On Friday, New York solemnly marked 25 years since 19 right-wing religious fundamentalists hijacked a couple of airliners and crashed them into buildings. The day started off like one would expect: Throngs of people had gathered at Ground Zero to honor the dead. Service members in dress uniform slowly and silently shuffled past a sea of bicycle fencing that herded them to the 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center. Inside the World Trade Building (AKA “Freedom Tower”), police, National Guard, and security officials were keeping watch as commuters and mourners poured in from the subway and train station below. Some carried assault weapons, others carried bagpipes. Nobody carried a smile, but it was barely 7 a.m.
Outside of the official memorial, tourists and those touched by the attacks stood quietly. Some stared up at the space where the Twin Towers once stood. In their place is a glass tower that shimmers in the sun.
As bells began to ring marking the moments the planes struck the old towers, a deafening silence fell over the crowd. People had massed behind row upon row of bicycle fencing. A man in dark sunglasses choked back tears. One woman sat on a curb, her head in her hands, sobbing. A widow with a Thousand Yard Stare looked on at the exact time and place where her husband died for the 25th year in a row.
“We’re here to remember my brother,” Sandy Aiken, 65, said. She and about a dozen members of her extended family all wore blue shirts featuring her brother, Terrance Ande Aiken, on the front. “We aren’t going to forget my brother,” Sandy said.
Many people wore similar memorial shirts featuring lost loved ones. Husbands, wives, sons, daughters, parents, and grandparents who would never meet their grandchildren. Some carried bouquets of flowers, framed photos, and other items they intended to leave on the memorial at Ground Zero.
As the memorial wrapped up, hundreds of firefighters from stations all over the world began marching past City Hall toward the Brooklyn Bridge. They were going to pay tribute to their fallen colleagues and the people they tried to save that day by re-creating the walk made by thousands of stunned and shattered New Yorkers who trekked across the bridge after the tower’s collapsed and shut down the city’s transit systems.
But as the procession passed City Hall Park, a sea of NYPD had gathered. Just beyond the police were about half-a-dozen jackasses in MAGA slogans hollering at people passing by. The police had corralled them in bicycle fencing, like some kind of zoo attraction. Under any other circumstance, someone carrying a flag and/or a cross while yelling obscenities wouldn’t be too uncommon (it is New York). But these people were here to support Jake Lang, a Neo-fascist J6er with wealthy parents who’s spent the last few months gallivanting across the US and stoking racial and political animus.
Lang wasn’t set to arrive until 11 a.m. The word was that he’d chartered a bus (as opposed to the usual rented box truck, or a supporter’s pick-up) so he could roll in with about two dozen supporters and members of an anti-immigrant church in Harlem. In the hour and a half it took for Lang to arrive, dozens of press, counter-protesters, and performance artists descended upon the park near the Brooklyn Bridge subway station entrance.
Everything quickly devolved into an obnoxious spectacle: protesters and counter-protesters screaming at one another, freelance press swarming around every little scuffle, half-naked performance artists doing weird, provocative bullshit, and appalled tourists dropping their jaws at just another day in New York.
When Lang finally showed up, he stood in front of the gates of City Hall with posters of tasteless and brain-dead AI slop depicting racist memes. They held a large banner draped on the ground that read “Do you Remember” showing a zeppelin crashing into the Twin Towers under a crescent moon on a dark green and black sky. Some of Lang’s people carried a giant cross, but that damn thing was so heavy the lanky kid trying to hold it up kept dropping it on people’s heads (including mine).
The crowd and cops at the subway station entrance quickly rushed over to where Lang had set-up, by the Jacob Wrey Mould Fountain. Lang’s people tried telling the professional press, photographers, videographers, liver streamers, and random social media jackoffs suddenly swarming them to keep back, but the crowd just kept pushing closer and closer. As Lang barked almost indecipherable nonsense and held up his own little wooden cross, the NYPD ran out an orange net to surround Lang and his supporters.
The word among some of the local press is that Lang had a permit to protest and march. When one reporter said that Lang’s idea to secure a permit was “smart” because it forced the NYPD to protect him, another reporter shot back that being competent enough to fill out a form designed for the semi-literate (and pay a $25 processing fee) is not a measure of intelligence.
