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This post originally appeared on Media Matters.

Sweden is known as a bastion of progressive values and policies, but underneath the dominant ideology, there is a motivated, well-connected nativist movement that has existed for decades and is now re-emerging, armed with fake news.

With a population of just under 10 million, Sweden is a small, historically ethnically homogenous country thatin recent years has accepted the largest number of asylum seekers per capita of any European nation. Swedens white nationalists, once relegated to the fringe, have been re-energized by a global so-called populist movement and a relatively progressiveimmigration policy that is anathema to their agenda. And there are signs that they may be succeeding in their efforts. Xenophobic hate crimes are up, stricter immigration policies have been imposed, and Sweden Democrats, the far-right political party, with ties to neo-Nazismis, for the first time ever, polling as the second most popular party in the country. To top it off, there is evidence that the media discourse on immigration has taken a dark turn to portray migrants as a problem, and fake news is on the rise.

Enter the Swedish alt-right, a movement that sees progressivism as having been imported into Swedish society as an experiment in cultural Marxism and views Swedens relatively small size and homogeneity as having contributed to a sort of unitarian zeitgeistof liberal thought.* The members of this movement see it as a fight to diversify the Swedish media landscape while promoting a decidedly racist agenda. Together, these attributes have created an environment ripe for the spread of alt-right ideas, and the most well-known white nationalist of the American alt-right has taken notice.

Richard Spencer, president of the white nationalist think tank the National Policy Institute (NPI), after having been recently alienated from a movement he named, is looking for legitimacy in a country he has dubbed the most alt-right. According to BuzzFeed, Spencer recently began a partnership with two Swedish alt-right outlets, Arktos Media, a publishing house that prints white nationalist literature in English, and Red Ice, a Swedish white nationalist video and podcast platform that often features international guests. The partnership, the AltRight Corporation, which has been called an attempt at a more ideological Breitbart, also has its own website and, until May 23, also had its own podcast, AltRight Radio. Soundcloud has since banned the podcast for violating its hate speech policy. But this movement is not confined to the internet. For the past nineyears, Sweden has hosted an alt-right conference which is attended by members and sympathizers from all over the world. One prominent American alt-right figure (whose name was not divulged) told AltRight.coms Daniel Friberg that Swedens annual alt-right conference was the most well-attended hed been to and, notably, the most radical, too.*

Migrant crime is a favorite topic of the alt-right in Sweden, in part because the outlets that promote this content know theyre speaking to an audience favorable to their ideological agenda, not facts. (Media Matters previously documented Breitbarts use of a racist meme to categorize stories about migrant crime in Sweden, most of which also had little basis in reality).Journalists know this is happening but remain ill-equipped to respond to it. A recent study found that eight out of 10 Swedes believe fake news is altering their perception of basic facts.Sweden has acknowledged the rise of inaccurate information and, in March, the countrys prime minister announced a plan to combat fake news ahead of Swedens 2018 general election. Yet, Sweden remains vulnerable to fake news and, as the education minister admits, there is some naivety when it comes to the information society. Often the flow of misinformation looks something like this: A Swedish or British tabloid reports on a study or crime with a sensational headline and few details or context; alt-right or far-right outlets cite the original source but add new details to further sensationalize the story; these outlets promote each other to amplify the story; and eventually the story makes its way to a more mainstream news outlet. Sometimes, the news that a story is false makes its way back to Swedish media, but by then, the damage is already done.

Last year, American film producer Ami Horowitz made a deceptively edited film rife with false claims about migrant crime in Sweden. In February of this year, after having been promoted by U.K. tabloid the Daily Mail and conspiracy theorist website Infowars, he was invited for an interview with Foxs Tucker Carlson, not oncebut twice, and one of the segments was later cited by President Trump as the impetus for his fact-free suggestion that something was happening last night in Sweden, which he couchedamid discussion of terror-hit cities. The interview received so much attention that the Swedish police and embassy pushed back, one Swedish newspaper responded by fact-checking each of Horowitzs assertions, and another criticizedTrumps complicity in the Sweden-bashing by the hard-core American right. But how equipped is Sweden to deal with xenophobic fake news that doesnt reach the pedestal of the president of the United States, and, thus, does not grab international attention?

