There is little dispute that hate has largely moved from community clubhouses into virtual spaces, making it easy for like-minded people to fellowship from afar, no membership required.

But organized hate groups have not entirely lost their appeal.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that tracks hate and extremist groups across the U.S., found 1,020 such organizations in 2018, up 7 percent from the previous year.

Its latest “hate map” places seven such groups as being active in San Diego County last year, with many tied to larger national movements.


The groups don’t have to be violent or have committed hate crimes to be included in the annual list. Rather, the center explains its criteria as follows: “All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”

Still, its criteria has been controversial at times, with many of the groups, including some in San Diego, protesting being characterized as hate groups.

Sheriff’s Cmdr. Theresa Adams-Hydar said there is no recent pattern of hate crimes being committed by or on behalf of an organized group in the region.

The Anti-Defamation League, which also monitors hate groups, separately logged 53 specific hate-related incidents in the county last year, with a focus on anti-Semitic and white nationalist ideologies. Some of the incidents are attributed to groups on the SPLC’s list.


The ADL defines a hate group as “an organization whose goals and activities are primarily or substantially based on a shared antipathy towards people of one or more other different races, religions, ethnicities/nationalities/national origins, genders, and/or sexual identities. The mere presence of bigoted members in a group or organization is typically not enough to qualify it as a hate group; the group itself must have some hate-based orientation/purpose.”

Matt Wagner, ADL’s associate director of law enforcement initiatives and community security in San Diego, warned that attention shouldn’t be focused solely on organized groups.

“The vast majority of white supremacists and white nationalists are unaffiliated with any group at all. Just like with other forms of extremism, this is a violent ideology that spreads predominantly online.”


He pointed to the suspect in the deadly Chabad of Poway shooting rampage, 19-year-old John T. Earnest, whose alleged manifesto indicates self-radicalization in web forums.

“Many of these terrorists … radicalize without formal membership in any one named group,” Wagner said.



White nationalist

Identity Evropa, labeled as “white nationalist” by the SPLC, appears on the latest hate map in San Diego. But the group, which helped organize the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., has since disbanded.

San Diego State University alum Patrick Casey, who had taken over as leader following Charlottesville, in turn started a new group in March called the American Identity Movement, or AIM.

Last year, Identity Evropa distributed thinly veiled white nationalist propaganda leaflets on many of San Diego’s college campuses and hung banners from freeway overpasses. AIM has said it will adopt similar tactics.


The ADL’s Wagner said the group is a prime example of the recent effort to push classic white nationalism ideology into the mainstream, often by using patriotic symbolism.

The group’s message centers around stoking fears that the country’s European heritage is at risk.

An email request sent through AIM’s website was not answered.

Other groups with similar ideologies and tactics have made appearances at the county’s colleges in the past year but don’t necessarily have local chapters.


For instance, on Jan. 28, 2018, Patriot Front distributed flyers at San Diego State University and San Diego Mesa College.

Patriot Front is a white nationalist group that formed after splintering from Vanguard America following Charlottesville.

Another flyering event at SDSU in October was attributed to a Daily Stormer Book Club. The group is considered the on-the-ground arm of the Daily Stormer, an anti-Semitic, white nationalist news website aimed at a younger generation.

The Road to Power, an Idaho-based white supremacy group, was behind a spate of anti-Semitic robocalls throughout San Diego last May, sent on behalf of neo-Nazi congressional candidate Patrick Little.


Neo-Nazis, alt-Right, and white supremacists march the night before the “Unite the Right” rally, on Friday, Aug. 11, 2017 through the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. (Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/TNS)

Racist skinheads

The Western Hammerskins are the West Coast arm of Hammerskin Nation, considered to be the largest, most organized skinhead group in the country.

The neo-Nazi group has long had a presence in Southern California, although its membership has dwindled since its heydey a decade or two ago.

The group is closely affiliated with white power bands and in October held its annual music festival, Hammerfest, in San Bernardino. An affiliate group of Hammerskin supporters is called Crew 38.


Hammerskin Nation members have previously been linked to violence, including a deadly attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012.

An email sent to the group through its website was returned as undeliverable.

Other, smaller skinhead or white supremacist groups are based in the East County, according to Wagner, but not named by SPLC.



Not here, but close

Tom Metzger, San Diego’s best known white separatist leader, is back in Southern California promoting his racist organization. In the 1980s the former television repairman and leader of the Ku Klux Klan ran his White Aryan Resistance group from his home in Fallbrook. But he later moved to Indiana.

In this 2000 file photo is Tom Metzger, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of the White Aryan Resistance, speaking in in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho. Metzger has recently settled back in Southern California after many years away in Indiana. (The Associated Press)


Now, he’s got a San Jacinto post office box, and his group has reappeared on SPLC’s hate map in Riverside County.

“Racism is flourishing throughout the world and so am I,” Metzger tweeted recently, “81 and going strong.”

