Over the weekend, many cities and towns celebrated LGBTQ pride with parades and festivities. Detroit held its annual pride parade on Sunday. The Motor City Parade boasts the state’s largest numbers for an annual parade event, with around 40,000 people attending every year. Lots of rainbows! It’s a parade celebrating people—like most parades. Unfortunately, the National Socialist Movement (NSM), known to most as neo-Nazis decided that handing out swastikas, offering up Sieg Heil Nazi salutes, and chanting the general invective that follows deep thinkers like white supremacists, decided to come too.
Detroit police had to come out to protect the special snowflakes from the consequences of spouting hate-filled ahistorical rhetoric at a parade that’s about loving one’s self and rainbows.
Some people felt that the police were rougher with the anti-Nazi protestors than with the actual Nazis. There were 450 hate-crime incidents reported last year in Michigan, which includes crimes against “sexual orientation,” the highest count being Detroit as Michigan’s most populace city.
To be clear, the neo-Nazis chanted things like “Fuck you faggots,” and “white power.” Not really an inspiring set of principals when you think about it. Fox News reported having images of some of the neo-Nazis ripping up a Pride flag, and another urinating on an Israeli flag. It takes someone with the will to really debase themselves in public to be a neo-Nazi these days, I guess.
By most reports the group itself was rather small.