In another, more recent example, Swedish tabloid Dagens Nyheter published a study titled, Young Men Who Commit Shootings Often Have A Foreign Background,which found that 90 out of 100 shooting suspects had at least one foreign-born parent. Of course, these findings are concerning, but a closer look illustrates problems that are not unique to Sweden: Unemployment, lack of educational opportunities, and mental illness were all identified by experts as important contributing factors to gun violence. It is also worth noting that almost half of the individuals counted in this study were merely suspected, not convicted, of perpetrating these crimes. Of course, this context was missing from the misleadingly titled article that notorious Islamophobe Virginia Hale later wrote for Breitbart. Alex Jones Infowars also engaged with the story, citing the Swedish fake newspurveyor and alt-right outlet Fria Tider (which has been called the Breitbart of Sweden*)in its report, with an even more misleading headline: SWEDEN: MIGRANTS RESPONSIBLE FOR 90% OF SHOOTINGS. Both articles used the opportunity to push debunked claims about crime in Sweden.

Though theyre false, these claims are repeated so often that they begin to exist as facts. For example, the fact-checking website Snopes has debunked many stories on Sweden and even issued a three-part seriesdebunking the most common misleading narratives on Swedish migrant crime. But the narratives persist. There are a few reasons for this. Its now widely known that sensational headlines get more clicks, and the effect is especially heightened when they play on a persons deep-seated emotions like anger and anxiety. Sweden has not become the rape capital of Europe, but real or imagined, Swedens historically liberal refugee admissions policy has created enough tension to make people vulnerable to fake news about the population. Another universal reason for the rise of fake news, as it relates to Sweden, is disaffection from mainstream outlets and increasing preference for alternative sources. A 2016 study in Sweden found half of media consumers get their news from sources other than Swedens traditional news sources and around 20 percent have no confidence in them.

There are uniquely Swedish reasons for why the country is susceptible to fake news. These include the well-intentioned ways crime is defined and reported and the language barriers to understanding Swedish news. For instance, according to a late 2015 internal memo, Swedish police were instructed not to report externally the ethnic or national origin of suspected criminals in order not to appear racist. The decision, while admirable and also not unique to Sweden, has raised suspicion. Many far-right outlets perceived the move as an attempted cover-up, and the controversy became so big that the Swedish government responded to the contention. Another Swedish practice that has unintentionally created the illusion of increased crime is the way Sweden defines and categorizes crime and the culture around crime reporting. For example, Sweden defines sexual assault much more broadly than the U.S. and other European countries do, and records every single offense as a separate crime, even if they are committed by the same perpetrator. The country has also created a culture in which victims are encouraged to report crimes rather than stigmatized. Swedens open and progressive crime reporting practices, when viewed comparatively, allow fake news purveyors to speculate on a suspected criminals ethnic background with impunity, as well as manufacture an inflated perception of criminality.

From the readers perspective, the fact that most alt-right outlets and fake news purveyors link to Swedish language news stories in order to validate their claims forces even the most critical reader to either know Swedish or rely on rough translations to discern the validity of the source. Knowing this, outlets can wrongly attribute or incorrectly paraphrase quotations from Swedish sources that advance their narrative without fear of retribution.

The intersection of fake news and the alt-right is a particularly troubling one. It is ever-shifting, beholden neither to facts nor ideology and, in the realm of the internet, almost totally unaccountable. What we do know is that its adherents are white men who are targeting everyone else, that its not going away, and that we must remain vigilant. Sweden is the favorite target of the American alt-right as it expands to Europe, desperately looking for legitimacy, and armed with total lies.

*These quotations were taken from the now-deleted AltRight Radio podcast, Eurocentric #2: Killing Captain Sweden.

More:
Sweden is the gateway to the alt-right anti-immigrant agenda in Europe - Salon

A train pulled out of the quiet and quirky Portland, Oregon neighborhood of Hollywood on Friday evening, and thats when the yelling began. Targeting two young women, one wearing a hijab, 35-year-old Jeremy Christian went on an Islamophobic tirade, accusing them of terrorism, tax evasion and general un-Americanness. When three men stepped up to intervene in the assault, Christian was ready with a knife, stabbing each one, successively, in the jugular and killing two of them.

This brutal attack was not just the result of mental illness, as is often blamed in cases such as these, but rather the latest stop-over in white supremacist escalations. Christian, who was new to such politics, had been frothing with rage for several weeks ever since an April 30 free speech rally that a local ultra-conservative group had organized and modeled after other alt-right events happening around the country. Wearing an American flag cape and wielding a wooden baseball bat, Christian was stopped by police before he could take a swing at the counter protesters.

