People mourning the killing of Charlie Kirk carried candles and American flags in a solemn memorial last week at the Huntington Beach Pier, long a destination for conservative gatherings ranging from protests over pandemic-era lockdowns to rallies in support of President Trump.
But on this night, things took a dark turn when dozens of men joined the crowd, chanting, “White men fight back.”
Then on Saturday, a white nationalist organization, identified by experts as Patriot Front, showed up at another beachside memorial for Kirk. The men, wearing khakis, navy blue shirts and white gaiters concealing their faces, marched down Main Street toward the beach holding a picture of Kirk. “Say his name!” they yelled. “Take back our world! Take back our land!”
By Sunday, key political leaders in the conservative Orange County city known as a hotbed for the MAGA movement were fighting to contain the situation, issuing a statement denouncing violence. Kirk’s assassination, City Hall said, “serves as a stark reminder of the devastating outcomes that can result from vitriol and violent rhetoric.”
“I despise them,” Councilman Butch Twining said of the white nationalists who disrupted the vigil. “There is no place for them here, and they disgust me.”
Huntington Beach is one of many communities grappling with the aftermath of the shooting of Kirk, a beloved activist in the conservative movement and close ally of President Trump.
Since his killing, conservatives have demanded the firing of people who posted online comments about Kirk they considered offensive. There have been debates over whether to lower flags to half-staff. One U.S. congressman is asking his colleagues to force social media platforms to kick off users who celebrated the killing. Vice President J.D. Vance encouraged people to take it a step further: “Call them out, and hell, call their employer.”
Huntington Beach is in a unique position because of its history of fringe white supremacist activity that goes back decades.
In the 1980s and 1990s, skinheads converged on Main Street throwing Nazi salutes and intimidating people of color. In 1995, a pair of white supremacists fatally shot a Black man after confronting him outside a McDonald’s restaurant on Beach Boulevard.
Huntington Beach leaders have fought to rid the city of that image and tried to make clear that hate is not welcome in Surf City. But events of the last week have made these efforts more difficult.
“Typically, when there’s an opportunity like this, white supremacists and far-right folks more generally are very good about inserting themselves and seeing it as an opportunity to pull things in their direction and shift the narrative,” said Pete Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University in Orange County who studies extremist groups.
This is happening as Huntington Beach has emerged as a West Coast beacon for Trump and MAGA. The city has made headlines in recent years for removing the Pride flag from city properties, rewriting a decades-old human dignity resolution — deleting any mention of intolerance of hate crimes — and wading into fights with state officials over issues like transgender student privacy.
Brian Levin, the founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino, said the U.S. is witnessing not just polarization between left and right, but a splintering within both the left and right. And that polarization, he said, is being exploited by extremist groups seeking to advance a certain message.
“The notion that these camps are unified teams just simply isn’t true,” Levin said. “I think what’s happening is we’re seeing the exploitation of civic discourse by people who are trying to outdo each other as being more authentic and how they do that is by being more eliminationist and more aggressive. Aggression and being an edgelord is considered currency.”
Barbara Richardson, who has lived in the city since the early 1970s, criticized city leaders for extending the mourning period for Kirk, flying flags half-staff through sundown on Sept. 21 — the day of his memorial service — saying that it will only contribute to rising tensions in the city.
Over the weekend, Richardson watched the videos of the white supremacists chanting downtown in horror. The moment was an unwelcome reminder of what residents grappled with decades ago.
“It’s disheartening,” Richardson said. “I think what happened at the Charlie Kirk rallies was a real black eye for Huntington Beach and it hurts tourism. It made me not want to go downtown. I remember the city in the 1980s and it was scary. I didn’t want to be around skinheads then and I still don’t.”
Last week’s memorials were for Kirk as well as Iryna Zarustka, the woman killed while riding a train in Charlotte, N.C., in a brutal attack captured on video.
Twining attended the event on Wednesday and was disturbed at what he heard from the white supremacists. He said he left quickly after they arrived and started chanting.
“They ruined a perfectly nice vigil where we recognized two people — Iryna [Zarustka] and Charlie—and prayed for them and sang Amazing Grace and had our own conversations about how much they meant to us,” he said.
He and others have stressed the vast majority of those who attended the vigils were there simply to mourn.
Twining said he and his wife have been accosted in a restaurant and at the grocery store over his presence at the vigil and the incorrect assumption that he’s supportive of white nationalists. There have been calls for him to resign and he’s even received death threats that have warranted police protection, he said.
“I reject the presence of hate groups loudly and unequivocally,” Twining said. “Their attempts to corrupt our democratic spaces will not succeed. As a leader in this community, I will not allow my voice to be twisted for extremism. I remain committed to preserving inclusive, respectful, and peaceful spaces where dialogue and remembrance can flourish untainted by hate.”
Videos of Saturday’s gathering show some attendees waving flags associated with Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization founded in 2017 by Thomas Rousseau after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
“They were intentionally generated to try and distance themselves from that violence and present themselves as pro-American,” Simi said. However, Simi noted, the group has also been accused of racial violence. In 2022, the Patriot Front was sued for a racist attack on a black musician in Boston and ordered to pay $2.75 million in damages.
On Saturday in Huntington Beach, resident Jerry Geyer was riding his bicycle in downtown watching as the group marched toward the pier chanting and decided to push back. He positioned his bicycle on the sidewalk in front of them in an effort to block their path. He rode next to them, shouting expletives.
“I cannot allow that to run through the streets of Huntington Beach,” he said in an interview with KCAL News. “That’s not what we are. That’s not who Huntington Beach is.”
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