On Feb. 7, a hundred residents of Lincoln Heights, Ohio, drove out a dozen armed neo-Nazis waving swastika flags. This community is about 70 miles from Springfield, where Silicon Valley darling JD Vance and Elon Musk whipped up hysteria with lies about Haitian immigrants. Nazi groups also marched in Springfield before Vance’s big lie.
Idavox, a local reporter on It’s Going Down, said:
A neo-Nazi group, ‘Hate Club,’ showed up on Friday (2/7/25) armed with long guns and flying swastika flags on an I-75 overpass in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood, just north of Cincinnati. They showed up in the wrong damn neighborhood.
A historically Black community, Lincoln Heights is home to generations of residents committed to a strong sense of community and culture, impactful civic engagement, and self-organization—especially as the first self-governing Black community north of the Mason-Dixon line. So when armed neo-Nazis showed up here there wasn’t even a question they were going to get run out. Within minutes of arriving on the I-75 overpass, neo-Nazi group ‘hate club’ got sent packing as community members, angry that Nazis had come armed to terrorize them in their own neighborhood, showed up to tell the fash they weren’t having any of it.
The community members were able to seize one of the Nazi flags and burn it.
Police protecting neo-Nazis
WKRC Cincinnati reports that at a town hall on Feb. 10, residents confronted representatives of the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office—the only police agency to attend, even though officers from Lockland and Evandale were involved in the incident. Residents pointed out that footage from the event shows the police protecting the Nazis and helping them escape.
A resident at the town hall said:
“Again, this is super unfortunate because when it comes to African Americans, you guys arrest first and ask questions later. And I just feel like you guys did not do that in that moment.”
In the days following the incident, residents formed armed patrols to ensure the community’s safety. This is amid ongoing threats. WPCO 9 News reports that four days after the rally on Feb. 11, a flyer was circulated “that used a racial slur and declared a ‘race war.’”
These developments show that organized people can push back the shock troops emboldened by the fascist MAGA movement. We cannot rely on the police or courts to do it.
Threats from fascist groups are only going to get worse. On Feb. 14, JD Vance met with the successor to the German Nazi Party in Munich, the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD). Elon Musk appeared virtually at an AfD rally before the Feb. 23 German elections.
Billionaires and MAGA
Unelected Musk is the world’s richest oligarch and is currently looting the U.S. people’s money in preparation for more tax cuts for billionaires. This is the money of the working people, wealth created through our labor. The convergence of the MAGA movement and Silicon Valley—combined with this naked plunder—shows exactly what the Trump phenomenon is about. It’s a big anti-worker swindle. The neo-Nazis on the ground are an essential part of it because the terror they instill is supposed to paralyze the people while the rich hang us out to dry.
But the people in Lincoln Heights aren’t bowing down to King Donald and his Co-regent, Elon Musk, and neither should the rest of us!