Tragedies like these inspire a sense of horror in the collective community, but it is not necessarily a surprise. The pattern of white supremacist violence has been consistent over the decades as fascist movements rise and fall, and disaffected members of their ranks follow suit with lone wolf violence. How the community responds to these moments of sorrow, and the ways in which those responsible are held accountable, is what determines the fate of movements like the alt-right.

A violent vision

The history of the white nationalist movement of which the alt-right is the latest incarnation is one of violence from start to finish. As FBI reports confirm, radical right-wing combatants are still the primary terror threat in the United States, far outweighing the Islamic terror boogeyman that the Trump administration hopes to portray. In a 2015 survey of 382 law enforcement agencies by the Police Executive Research Forum, a full 74 percent of attacks came from far-right anti-government radicals. In a U.S. Military AcademysCombating Terrorism Center study, far-right terrorists were responsible for an average of 337 attacks a year since 9/11. The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks hate groups, listed white supremacists as conducting more attacks in 2015 than any other ideology, and when combined with anti-abortion and anti-government groups, which often crossover, the number rose to a full 63 percent of all domestic terrorism.

The threat of white supremacist terrorism is a constant in U.S. history. During the civil rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan built a paramilitary assault on the American South, murdering hundreds in bombings, gun attacks and lynching. In the 1980s, the Order erupted as a revolutionary project out of the Aryan Nations, robbing banks and murdering Jewish radio host Alan Berg. The militia movement, which was becoming an increasingly violent force in the 1990s after the passage of the Brady assault weapons ban and blunders by federal agents at Ruby Ridge and Waco, hit its zenith when Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh detonated a fertilizer bomb in the Oklahoma City Federal Building.

Built on failure

The pattern of white supremacist violence often fails to be associated with the movement itself because of the common lone wolf quality of individual attacks. Following the leaderless resistance model developed by white nationalist Louis Beam and championed by skinhead leaders like Tom Metzger, those on the fringes of the movement and society are often instigated to engage in acts of extreme violence against the state, minorities and their collaborators. The model for this violence is one of desperation, attempting to mobilize those without strong social bonds. The failure of their ability to organize, to see growth from a seed idea into a mass populist movement, kicks it over the edge into a nihilist assault lacking in long-term vision. As the culture further turned left, and major white supremacist enclaves like the Aryan Nations compound and the National Alliance were disrupted, desperate acts of violence took place from the 2009 murder of a security guard at the Smithsonian Holocaust Museum to the 2012 shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

A part of this pattern comes from the relationship that white nationalists have with those on the margins of the mainstream, like politicians, media outlets and other provocateurs. Because of the extreme nature of their ideas, white nationalists latch onto those who despite not sharing their key ideological platform have enough in common with them to help mainstream their message. People like Barry Goldwater and George Wallace held this role to the anti-integrationists active during the civil rights movement. In the early 1990s, the campaign of Pat Buchanan and the broad paleoconservative movement did this as well, using dog whistle language railing against immigration, globalization and affirmative action. Today, this comes in the form of what many call the alt-light, the layer of anti-PC talking heads that populates the so-called deplorable-sphere around the Donald Trump campaign. Milo Yiannoupoulos, Lauren Southern and Gavin McGinnis all promote their talking points and political ideas, even if they would squirm when the full-bore racism and anti-Semitism is unleashed.

Historically, white nationalists ride their mainstream relationships as far as those with celebrity are willing to take them, and when the association becomes too toxic, those with careers to think about jump ship. As the true alt-right becomes more well known, and their history of violence becomes more commonly understood, this will further push those who have lent their celebrity to betray their allegiances. It is this final push that relegates the fascist core back to their subcultural roots, validating in their minds a revolutionary perspective that had been compromised by the pursuit of beltway respectability. It is at this moment that the acts of lone wolf violence escalate, when the hope of a peaceful solution to the race problem has been dashed. As we enter the period when the alt-right breaks from Trump and is abandoned by their temporary colleagues, the potential for violence only magnifies.

A part of history

What often blinds people to the alt-rights potential for violence is their branding, not their content. With fashionable swooped hair, pressed suits, and geeky Internet jargon, they seem more like an upper-middle-class wedding party than a nationalist cadre bent on a 21st century coup. This is only a mirage, as they are simply the latest generation in a lineage of white nationalist organizing, but with better youth appeal. At American Renaissance, one of the largest alt-right conferences, the whos who of the movement is in attendance: U.S. Members of the Aryan Nations hobnob with the alt-right group Proud Boys, former KKK leaders like David Duke and Don Black hold Q&As, and politicians from far-right European political movements like the British National Party receive standing ovations.

