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OAKDALE — As the Central Valley’s flatlands give way to the rolling hills of California horse country, this quiet city that calls itself “the Cowboy Capital of the World” and features weekly rodeos seems but a blip on Highway 120, halfway between San Francisco and Yosemite National Park.

But Oakdale, a city of about 22,000 people in Stanislaus County, is facing a new and frightening renown: A few miles from downtown, Nathan Damigo, one of the most prominent new white nationalist leaders in America, runs a group that helped organize last weekend’s bloody rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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How Facebook is tackling hate speech after the Charlottesville rally From a five-acre compound on a winding road along the Stanislaus River, Damigo, a 31-year-old former Marine and ex-con, has launched Identity Evropa, which experts say is a growing hate group recruiting young people and college students. He also attends California State University, Stanislaus, in nearby Turlock, where students say he’s agitated on racial issues.

Ultra-blue California may seem to be the last place you’d find right-wing extremist group’s like Damigo’s. But experts say the Golden State is becoming a center of white nationalist activism, with more active hate groups than any other state.

“This is not getting better. It is getting worse,” said Brian Levin, a San Bernardino State University professor who studies extremist groups. “So many people are amped up. They are now emboldened.”

Oakdale residents interviewed this past week said they knew little about Damigo, who attended Liberty Baptist High School in San Jose, but they didn’t express surprise that the white nationalist movement had a presence in Oakdale, where Donald Trump won all five of the city’s precincts in November.

“There’s always been a lot of racial tension here,” mostly between Latinos and whites, said Clay Blakeman, 29, who grew up in the neighboring town of Ceres and belonged to a skinhead gang as a youth. Far-right views are common in the Oakdale area, he said.

“You used to see a ton of Confederate flags around here,” Blakeman said at a farmer’s market Wednesday night during a visit from San Diego, where he now lives. “This is a center for white boys.”

At Stanislaus State, biology major Ebone Qualls, 20, had a stern message for her fellow student: Stay away.

“He shouldn’t be allowed to go to school, especially at a diverse campus like this,” she said. “They are trying to start a race war. It makes me feel very unsafe.”

Not since Alabama Gov. George Wallace ran for president in 1968 have white supremacist groups surged as they have under President Donald Trump, Levin said.

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Overall, hate crimes in California were up 14.2 percent in California’s nine largest cities in 2016, according to a report prepared by Levin, who has also seen a troubling trend in data from the first two months of this year, the latest data available. In San Jose, there were five hate crimes in January and February compared with 19 for all of 2016.

“Trump started it,” Levin said. “There were none of these white nationalist mega-rallies” before he announced his campaign for president in 2015. “Charlottesville was the biggest we’ve seen in decades.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Now, planned rallies in Berkeley and San Francisco next weekend threaten to attract hundreds of right-wing agitators to the region. They have local officials worried about another eruption of violence, following the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. Heyer died when a white nationalist allegedly drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.

Predicting that violence will occur at the upcoming rally in Berkeley, where a similar gathering turned bloody in April, “is like predicting people are going to smoke weed at a Grateful Dead show,” Levin said.

White supremacist groups target liberal cities like Berkeley and San Francisco for protests and rallies because they want to attract opposition and spark more upheaval, said Joanna Mendelson, an Anti-Defamation League researcher in Los Angeles who studies right-wing groups. “These locations are lightning rods for their extremist views,” she said.

For decades, most white nationalists in California had fit into a “thuggish” model, sporting tattoos and focusing on petty street crime, Mendelson said. But today’s typical white supremacist “is essentially a repackaged, three-piece-suit-wearing racist who espouses the same hateful beliefs but with a seemingly more palatable veneer,” she said.

Damigo is one of the new generation of “alt-right” leaders who fit that model. But the slick image doesn’t mask his penchant for violence. At an April rally in Berkeley that quickly turned bloody, Damigo punched a woman in the face.

He joined the Marines at 18 and served in Iraq. He saw friends die, he told KQED radio earlier this year. After getting home, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which he blamed for his decision to rob a taxi driver at gunpoint, claiming he mistook the man for an Iraqi. Damigo spent a year in jail and four years in prison, where he started reading books by former KKK leader David Duke.

