Another day, another horrifying display of anti-Semitism and Nazism from teenagers in our schools. This time, the Garden Grove School District located in Orange County, California, is reopening an investigation into a video that showed students giving a Nazi salute and singing a Nazi-era marching song. At least one school official has noted that new photos and videos related to this incident have recently leaked.
The incident in the now-viral video happened back in November. Why are we talking about this now? Well, for two reasons. First, because new details have apparently come out, and second, because it’s now been revealed that many in the community—including many in the school district—didn’t know this disturbing incident happened until the video evidence went viral online. That’s … very much not okay and, frankly, not even safe.
At a recent meeting, Pacifica High School principal Steve Osborne did apologize for not telling the community earlier. After the apology, Osborne dropped the line about officials having received "new allegations, new photos and video ... and new claims that have led us to reopen and widen the scope of the investigation." These new videos and photos feature students goose-stepping around campus while holding a German flag, as seen in the image above.
Several students shared the original video, which is about eight seconds long, on social media. The Garden Grove Unified School District says in a statement that the video was recorded off-campus before a student athletics banquet took place, and that the students were unsupervised at the time.
The district says that administrators at the high school first discovered the videos in March and that they “addressed” the situation with the students involved. However, it wasn’t until The Daily Beast published the video last week that some district-level officials (and much of the community) found out about it. Yikes.
How was the horrifying video “addressed” with the offending students? The school hasn’t said, citing student privacy concerns. So it’s entirely unclear whether or not they’ve actually been punished.
In fact, a lot of American high schoolers seem to be getting away with hate speech.
You might remember the teenagers in Minnesota who went viral after a picture of their Nazi-themed prom proposal horrified the collective internet. Or the teenage boys in Wisconsin who appeared to be giving a Nazi salute in a prom picture. Or the California high schoolers who made a swastika out of red solo cups.
According to an annual report released by the Anti-Defamation League, the “number of anti-Semitic incidents was nearly 60 percent higher in 2017 than 2016, the largest single-year increase on record and the second-highest number reported since ADL started tracking incident data in the 1970s.” Terrifying. It makes you wonder: How many of them feel emboldened by Trump?