Let me say this right up front, right out loud.
I only have questions on how best to deal with the Neo-Nazis down the road. No answers.
Maybe by the end of this column you will have some thoughts. I would like to hear them.
First, though, imagine a handful of Black men piling into a truck, parking in downtown West Palm Beach near the police station. They scream racial epithets at officers, sometimes physically getting in their faces. They spend days trolling downtown white neighborhoods, tossing pamphlets in yards that call for extermination of the Caucasian race.
Would they have been cited only for littering?
Would the city consider silence about the violent threat so as not to give more publicity to the gang?
Would it escape Tucker Carlson’s radar?
No, no and most definitely no.
But they weren’t Black. They were Neo-Nazis.
I’ll gloss over Carlson’s likely choice of rant material, given that the Dominion Voting Systems libel suit has already confirmed — and I can’t say this often enough — that he has lied for a living.
News organizations struggle over how much attention to give hate groups. Coverage is to white supremacists what a jolt of pure oxygen is to hyperbaric enthusiasts. Rejuvenation. Just what the body politic needs to keep going.
At least one prominent Palm Beach County official has expressed a similar concern. To pay attention to them is to encourage them.
I agree, in part. That’s why I won’t identify the Palm Beach County white supremacist who led the cop-screaming. I won’t direct you to his preening picture or his social media.
But I can’t say that’s the right choice. If ignoring hate-filled splinter groups once effectively muffled the message, but Twitter, Facebook and YouTube ensure it doesn’t anymore. Social media never seemed to care very much about fomenting violence. Its algorithms reward rage.
And the baited introduction to Nazism is becoming more subtle and much more insidious: In Jacksonville, Neo-Nazis shined a message on a downtown building attacking drag shows, not Jews. In Flagler County, a young mother told the school board that Hitler got a bad rap for book-burning.
The only books Hitler wanted gone were child porn, she said, just like the schoolbooks in local classrooms.
So that’s my first question: Are we talking too much, or too little?
Then there’s the First Amendment’s two-edged sword.
I have narrowed down the things that make me grind my teeth because honestly, no one has enough healthy molars to take on the entirety of 2023 America. Or even 60 days of the Florida Legislature.
People working to drive a stake through the heart of the First Amendment while wrapping themselves in its protections make the short list.
Neo-Nazis who strolled West Palm neighborhoods throwing stomach-turning leaflets in yards were cited for littering. They may not even be guilty of that.
Free speech protects them.
They know it. They are counting on it.
A bill winding its way through the Legislature stiffens penalties for threat-filled leafleting. It also bans projecting images on structures, similar to a Palm Beach County Commission ordinance recently adopted after a Nazi swastika showed up on a West Palm building.
You can’t put the screws to free speech, though, without putting the screws to free speech.
The staff analysis of the Florida bill (HB 269) devotes not one word to the question of whether it is constitutional. But in 2014, New York City police arrested members of The Illuminator Collective for projecting images. Charges had to be dropped. The group promptly sued the police department and won.
What speech are we willing to sacrifice in exchange?
Following the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., the name of Heather Heyer, the murdered 31-year-old, was projected onto the side of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. After Donald Trump commented on the “very fine people” in attendance, the words “We are all responsible to stand up and end white supremacy” showed up on the former president’s Washington hotel.
Are we trying too hard to crack down on the new iterations of hate? Or not hard enough?
Too many of our reactions feel just like that: reactions. Jacksonville is taking a more muscular approach. Seeded with $1 million, a Jax nonprofit is funding community-wide education — and crucial conversation — to address emboldened hate taking root there.
Would it work here? Will it even work there?
As promised: No answers. Just increasingly urgent questions.
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel editorial writer and columnist. Contact her at .
