Why neo-Nazis marched in Indianapolis this weekend, and almost every weekend in the US
Neo-Nazis with swastika flags have marched in Indiana, Ohio, outside a Michigan production of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ and at Disney World in Florida
A neo-Nazi rally on Sept. 2, 2023, in Orlando, Florida. Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
By Benyamin Cohen August 18, 2025
This story was originally published on November 18, 2024 and was updated to reflect the latest Neo-Nazi activity.
Armed neo-Nazis, shouting “white power!” and carrying swastika flags, marched through downtown Indianapolis on Saturday. This follows similar incidents in Ohio in February and last October.
“Almost every single weekend, white supremacists are rallying in some neighborhood,” Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said in a Nov. 2024 interview. The group’s data found 282 such events in 2023 and more than 750 since 2020.
The regularity with which they happen can both numb and instill fear in Jewish communities. Segal said they are not part of a rising trend of antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel, but have been occurring since 2016, “around the time of the first Trump administration.”
Segal said these rallies are usually organized by small groups hoping to get attention online, where they can attract new recruits. Additionally, the marches are sometimes the result of a turf war, almost a “soap opera” between competing white supremacist groups.
The Aryan Freedom Network, one of the most active neo-Nazi groups in the country, has become a driving force behind many of these rallies. Based in Texas but with chapters in dozens of states, the network mixes Nazi symbols with Klan-style theatrics and Christian nationalist rhetoric. Extremism researchers say its growth in recent years reflects how white supremacist ideas are being repackaged for the digital age — quick-hit marches designed less to win streets than to flood social media with propaganda and attract new recruits.
Antisemitic neo-Nazi marches happen all the time.
While white supremacist rallies are frequent, “that doesn’t mean it’s not a concern,” Segal said. “But having small groups of white supremacists show up in a community, march through town with swastikas and other hateful symbols is actually quite normal in this country.”
The neo-Nazi march that had the most lasting impact was the one in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Called the “Unite the Right” rally, it was organized to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general. Among the hundreds of attendees were a who’s who of extremists, including far-right militias, Klansmen, neo-Nazis and Richard Spencer, a supporter of President Donald Trump and a college friend of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. The following day turned violent when rallygoers clashed with counterprotesters. Dozens were injured and a white supremacist rammed his car into counterprotesters, killing one.
In a news conference afterwards, Trump famously said, “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
These marches are mostly organized by small groups.
Marches similar to the one in Indianapolis — led by a small group hoping to cause a big ruckus — are what the ADL sees on a regular basis. Some recent examples: outside a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank in Michigan; outside the Broadway theater hosting the Tony-winning Parade, a musical about antisemitism; and multiple times in front of Disney World in Orlando.
“I don’t think these groups are cooperating in the same way that they did around Charlottesville,” Segal said. Instead, it’s mostly infighting between white supremacist groups “competing for attention.”
Sometimes these marches are held to start a turf war.
The marchers at a 2024 march in Columbus, Ohio belonged to a newly formed white supremacist group based out of St. Louis, Segal said. A rival group is based in Ohio. “Essentially, this was perhaps part of a turf war,” Segal said. He called it a “soap opera amongst white supremacists,” where one group “is trying to antagonize another by showing up in their area.”
Masked neo #Nazis stormed through Columbus, #Ohio, waving swastika flags and spewing racist chants and slurs.
— Yahia Lababidi (@YahiaLababidi) November 17, 2024
Witnesses who confronted the march or captured it on camera said that some of the neo-Nazis were armed. https://t.co/hXZLvVsOaP
The marches tend to co-opt current events.
During the height of the presidential election campaign last summer, the focus turned to Springfield, Ohio, after then-vice presidential nominee JD Vance, a senator from the state, repeated a debunked claim that Haitian immigrants there were eating pets. During a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump repeated the claim and shortly afterwards, five different white supremacist groups — all sharing an anti-immigration ideology — descended on Springfield, Segal said.
“These groups take their cues from the public discussion,” he said. “We’ve also seen, since Oct. 7, white supremacists adopt anti-Israel slogans as well. They’re always going to try to exploit the news and a crisis in order to get attention.”
The events are meant to be quick and newsy.
The rallies are usually not announced in advance; a spontaneous gathering is less likely to draw local authorities or counterprotesters. “They’re quick: get people in and out,” Segal said. “It’s to create imagery and propaganda that then has an impact well beyond the community that they target.”
Videos of the events are quickly shared online. “This is what they want,” he said. “One of their ultimate goals is to get this attention. If there was no social media, we would not probably see as many of these rallies.”
Segal said news organizations should consider whether or not to publish the names of the small groups behind the marches because it could “potentially give oxygen” to them. For its part, the ADL has sections on its website devoted to each of these groups, because it believes that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Segal said, even though some of these groups may see it as a badge of honor to be profiled by the ADL.
‘Rinky dink’ groups with serious consequences
These groups are all “very similar in terms of not only their beliefs, but their tactics,” Segal said. “But we don’t really have the luxury to call them rinky dink.”
He explained that these small marches are used to recruit people online. “You never know who online is going to see what they do and say, ‘Oh, I need to not only be part of this, but take it to the next level.’”
He said this is what led to the mass shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh (2018) and Poway, California (2019), and at supermarkets in El Paso (2019) and Buffalo (2022). None of the shooters “were card-carrying members of any of these alphabet soup of groups, but they subscribed to the exact same ideology,” Segal said. “Hundreds of these types of events, even as small as they are, are just normalizing the hatred of Jews and other minority communities. And there are consequences to that.”
Anti-semitic incidents are on the rise across the U.S.@rudoren, editor-in-chief of @jdforward, explains how she defines the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-semitism. pic.twitter.com/d9WibLVuub
— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) November 18, 2024