Eventually, the chaos became a mobile, amorphous blob that slowly shuffled down Broadway. Anti-fascist supporters yelled or joined counter-protesters. Confused workers on their lunch breaks rolled their eyes and stomped off in the opposite direction. Some NYPD pushed, shoved, and bitched at city-credentialed press who couldn’t get out of their way. Traffic ground to a halt in all directions as snarling New York drivers unleashed a string of profanities with their blaring horns. Tourists stood frozen with fear, clutching loved ones.
And Lang stood at the center of the chaotic, uncoordinated scrum, shouting inaudibly into a bullhorn as he shuffled down the street past all the eyeballs and cameras.
Police finally corralled the whole group at Cortland and Church, just outside the World Trade building and the 9/11 memorial. While everyone stood around shouting, a handful of men in khakis and white button-up shirts were running parallel with the group. They stood along Church Street in front of the bicycle fencing, just across the World Trade Center’s food court, and unfurled a banner that read “Jake Lang is a Jew.”
At first many people thought this group was some kind of edgy, satirical comedy troupe. They called themselves actual Nazis, said Lang was a fake Nazi, and wore red arm bands with swastikas. A person in an Elmo costume wore a Palestinian flag and squeaked random comments. People walking by stopped dead in their tracks as they tried to figure out just what the actual fuck was going on.
Gregory Conte and Trevor Raein, two of the men doing the most talking, told me they were “National Socialists.” The two men said they weren’t part of any organized group, but that they were active “throughout America.” Raein noted that he was from the south Detroit area of Michigan, and had traveled to New York. (There is no such thing as “South Detroit” — that’s Windsor, Canada.)
As the men howled Nazi things, like exterminating all the Jews, the person dressed as Elmo squeaked about Israeli genocide against Palestinians. When someone in the crowd told Elmo to punch the Nazis, one of the Nazis said, “We actually found Elmo.” Another added, “Elmo’s with us.”
A Jewish man who chanced upon the scene while on the phone stopped next to me. “Hang on,” he said into his phone, “There’s actual Nazis here. I’ll try to call you back, I think have to go punch these guys.” When he walked between Conte and Raein, the three began arguing. Eventually the man threw up his hands and walked away in disgust.
A man in a Donald Trump T-shirt yelled obscenities, and said the US kills Nazis. When he threatened to “knock ’em the fuck out,” Conte walked up to the man and smiled. Raein looked at the man and called Trump a cuckold. The man shook his fist and yelled, then he walked away.
Some of the people exiting the 9/11 memorial service were walking up Church Street and looked in horror at the assholes across the street wearing Nazi arm bands, shouting antisemitic slogans, praising Hitler and throwing up so-called “Roman salutes.” A fireman angrily called them a disgrace and leaned into the barrier before a police officer walked up and escorted the fireman away.
They all had the same look of astonishment on their faces. They looked around, wondering why someone else wasn’t doing something. They looked at the NYPD standing motionless and silent. They looked at the crowds shouting back at the Nazis. They looked at the photographers with fancy flash kits taking artsy pictures, the streamers shooting live video, and the teenagers talking into phones for social media. And then they walked away.
After about an hour, the Nazis suddenly rolled up their banner, took off their arm bands, and walked briskly down a side street. Two other journalists and I followed them a few blocks to calmly ask a few questions. They gave vague answers, and got cagey when we started pressing them with more specific questions. Suddenly, they said, “Guys, we really have to go,” and ran off.
Another photographer and I stood there stunned. They’d grinned and cursed an onslaught of 9/11 mourners, Trump supporters, fascists and anti-fascists, random New Yorkers, and countless others without any sense of shame. But when three tired, sweaty and over-worked journalists started asking a few routine questions, they ran off.
isn't having a Jewish ancestor the most nazi thing a nazi can do? especially in these stephen miller times?
OT:
OK. So. I've been wondering all afternoon what "that noise" is. It turns out that the wife of the couple that lives behind us got her husband a birthday gift of two "rent-a-goats" to eat up the poison ivy patch in their back yard.