Students have arranged red plastic cups in the shape of a swastika. They’ve held up “We love White” signs. They’ve chanted a Nazi marching song.
Several high schools in Orange county, California, have been engulfed in scandal in the past year over racist behavior by some of their white students. This week, videos surfaced showing a group of boys from Pacifica high school in Garden Grove doing the Sieg Heil salute and marching with German and Confederate flags.
The latest controversy has reignited anger and anxiety among Jewish communities and students of color, with many questioning why this keeps happening. To some, the answer is obvious: white supremacy has a long history in Orange county, and officials aren’t taking the threats seriously. The consequences, they say, could be deadly.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Orange county was known as a recruitment hub for neo-Nazi groups, sometimes resulting in violence and hate crimes. And although it now counts more registered Democrats than Republicans, the county was long one of the blue state’s rightwing strongholds, with xenophobic, racist and homophobic politicians holding some of its top jobs.
“People have this skewed perspective of California – that it’s liberal, that it’s hippies,” said Melissa Shaw, a former Pacifica high school student, who is Jewish. “That was not my experience in Orange county … I felt like I was running from the neo-Nazis.”
Experts say the far right is still active and dangerous in the region. A member of a local militant neo-Nazi group was charged last year for murdering a 19-year-old gay Jewish classmate. The so-called Rise Above Movement (Ram), one of the most prominent white supremacist groups linked to recent violence, is concentrated in Orange county, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
“Orange county is a safe haven for Nazis,” said Jaime Segall-Gutierrez, a local civil rights attorney. “Not enough is being done to discourage this type of behavior. If anything, it’s being encouraged … because of the lack of accountability.”
Decades of swastikas and ‘sweeping under the rug’
“My initial reaction was, ‘same old shit,’” Flo Martin, a former Pacifica high teacher, said about the new Nazi salute videos. Martin taught German at the school from 1980 to 2003, and said it was not uncommon for white students to engage in hateful behavior: “Whenever there was an incident of antisemitism or racism, students would come rushing to my classroom and I would grab my camera and document it,” she said. She still has photos of a swastika etched into a school field.
Martin, 77, said school officials at the time were reluctant to conduct serious investigations or punish students – and she said she fears they still aren’t doing enough today. “It was a policy of sweeping stuff under the rug.”
Garden Grove school district officials have said the recent footage came from an off-campus event last year and that they addressed the situation with the involved students and families. But they only addressed the footage publicly after the months-old video was leaked to the Daily Beast.
Pacifica’s principal, Steve Osborne, said in a statement shared with the Guardian that “an investigation and consequences did occur” in March, adding, “We did a disservice to the entire school community by limiting our action to the small group of students involved. We are sorry that our investigation and our transparency … fell drastically short.”
It’s unclear how the students were disciplined.
Shaw, the former student, said the school’s inadequate response this month was all too familiar. The 39-year-old, who graduated in 1998 and is now an education consultant, said she faced regular bullying from white supremacist classmates, who at the time were recognizable by their Doc Martens boots with white or red laces. When she was a 16-year-old junior, someone burned the contents of her locker, and the school’s response was essentially to shrug it off, she recalled.
The first boy she dated broke up with her after he discovered she was Jewish, she added. She was regularly called slurs.
“It was a constant, slow dehumanization,” Shaw recalled. “There was this sense of being in danger.”
Steven Chandler, another former Pacifica student, said he was bullied for being gay, and that when there were incidents involving white supremacists, the school would prioritize the concerns of accused students’ parents: “They were worried more about their PR as opposed to actually addressing the issue.”
When he saw the news this week, he wasn’t surprised, but added, “I don’t think this is a prank. No one is dealing with the underbelly of what is going on.”
The Garden Grove district called the situation a “crisis” in a statement, saying it was creating a “taskforce to address school-based hate and bias” and would be working with community groups to implement “anti-bias campaigns”.
“It is unfair to paint a picture of an entire community based on the actions of a few individuals,” the statement continued, adding, “Our district is moving full speed ahead to stop hate speech in its tracks … We will continue to do all we can as educators to encourage a culture of understanding, care, and inclusivity.”
‘Law enforcement encourages Nazi behavior’
Segall-Gutierrez, the civil rights lawyer, said the problem was made worse by local law enforcement’s reluctance to take the threats posed by white supremacists seriously.
He pointed out that after violence broke out at a 2017 pro-Trump rally, the Orange county district attorney prosecuted a young anti-fascist activist and treated Tyler Laube, a member of the white supremacist Ram group, as a victim – even though Laube was prosecuted by the federal government and pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the case.
Segall-Gutierrez represented Jessica Aguilar, a 23-year-old student who protested the neo-Nazis and was accused of slapping Laube.
“It’s a blue county now, but it has a red heart … and that red heart is this little pocket of Nazis and a local law enforcement and a DA’s office that doesn’t seem to be too preoccupied with them,” he said.
Aguilar told the Guardian that the case had taken a toll on her, and that she believed police should be targeting the white supremacist groups as criminal gangs: “They are prosecuting people who are counter protesting but not these individuals who are out there being violent … Law enforcement is definitely encouraging this Nazi behavior.”
The Orange county district attorney, Todd Spitzer, defended his handling of the case in a statement to the Guardian, saying, “People who commit crimes will be prosecuted, regardless of who the victim is, or what beliefs the victim holds, or whether they too have committed crimes … As offensive as someone’s beliefs maybe, they have the right to express those beliefs without being assaulted.”
A lawyer for Laube did not respond to an inquiry.
Rabbi Peter Levi, the ADL regional director in Orange county said it was vital for schools to proactively intervene and disrupt hateful behavior, especially considering the evidence that white supremacists were now engaged in extensive recruitment efforts on campuses and online.
“We only know about this one because it was caught on video and shared,” he added. “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”