by Matt Petras
When Jasiri X moved from the south side of Chicago to Monroeville as a teen in the 1980s, he discovered “in-your-face racism” for the first time. On his first trip to Monroeville Mall, someone called him a racial slur.
Following the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, plans for far-right demonstrations and the possibility of violence have been identified across the country. The anti-disinformation group Alethea Group identified Pittsburgh as a possible site of far-right activity, according to the Washington Post, though the FBI released a statement Jan. 12 explaining it has not identified any threats directed at Pittsburgh.
Still, given initial reports like this and the Pittsburgh area’s existing relationship with white supremacy, it seems intuitive to Jasiri X that more of this violence could be coming to Pittsburgh.
“If we’re a hotbed of white supremacist activity,” he said, “we should be expecting violence, shouldn’t we?”
FBI analysts declared Pittsburgh a “hub” for white supremacy in November 2020. Several white supremacist and other far-right hate groups operate across Pennsylvania, including groups associated with the Ku Klux Klan. In October 2018, a gunman attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in the history of the United States. The attack was also motivated by hatred toward immigrants.
A man in Toledo, Ohio, who planned another attack on a synagogue, said the Tree of Life shooting inspired him, and the man who shot and killed 49 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand wrote a manifesto outlining a white supremacist ideology strikingly similar to that of the Tree of Life shooter.
“The Pittsburgh attack was itself worldwide, not just in Pittsburgh and not just nationally,” said Brad Orsini, senior national security advisor for the national group Secure Community Network and former FBI special agent.
Orsini said that since the white supremacist “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville in 2017, there has been a significant increase in hate crime across the country. Orsini, who managed security for the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh before taking his national position, has witnessed a slew of far-right hate group activity in Western Pennsylvania.
“We’ve seen the Ku Klux Klan in Pittsburgh, we’ve seen Patriot Front, we’ve seen Identity Europa,” Orsini said. “We have seen visible signs of those groups throughout Western Pennsylvania and in Pittsburgh over the past four years, absolutely.”
Jasiri X, executive director of 1Hood Media, speaks to members of the news media at a at a press conference on the portico of the City-County Building on Monday, June 15. (Photo by Ryan Loew/PublicSource)
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