this kind.”

This was, in fact, the second action by NSC-131 targeting the governor’s home. In mid-October, members of the neo-Nazi group similarly marched at Healey’s residence declaring: “New England is ours, the rest must go.” At the time the governor released a statement blasting “these Neo-Nazis and white supremacists” for “trying to scare people from exercising their rights,” adding: “We won’t tolerate it in Massachusetts.”

NSC-131 is an offshoot of another far-right hate group, Patriot Front, and is tactically similar in staging flash-mob actions like the march on Healey’s home. But unlike Patriot Front, which coats its white nationalism in a veneer of patriotism, NSC-131 is unabashedly Nazi in its ideology and iconography. “By using the Swastika and the symbols of dreaded Nazi Germany,” the group has stated in its literature, “we place ourselves in the most stark opposition possible to everything that we would change in modern society.”

The neo-Nazi group has, nonetheless, attempted to make inroads with the MAGA crowd by coopting the issues animating the GOP base, declaring that “it is Nazism … to oppose Drag Queen Story Hour and Critical Race Theory.”

The group has also launched a somewhat less-caustic, tradlife political movement called the People’s Initiative of New England, or PINE — which has distributed fliers at Donald Trump rallies. PINE calls for the secession of New England from the United States, and for the removal of non-whites — with the aim, it has written in manifestoes posted to Substack, of creating a government that “represents” the region’s white “supermajority and founding stock.”

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