Frances Lodge, Damigo’s 75-year-old grandmother, said in a phone interview from her home in Maine that Damigo “came home from his second tour of duty in Iraq very much changed” and transformed even more after his time in prison.

“It’s very difficult,” she said. “The white supremacy movement is not something we could ever approve of — but he’s still the same good kid that I remember.”

Identity Evropa has distinguished itself from other white nationalist groups by focusing on college campus recruitment and trying to put an educated spin on the ideology. Damigo bans his members from getting tattoos on their face or neck, reported KQED, which has conducted extensive interviews with him. “They look at (college students) as their lifeblood,” Mendelson said.

On Thursday morning, Damigo paced back and forth in the driveway of his family’s compound in Oakdale, located just outside the city limits.

“I don’t have any comment,” he snapped across a locked gate as several large dogs barked nearby.

Dressed in blue shorts and a white shirt with visible tattoos on his legs, he walked back up the driveway toward a large red A-frame house, ignoring a reporter’s question about whether he felt responsible for Heyer’s death in Charlottesville.

From his Virginia hotel room after the violence, Damigo made a broadcast on the live video app Periscope. “This was a huge victory for us,” he said. “This is uniting us in a way I don’t think we ever could have been united before. We are not going to stop protesting the replacement of our people, our heritage and our culture.”

Bay Area law enforcement authorities plan to turn out in force to prevent violence at next weekend’s rallies. The first is set to be held at Crissy Field in San Francisco on Saturday and a second in Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park on Sunday. Police and local elected officials are struggling to respond and balance free speech rights while avoiding eruptions.

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín said this past week that the city hasn’t received any request for a permit from organizers of the “No to Marxism in America” rally. “This rally, and its hateful rhetoric, is not welcome in our city,” Arreguín said in a statement.

In San Francisco, the Aug. 26 rally — organized by a group called Patriot Prayer — is planned within Golden Gate National Recreation Area and has already received a permit from the National Park Service. But after a coalition of elected officials — including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee — urged the parks agency to reconsider, the superintendent of the park said she would review the permit and announce a decision sometime this week.

“I am deeply alarmed by the hateful and dangerous nature of the event, its timing so soon after the horrors in Charlottesville, and the serious questions over whether the National Park Service is at all equipped to ensure public safety during a white supremacist rally,” Pelosi said in a statement.

But Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer and the organizer of the San Francisco rally, said in an interview that his group isn’t white nationalist — and he isn’t even white.

“We want to spread a good message of love and peace,” said Gibson, who is part Japanese. “We’re not going to let white supremacists or Nazis or the Klan in.”

Gibson, a 33-year-old real estate investor and Trump supporter in Vancouver, Washington, said he wasn’t political at all until he watched the violent aftermath of Trump’s June 2016 rally in San Jose, after which Trump opponents attacked rallygoers.

“That day changed my life. That’s when I realized that our freedom is under attack,” Gibson said. “We have a poison culture. In these intolerant liberal cities, people are afraid to say what they believe in.”

Since then, he’s been organizing rallies up and down the West Coast. He admits that his rallies have attracted white nationalists, but said he denounces their ideology.

Whatever National Park Service officials decide on a permit, Gibson said, his rally is happening. “We’ll be coming down to San Francisco no matter what,” he said.

He said he is worried that violence will erupt at the rally, which he expects to attract about 500 supporters and “a few thousand” people protesting the rally. He said Pelosi’s statement painting his group as white nationalist increased the chance of violence by inciting counter-protesters.

People working to oppose white nationalist groups are divided on their best course of action. Some believe that a strong, vocal response to the protests is best — while others say counter-protesters should stay home, in part to avoid violence and not give white supremacists the attention and fireworks they’re looking for.

Arreguín encouraged Berkeley residents to avoid the park on the day of the rally and not to counter-protest. “The best way to silence the white nationalists is by turning your back on their message,” he said.

But others say a peaceful response is important and that white supremacist messages shouldn’t go unanswered.

“We will have people out there to show our opposition to that kind of thinking,” said Mansour Id-Deen, president of the Berkeley’s NAACP chapter. “We’re not going to tolerate that kind of divisiveness these people bring into our community.”

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