It’s a white supremacist group calling itself RAM — a swaggering, belligerent acronym for the Rise Again Movement that to all appearances is a cluster of melanin–obsessed men dedicated to the brand of brutish mayhem that white supremacists amp up for.
A man who co-founded RAM in Southern California just wound up in court, where he pleaded guilty to conspiring to riot, having attended a Huntington Beach rally in March 2016 where he and others of his ilk “pursued and assaulted” people, including one protester he tackled and punched multiple times.
Takeaway: Don’t ever let the Pacific-blue geopolitics of California surprise you. Dismay or appall you, sure, but never surprise you.
Like a taut earthquake fault that too often unbelts itself and cuts loose with repellent force, a deep lode of hate and racist one-upmanship undergirds Southern California. This is not of recent stamp only. The slow-walk destruction of Native Americans, Los Angeles’ 1871 Chinese massacre and the marginalizing and demonizing of Latinos and Asians don’t square with the kumbaya California vibe.