Metzger said in an email to the Union-Tribune that he moved to be near family, and he was also “bored” in the Midwest. He records a radio show daily for his website — available for $20 a month — records his racist ideas separately on a phone hotline and tweets. But the number of paid subscribers is low, he said, “since I don’t promote the right left line.”

He says he doesn’t fit into the current white supremacist movement, saying it is controlled by right-wing conservative elements. “As it is constituted at present it would be better if it totally collapsed to be replaced by something much more radical,” he wrote.


Another organization on SPLC’s hate map is The Realist Report, an anti-Semitic news website based in Poway.

However, it is unclear if the site is still based there. On the website, founder John Friend describes Southern California as his home and lists a post office box in Long Beach. Earlier this month he reported speaking to a 9/11 conspiracy theory group in San Diego.

Friend agreed to clarify his location for the article but only under his terms — in a recorded interview on Skype that he could publish on his website. The Union-Tribune did not agree to those terms.



Black nationalist

Sicarii1715, a San Diego-based group, preaches that blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans are the true descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel. It is designated as a “black nationalist” group on the SPLC’s hate map.

“An offshoot of the larger movement known as the Black Hebrew Israelites, the Sicarii sect echoes the majority of the movement’s core principles, including the beliefs that white people are agents of Satan, Jews are liars and false worshipers of God, and blacks are the true ‘chosen people,’” according to the ADL’s description of the group.


They also espouse anti-America, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ sentiment, as well as deny the Holocaust happened, according to the ADL.

About a dozen regulars spread the message by preaching on street corners, often in downtown San Diego. There are also chapters in other cities, including Seattle and Chicago.

The group is led by Adonis Glaude, known as Ahlazar BanLawya or Guerilla Hebrew.

A person who identified himself as a “deacon” in the group spoke briefly with the Union-Tribune but did not respond to follow-up attempts seeking comment.


BanLawya told the Union-Tribune in 2017 that being on the list is an “accomplishment” that shows the group’s influence, but he said the mission is ultimately about love and empowering African-Americans, Hispanics and Latinos. He also said the center doesn’t accurately describe what the group is about.

“It almost looks like they are trying to purposely juke the stats. It seems unfair,” BanLawya said.

Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan speaks during a news conference on March 31, 2011, in Chicago. (The Associated Press)

The Nation of Islam, led by Louis Farrakhan and a staple on the SPLC’s list, also has a chapter in San Diego — Muhammad Mosque No. 8 on Imperial Avenue in Encanto. Farrakhan preaches that blacks are genetically superior to whites and pushes anti-Semitic ideology. Farrakhan was recently banned from Facebook along with several controversial alt-right figures.


In 2017 after appearing on the SPLC’s list, local mosque members appeared at a press conference downtown and disputed the “hate” label. Organizers said their group was non-violent and involved in community service.

The local mosque did not return a phone call seeking comment, and an email was returned as undeliverable.



Anti-immigrant

San Diego, with its proximity to the border, has long been home to groups hostile to unauthorized immigrants.

Two local groups are on the SPLC’s current list with “anti-immigrant” ideology.

The Mountain Minutemen, founded by Robert “Lil Dog” Crooks in 2005, patrol the border as civilian volunteers.


“Our mission is to wake up the sheeple in realizing that amnesty, open borders, and illegal alien invasion is a threat to the sovereignty of this great nation,” the Mountain Minutemen website reads.

The group currently operates in the Tecate and Campo area, as well as in Arizona, according to Crooks, a retired commercial fisherman. He would not disclose the size of the group’s ranks.

“We are reinforcing Border Patrol with our eyes and ears,” he said in an interview with the Union-Tribune.

In 2007, Crooks allegedly emailed around a fake video to other Minutemen members that depicted shots being fired at a border crosser — referred to as a “cockroach” — through a night-vision scope. The accompanying message: “This video shows how to keep a ‘Home Depot’ parking lot empty,” according to the SPLC’s Intelligence Report.


Crooks said the organization’s mission has evolved over the years and is now mostly concerned with combating narcotics trafficking.

Crooks, who once lived on a mountain near Tecate for the cause, now runs operations from his home in Las Vegas, although he frequently travels to the border.

He blew off the SPLC’s characterization of Mountain Minutemen as a hate group.

“The people at Southern Poverty Law Center are part of a left-wing, progressive, Communist organization. They’re not America. They don’t believe in America,” Crooks said.


Another group, San Diegans for Secure Borders, has focused more on lobbying for immigration policy changes and hosting rallies. The group was founded by Jeff Schwilk, who previously led a San Diego Minuteman group.

The group was especially active during the presidential election, and last spring it promised to mobilize to stop members of a migrant caravan from entering the U.S.

“If our federal government won’t or can’t stop this border anarchy, the American people will,” Schwilk told the Union-Tribune in April 2018.

The group has largely gone silent in recent months. Schwilk did not return a phone call seeking comment.