While their language may be, at times, couched in academic jargon, they have the same effect of motivating their fringe towards acts of kamikaze violence. After Dylan Roof murdered nine in a flurry of automatic gunfire, his manifesto revealed that his inspiration was the propaganda of the Council of Conservative Citizens a neo-Confederate group that lists miscegenation as against Gods chosen order, and holds American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor as one of its spokesmen and board members. Taylors work at American Renaissance further inspired Jared Loughner, the 22-year-old man who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several others in 2011.

As the alt-right coasts into its most contentious period since its 2015-2016 rise, the violence has risen among its disaffected periphery. James Harris Jackson went to New York City in March with the intent of finding and killing black men in relationships with white women. Instead, he settled on murdering a black homeless man with a sword. Weeks later, Sean Urbanski murdered Army Second Lieutenant Richard Collins in an act of racial revenge. Both men were following alt-right figures online, with Urbanski in the Alt-Reich Facebook group and Jackson following alt-right leaders like Richard Spencer. During the same period of escalation, Lauren Southern brought an entourage of alt-right celebrities and others ready to attack community members and protesters to her speaking event in downtown Berkeley, California.

Us together

While the historical behavior of white supremacists teaches us what to expect, there is also much to learn from the community responses that have neutralized their growth. For example, while the federal government went to war with the militia movement after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, it was growing public disgust that devastated the militia movements recruitment efforts and essentially forced them into retreat until Barrack Obama was elected president.

The final answer, though, is the creation of a mass response to this type of racist violence. With only hours notice the day after the Christian murders in Portland, a candlelight vigil drew thousands to the site of the attack. Meanwhile, the organizers of the April 30 free speech rally are organizing another event on June 4, and the response from the community promises to completely overwhelm them, showing that an iron wall has been built against alt-right recruitment. This is the way that a mass movement turns the tide of atrocity, letting the violence act as a reminder of what inaction can bring.

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Shane Burley is a writer and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. His work as appeared in places such as In These Times, Truth-Out, Labor Notes, ThinkProgress, Roar Mag, and Upping the Ante. He is the author of forthcoming book Fascism Today: What It Is and How We End It (AK Press, 2017). His most recent documentary "Expect Resistance" chronicles the intersection of the housing justice and Occupy Wallstreet movement. His work can be found at ShaneBurley.net, or reach him on Twitter at @shane_burley1.

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As the 'alt-right' moves to violence, community responses matter - Waging Nonviolence

Cassandra Fairbanks, an alt-right activist and social media personality, filed a lawsuit in federal court today accusing Fusion writer Emma Roller of defamation for a tweet Roller posted in which she described Fairbanks and fellow alt-righter Mike Cernovich as using a white power hand gesture in the White House.

Rollers tweetsince deletedwas posted on April 28. The next day, Fairbanks posted a response on Twitter, hinting at the now-ongoing legal action:

In the lawsuit, Fairbanks alleges that Roller committed defamation via libel, invasion of privacy and that the Fusion writers actions caused the pro-Trump journalist to experience emotional distress and harm. Shes seeking a retraction, an apology and at least $100,000 in damages.

As to whether the hand gesture in question is actually a symbol of the white power movement, Buzzfeed notes:

[I]ts long been a stated goal of online communities such as 4chans /pol/ board to fool the mainstream press into reporting that anodyne gestures and images are the new swastikas.

And, in this particular instance, that seems to be exactly what happened. Thus, the crucial element for a defamation case, actual malice (here, the idea that Roller was deliberately lying about Fairbanks), would be nearly impossible to prove. Of course, thats assuming Fairbanks is actually confident inor really trying to winher lawsuit in the first place.

Many of Fairbanks critics wasted no time before lambasting the recently-converted alt-right star and pegging her as something of a hypocrite. After all, Internet Pepes, droll anime Nazis and the assorted white nationalists who tend to make up the Pro-Trump alt-right are famous for misunderstanding the concept of free speech and waving their apparent allegiance to it as some sort of a banner.

In turn, alt-righters frequently rail against political correctness, the liberal media, and other denizens of intellectual spaces full of easily triggered snowflakes. So here comes Fairbanks, upset by a tweet to the point that shes going after a journalists livelihood.

