Andreatta: When you carry a torch with Nazis you're playing with fire

The amateur sleuthing campaign to identify torch-bearing Charlottesville marchers has literally landed on the doorsteps of village of Honeoye Falls residents.

Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, this week found flyers on their property singling out a 21-year-old man named Jarrod Kuhn, who lives behind a shoe store on Main Street.

The literature depicted him hoisting a tiki torch amid throngs of marchers on the University of Virginia campus Friday night and cast him as a “leading figure” in the neo-Nazi movement.

More: Honeoye Falls man who marched in Charlottesville: 'I'm not a hateful person'

“Residents are advised to interact with him with caution,” read the flyer, which carried the headline, "No Nazis In Our Neighborhood."

Kuhn acknowledged to a Democrat and Chronicle reporter that he was the bespectacled man in the image wearing a collared shirt and sweater. He recalled thinking the photograph would go viral the moment it was taken.

“I always knew this was a risk for going to events like this,” Kuhn said. “But I didn’t think that it would ever happen, you know, like this, that my life would be put in danger, I’d be getting death threats, people showing up here, people coming in the community and putting up flyers, people saying I’m a danger to the community.

“That’s interesting,” he continued. “What if they were to say that about an African-American man they didn’t even know?”

Kuhn described himself as an everyday man who identifies with right-wing politics, but denied being a “National Socialist,” more commonly known as a Nazi, or attending the rally with any fascist group.

Yet it was white nationalists sympathetic to Nazism who organized the “Unite the Right” weekend in Charlottesville to oppose a plan to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a city park.

The hundreds of torchbearers who marched on the main quadrangle of the University of Virginia on Friday were reported to be chanting, “You will not replace us” and “Jew will not replace us.”

More: Man, fired from job, makes no apology for carrying torch in Charlottesville

More: Nevada student defends presence at Charlottesville rally

More: Charlottesville fallout disrupts, delays plans for more far-right, alt-right rallies

Kuhn, who did not appear to be chanting in the photograph, said he opposed dismantling the statue because it was a piece of history, but that he doesn’t hate anyone.

“That’s goofy. That’s ridiculous,” he said of the ideology that defines the racists who organized the weekend. “You can’t hate someone just because of their background or if they’re, you know, of non-European descent. I’m not like that.

“I think that we have a special history in this country and it should be preserved,” he continued. “But I’m not going out to actively harm other people. That was never the intention. I did not go there to engage in violence. I mean, if you saw the photo, I'm wearing a sweater and collared shirt. I just went down there to make a statement.”

The collared shirt was the uniform of most male marchers. It was as if organizers sent out a postscript with their memo: "P.S. Don’t forget to look respectable."

There was a time in this country when white supremacists marched behind masks and under hoods, a uniform that was more feared than respected.

Their desire for anonymity implied a sense of guilt or cowardice, or both, but also conveyed the terrifying notion that they could be anywhere. We’re your butchers, your bakers, your candlestick makers. You just don’t know it.

Kuhn said he went to Charlottesville to make a statement about a monument to a Confederate general.

But those throngs of unmasked white supremacists made the statement that they’re out of the shadows, that they’re mainstream and Main Street. We’re your butchers, your bakers, your candlestick makers. Now you know it.

Anyone who carries a torch with them is playing with fire.

David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.

This column includes reporting by staff writer Lauren Peace.