Yesterday former Commander-at-large for the US Border Patrol Greg Bovino gave a press conference with Jake Lang at the Gordie Howe International Bridge to a crowd of less than 50 people, almost all of them either media or members of Lang’s entourage. The event was meant to be a Deport Abdul El-Sayed rally, but even the people coming and going from the bridge were looking on in confusion, unsure of what they were seeing. The entrance area to the footpath of the Gordie Howe bridge is in the middle of nothing. It’s not a high foot traffic area, and I doubt anyone who lives in the neighborhood or was walking by had any idea what was going on.
The press conference itself had the standard pro ICE and anti Abdul rhetoric that one would expect. Jake Lang and company held up a “Deport El-Sayed” sign that featured AI images of Abdul El-Sayed, Hasan Piker, Illhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and one black gentleman that I couldn’t identify. The first person who asked a question was a heckler, asking Bovino what he’s doing here in Michigan. The second question/comment was from a member of Jake’s crew who opined about supposedly being banned from every Planet Fitness in the country for wearing a pro ICE shirt to his local facility. The whole event was a bust and a waste of everyone’s time.
Fifteen minutes into the press conference a small group of six Neo Nazis appeared out of seemingly no where, led by a local man, Trevor Raein. Their organization is called European Americans, which describes itself as “Classy Nazis taking back Detroit.” They wore Nazi arm bands and proudly waived swastika and Palestinian flags across the street from the press conference. They were chanting “Jake Lang is a Jew” and “Free Palestine” over and over again. They were yelling anti Jewish slurs from across the street, Raein repeatedly stated, “We’re the real Nazis. Those are fake Nazis, and as the real Nazis we say FREE PALESTINE.” The European Americans successfully crashed the press conference despite their small numbers, and there was a stand off between Lang’s crew and the “real” Nazis. Five or six cops formed a line on the street while both groups were yelling at each other from opposite sides of the road. Lang’s infamous crusader truck was blasting the song Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice on a loop in an effort to drown out the counter protestors.
Of course, I had a lot of questions for Trevor Raein. After all, who had ever heard of pro-Palestine Nazis? The whole thing reeked of CIA wrecker behavior. I approached him to ask questions about his support for the Palestinians. He was happy to speak with me and provided a flyer out of a red folder with a sticker of Adolf Hitler’s face that said “Hitler Loves You.” I can’t show you the flyer because it features swastikas and ethnic/religious slurs, but basically it advocates for a white/arab alliance against what he calls “Jewish power.” Raein told me he recognizes the genocide in Gaza saying, “We’re Nazis and we’re opposed to genocide. We don’t want to harm non-white people.” One of the few counter protestors that came to the event was a Muslim woman who argued with Raein, suggesting that he was a “fed” and that no self respecting Muslim would ever align themselves with people who openly brandished the swastika. Her comments were a breath of fresh air for me. I wasn’t able to get her name, but she and the other Muslim woman who came to protest Lang were the only two people that I saw exhibiting any kind of courage or moral clarity.
Raein was very friendly and open to talk, but the whole interaction left a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was able to find his Twitter account online and learned that Trevor and his organization spend most of their time following Jake Lang around the country to counter protest Lang’s events. Trevor and company followed Lang to Little Palestine in Chicago and to the 9/11 memorial in NYC that happened last month. They do all of this to display a banner that says, “Jake Lang is a Jew!” and hurl antisemitic insults at him and anyone he associates with. It’s hard to imagine someone lower than Lang in terms of America’s right wing political radicals, but Raein found a way to subsist as a bottom feeding parasite hanging from one of Lang’s testicles.
For those who don’t know, Jake Lang was raised Jewish. He had a bar mitzvah in Jerusalem with his mother. During Lang’s political radicalization, he renounced his connection to Judaism and converted to Catholicism, becoming a self described crusader. His Jewish ancestry has been a sticking point between him and other more hardline Neo-Nazis like Nick Fuentes, who argue that Lang’s ancestry makes him a spy or otherwise compromises him.
This event hits on something that I and many other people have been pointing out for years: Right wing infighting boils down to an anti-Muslim contingent (represented in this case by Jake Lang) and the antisemitic contingent (represented by Trevor Raein). Of course, neither of these groups are anything that normal pluralistic people would want to be associated with. I don’t hate Jews; I don’t hate Muslims. For both of these groups, their obsessive focus on race and immigration obfuscates problems that are largely economic. Neither of these groups are capable of producing social or economic conditions that any free person would ever want to live under, so they are stuck in a sort of limbo — Hurling moral and ethnic invectives at each other from across the street, while normal people are out riding their bikes and enjoying a beautiful October afternoon.
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