California police on Monday were investigating a violent clash between members of a white supremacist group and counter-protesters on Sunday, during which 10 people were stabbed and several others injured.
Advertisement
Chris Harvey, a spokesman for Sacramento Fire Department, said nine men and one woman aged between 19 and 58 were treated for stab wounds, cuts, scrapes and bruises.
Protesters tried to block Traditionalist Worker Party members from reaching a staging area where they had been given permission by the California Highway Patrol to demonstrate between noon and 2 p.m. local time, police said. Sgt. Matt McPhail of Sacramento Police says a gun was found in the area of the melee after the incident at the Capitol.
The original protest was permitted, according to The Associated Press, and organized by the Traditionalist Worker Party, which describes itself as a political party “created by and for working families” that aims to “lead Americans toward a peaceful and prosperous future free from economic exploitation, federal tyranny, and anti-Christian degeneracy”. TWP is known to be a white nationalist group with ties to white supremacists.
The fight broke out at about noon at the start of the rally outside the California State Capitol, the Sacramento Police Department said in a statement. Toby Wenning was forced off of Capitol grounds by counter-protesters calling him a Nazi after recording them with his phone. The group was met by about 400 “anti-fascist” counter-protesters.
In a call-to-action ahead of the rally, anti-fascists wrote that “the need to counter fascism and white supremacy has never been greater”.
Matthew Heimbach, chairman of the TWP, told the Los Angeles Times that his group and the Golden State Skinheads organised the rally.
“The campaign of billionaire Donald J. Trump and his promotion of misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and attacks on broad sections of the working-class and poor has helped to embolden the far-Right”, they said.
Three people were stabbed during that altercation.
“We concluded that it was time to use this rally to make a statement about the precarious situation our race is in”, the Traditionalist Youth Network statement said.
Advertisement
The clashes on Sunday came just months after a similar confrontation in March between Ku Klux Klan members and counterprotesters in Anaheim, California.
