The White House on Monday joined city, state and Jewish community leaders in Ohio condemning a small group who marched through Columbus on Saturday chanting racial slurs and white nationalist slogans while carrying Nazi flags.
NBC affiliate WCMH of Columbus reported that it received eyewitness reports of the march around 1:45 p.m. Saturday in the state capital’s Short North Arts District.
Videos uploaded to social media and geolocated by NBC News to the same neighborhood showed at least 11 people carrying black flags with red swastikas and wearing black outfits with red masks, chanting slogans such as “Bow down, [n-word]!” into a bullhorn.
“President Biden abhors the hateful poison of Nazism, anti-semitism, and racism — which are hostile to everything the United States stands for, including protecting the dignity of all our citizens and the freedom to worship,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said Monday morning.
The news comes a week after protesters waved Nazi flags outside a community production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Michigan, to the shock of performers and theatre-goers.
“We will not tolerate hate in Ohio. Neo-Nazis — their faces hidden behind red masks — roamed streets in Columbus today, carrying Nazi flags and spewing vile and racist speech against people of color and Jews,” Ohio gov. Mike DeWine said in a statement posted to X.
“There is no place in this state for hate, bigotry, anti-semitism or violence, and we must therefore denounce it wherever we see it,” he said.
Shannon Hardin, Columbus City Council president, said on X that the community “rejects their pathetic efforts to promote fear and hate,” adding that he was in touch with law enforcement. He also alleged the march was linked to the election success of Donald Trump earlier this month. “I’m sorry the President-elect has emboldened these creeps,” he wrote.
Trump famously said there were “very fine people on both sides” after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where one counter-protester was killed. Trump has dismissed accusations that he has encouraged extremism or that his supporters include Nazis.
“President Trump is backed by Latinos, Black voters, union workers, angel moms, law enforcement officers, border patrol agents, and Americans of all faiths,” his campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement last month.
Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein said on X he was also in contact with police over the march and said his office would monitor the group involved. “Take your flags and the masks you hide behind and go home and never come back,” he said.
Lee Shapiro, regional director for the American Jewish Committee, said Columbus police were “acting to quell this unauthorized march” in a statement Saturday.
“The vile display of hate by a small band of masked neo-Nazis in the Short North is another sad example of the bigotry that we have witnessed across the country,” Shapiro said.
Far-right groups have recently made headlines for stoking division elsewhere in the state.
A white nationalist activist in Springfield, Ohio, took credit for the false story that Haitian immigrants in the city were stealing and eating pets, repeated by Trump at a rally in September.
Christopher Pohlhaus, leader of the national neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, said after that debate that his group had had “pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.” Police said there was no evidence for the pets claim, despite its wide dissemination.
Oren Segal, vice-president for the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, told the New York Times that the a new St. Louis-based group named Hate Club had taken credit for the Columbus march and that it may have been at least partly inspired by a rivalry with another group in Ohio.
“At the end of day, they want to create fear and anxiety in communities and get a photo op,” he said.
Caroline Radnofsky, Jean Lee and Larissa Gao contributed.
