On Saturday, June 8, ten neo-Nazis associated with the National Socialist Movement protested Detroit’s Motor City Pride Festival, carrying guns and shouting homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs.
NSM leader Burt Colucci and Aric Lemieux, NSM’s South Michigan chapter leader, headed up the protest, which included participants from Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Michigan. Lemieux expressed his intention to protest the festival months ago, and other group members joined in. The NSM, which was formerly based in Detroit, has a long history of protesting Pride events. It is also a defendant in a lawsuit stemming from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017.
As police escorted the group to a designated protest area, members of the group shouted obscenities at festival attendees. Inside the protest area, Mike Schloar, a longtime NSM member from Tennessee, posed as if he were urinating on an Israeli flag. The group went on to create event “souvenirs,” per their social media accounts, by tearing the flag to pieces. They also stomped on and destroyed a rainbow flag and shouted or chanted white supremacist slogans and obscenities including, “f**k you faggots,” “Sieg Heil,” “white power,” “our streets,” “blood and soil,” “white lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us.”
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