Well, thing is, Fairbanks doesnt seem to care about this principleor even Rollers tweetat all. This one feels like its simply for the clicks.

For more, see the Buzzfeed News story here.

[image via screengrab]

Follow Colin Kalmbacher on Twitter: @colinkalmbacher

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

The rest is here:
Alt-Right Snowflake Triggered By Tweet Sues Fusion Writer For ... - Mediaite

Thursday, June 1, 2017 at 10:15 a.m.

We're just waiting for the anti-scumbag rally.

Screenshot, Texas Antifa Facebook

When a group called Texas Antifa planned a June 10 rally calling for the removal of the monument to "gross slave owner" Sam Houston in Hermann Park, KPRC and the Houston Chronicle were all over the story. Even Mayor Sylvester Turner commented on the controversy, saying removing the statue wasn't "even on my agenda."

On its event page, a group called This is Texas announced a counter-protest to the rally, saying:

"Antifa has come out saying they will be bringing several large (communist) groups together to host a rally around the Museum District in Houston, Texas on June 10, 2017. This list includes Black Lives Matter, Antifa & more. Their goal is to remove the Sam Houston statue. Many of these communist punks are embolden [SIC] after they lay claim to a win in New Orleans by bringing down the Confederate monuments. They have made threats toward Texas & Texans saying 'Texans better not show up or they will limp home bruised, broken, hurt, with their tail between their legs' & 'Smash the state'."

There's just one slight problem: "Texas Antifa" is an alt-right troll group that stole the name of a self-described anti-fascist group, Houston Antifa a local chapter of a national grassroots movement in order to... well, we're not sure, exactly, but we think it has something to do with pissing off as many people as possible.

Unfortunately, KPRC and the Chronicle failed to dig a little deeper. If they had, they might have found the real Houston Antifa page, which has warned people to "unlike and unfollow this fake ass Texas Antifa page. Do NOT attend the June 10th Rally! This account was started a month ago and is in NO way, shape, or form affiliated with any actual Antifa Organization."

A representative of Houston Antifa echoed the statement to the Houston Press via Facebook Thursday morning, saying, "We encourage folks NOT to attend this event whatsoever, on the Right or the Left."

The trolling has occurred throughout the country, as Buzzfeed reported May 30, citing "a coordinated campaign to create fake accounts in an attempt to troll and discredit anti-fascist activists."

When we asked the Texas Antifa folks if they wanted to comment on their deception, a representative told us via Facebook, "Being called fake works in our favor. It will bring down how many will go to the counter protest. No more comments, sorry."

It really hurt our feelings we were hoping for an enlightened, intellectual discussion about the merits of their overall campaign and why they feel they're justified in misleading reporters and stoking hatred. That's when our contact said, "I'm not the person to make the decision [on further discussion], simply repeating what I was told to say. Actually, supposed to simply say no comment to any press."

So, the hack was just following orders. Learning from the best.

Read more here:
Houston Media Pranked By Alt-Right Facebook Trolls | Houston Press - Houston Press

Even among right-wing protesters who aimed to upset people, Jeremy Joseph Christian was disturbing.

He arrived at an April 29 "free speech" march in Southeast Portland wearing a Revolutionary War flag as a cape. He carried a baseball bat. He threw Nazi salutes and shouted racial slurs in a Burger King parking lot. Twice, left-wing demonstrators grew so infuriated with his antics that Portland police officers formed a barrier to shield him.

The "alt-right" marchers even debated what to do about him. Some of them, leather-clad bikers, told him to shut up and tried to kick him out of the rally. Others seemed fine with him expressing himself: Unpopular speech was the point of the event.

On May 26, nearly a month later, Christian's hateful words allegedly turned into action.

He stands accused of murdering two men and wounding another who intervened as he harassed two teenage girls with an anti-Muslim screed on a Portland MAX train. Multiple witness accounts say he cut the throats of three men who confronted him.

Mayor Ted Wheeler has since asked for federal assistance to keep right-wing agitators from holding events scheduled in Portland. The leaders of local and national extremist groups known as the "alt-right" spent the weekend frantically trying to distance themselves from Christian, even as they refused to cancel a June 4 rally set for Terry Schrunk Plaza downtown.

Wheeler says Portland is still too raw and angry to fully process the events of last week. But it's already clear that in the days to come, this city will want answers to some uncomfortable questions about Christian.

