Violence breaks out at white nationalist rally in California

A white nationalist group's rally outside the California state Capitol building turned violent as fighting broke out with a larger group of counter protesters, leaving 10 people injured with stab wounds, cuts and bruises.

Fights erupted when about 30 members of the Traditionalist Worker Party gathering to rally around noon Sunday were met by about 400 counter-protesters, California Highway Patrol Officer George Granada said.

As people tried to leave the area, smaller fights broke out, Granada said.

Sacramento Fire Department spokesman Chris Harvey said nine men and one woman, ranging from 19 to 58 years old, were treated for stab wounds, cuts, scrapes and bruises. Of the injured, two were taken to the hospital with critical stab wounds, but they were expected to survive.

"There was a large number of people carrying sticks and rushing to either get into the melee or see what was going on," Harvey said.

Police were investigating two assaults that happened outside the Capitol grounds, but no arrests have been made, the Sacramento Police Department said in a statement.

The Capitol was on lockdown until protesters cleared the area.

Videos from the melee posted on social media showed mounted officers dispersing a group of mostly young people, some with their faces covered, while some throw stones toward a man holding a stick and being shielded by police officers in riot gear.

A KCRA-TV reporter and his cameraman were caught in an altercation with protesters who shouted "no cameras" as they tried to grab their equipment and shove them away from the crowd.

The victims were all present while the protest took place, said Sacramento Police spokesman Matt McPhail but he said it was still unclear whether and how they were involved.

The Traditionalist Workers Party had scheduled and received a permit to rally for two hours in front of the Capitol. Law enforcement was aware of the counter-protest effort and police deployed more than 100 officers to the Capitol, McPhail said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described TWP as a group formed in 2015 as the political wing of the Traditionalist Youth Network, which aims to "indoctrinate high school and college students into white nationalism."

The SPLC describes white nationalists as "groups that espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of non-whites. Groups listed in a variety of other categories - Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead, and Christian Identity - could also be fairly described as "white nationalist."

The group's website states:

We reject all federal racial quotas on education, hiring, and government contracts. We reject anti-White immigration policies designed to radically alter our country’s historical racial balance. We reject anti-White social engineering projects like forced busing, the “disparate impact” shakedown racket, and the numerous other ways that our government is stacking the deck against White families. Without exception, all identities and cultures have an inalienable right to take pride in their heritage and to preserve their communities and identities, including the White identity.

Matthew Heimbach, chairman of the Traditionalist Worker Party, told the Los Angeles Times that his group and the Golden State Skinheads organized the Sunday rally. Heimbach said that in the clash, one of their marchers had been stabbed in an artery and six of the counter-protesters had also been stabbed.

Vice chairman Matt Parrott, who was not present at the Sacramento rally, blamed "leftist radicals" for instigating the violence.

A message left at a phone number for the Traditionalist Worker Party was not immediately returned to The Associated Press.

A post recently uploaded to site of the Traditionalist Youth Network said TWP members planned to march in Sacramento to protest against globalization and in defense of their right to free expression. They said they expected to be outnumbered 10-to-1 by counter-protesters.

"We concluded that it was time to use this rally to make a statement about the precarious situation our race is in," the Traditionalist Youth Network statement said. "With our folk on the brink of becoming a disarmed, disengaged, and disenfranchised minority, the time to do something was yesterday!"

The clash follows a confrontation in March between Ku Klux Klan members and counter-protesters in Anaheim, California in which three people were stabbed.

The Christian Science Monitor reported at the time that social movement researchers acknowledge that there is a dual message to today’s racial equality movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

Mainstream activists, they say, tend to advocate peaceful protest toward policy reform. Though a measure of civil disobedience can be helpful, outright aggression undermines any message of tolerance, such groups say.

On the other hand, groups such as Frida’s – who were among those who showed up at the Klan rally over the weekend – say that the fight against inequality is precisely that: A fight. It is a philosophical divide that has long existed in the civil rights movement, and perhaps was most famously embodied by Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“People in the front are saying, ‘We want to be nonviolent,’ ” says Eric McDaniel, an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas, Austin, who specializes in racial politics and organizational behavior. “But there are people in the back who are like, ‘If we have to use force to get you to treat us equally, we will.’ ”

 While both groups are trying to achieve the same goal, Professor McDaniel continues, those who are more aggressive believe “that the system is so corrupt that it can’t be fixed.

“It’s an issue of lack of patience… [and] an underlying anger at the system,” he says.