What turned a low-level stickup man into a monster? Should his actions reflect on the people who marched alongside him? What responsibility do they bear for the way Christian developed his hateful behavior?

U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley speaks at the May 27 vigil. (Emily Joan Greene)

At a May 27 memorial for the men killed in the MAX stabbing, U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) described Christian's alleged actions as the logical end point of vicious rhetoric on the far right. "A message of hate leads to violence," he said, "and violence leads to tragedy."

Christian, 35, who previously lived with his parents in the Piedmont neighborhood of North Portland, spent most of his adult life either behind bars or under post-conviction supervision, the result of state felony convictions for robbing a convenience store in 2002 and a federal gun conviction in 2011. He was released from federal custody May 14, 2014. He told booking authorities May 27 he's now homeless and without any income.

His parents and four siblings could not be reached for comment. Several people who knew him described him as disturbed, but he told booking authorities he'd never been diagnosed with a mental health issue.

His Facebook page was full of racist rants, and a simple introduction. "I'm an ex-con," he wrote. "I like comix, cannabis and metalin any combination."

His forearm was covered in Nordic rune tattoos, and the "Misanthropic Nihilist" philosophy he outlined online suggests he was among those radical white supremacists who call themselves "Odinists"they celebrate pagan Norse gods as part of their race hatred.

Jeremy Christian at a free speech rally in Portland last month. (Joe Riedl)

Christian's social-media posts also make clear he saw himself as the street-level enforcer for a neo-Nazi movement larger than himself.

"Brown shirts are rank and file," he wrote on Facebook on Jan. 23. "Nihilist Criminals like me facilitate and run the show if we are talking about recreating the third Reich. You need unhindered and unhinged thugs for dirty work. A Good thing we have the largest collection of them in the entire world!!!"

An affidavit of probable cause says that minutes after he was arrested for the May 26 killings, Christian was recorded in a squad car describing his standoff with one of the men who confronted him.

"I told him, 'You ain't gonna heal, punk,'" Christian allegedly said. "And he still wants to put his hands on me. Stupid motherfucker. That's what liberalism gets you.

"I hope they all die," Christian continued. "I'm gonna say that on the stand. I'm a patriot, and I hope everyone I stabbed died."

The question of whether Christian was a product of political fringe groups, or merely a disturbed man who was attracted to extremist rhetoric, is more than a matter of assessing blame. It may determine how much leeway such movements are given in future.

Christian distinguished himself among the disparate attendees of events organized by the alt-right, a collection of online agitators, militia groups and white supremacists who for months have engaged in street confrontations with antifascist groups, or antifa.

Joey Gibson, a Vancouver, Wash., organizer of the April 29 Portland march and other alt-right events, has since May 26 repeatedly attempted to distance his movement from Christian.

"Jeremy Christian has nothing to do with us," Gibson tells WW. "He showed up [to our march] with violent intentions. We asked him to leave several times. We did what we could. You can't make too much sense of a lot of things he said."

On May 29, Mayor Wheeler announced he would try to block further activity by those groups, asking the federal government to revoke permits for the June 4 "free speech" rally Gibson wants to hold in Terry Schrunk Plaza.

"Our city is in mourning, our community's anger is real, and the timing and subject of these events can only exacerbate an already difficult situation," Wheeler said in a statement. "I am calling on every elected leader in Oregon, every legal agency, every level of law enforcement to stand with me in preventing another tragedy."

Mayor Ted Wheeler at the May 27 vigil. (Emily Joan Greene)

Civil liberties groups blasted Wheeler's actions as a violation of the First Amendment. Other activists celebrated a crackdown on a right-wing movement they described as racists emboldened by the election of President Donald Trump.

Gibson says despite Wheeler's concerns, his associates still plan to gather in Portland on June 4.

"Unfortunately, there's going to be hundreds of people in that park, no matter what," he tells WW. "There's going to be a huge police presence. Violence will not be tolerated on either side. Do our march. Go home."

Randy Blazak, chairman of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crime, says the city should err on the side of allowing people to gather, including extremists.

"It's better to see them in the daylight than suppress them into the shadows," Blazak says. "I'd rather them march in the streets so we can take their pictures, and when they get on the bus with us, we know who they are."

A May 27 vigil to honor the victims of the Portland MAX stabbings. (Emily Joan Greene)

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Who Radicalized Jeremy Christian? Alt-Right Extremists Rush to Distance Themselves From MAX Slaying Suspect - Willamette Week