A gaggle of masked neo-Nazis disrupted a drag queen story hour in New Hampshire over the weekend, chanting and performing Nazi salutes.
More than a dozen males sporting sun shades, baseball caps and matching shirts and trousers could be seen shouting outdoors an LGBT-owned espresso store in Concord, the US state’s capital in a video seen hundreds of thousands of instances.
The drag story hour, at which drag queens learn kids’s books to children, needed to be moved upstairs away from the disruption.
State officers say NSC-131, a neo-Nazi group based mostly in New England, had claimed accountability for the protest. NSC stands for the Nationalist Social Club.
The males chanted “131” and homophobic slurs, in accordance with Juicy Garland, a drag performer who was on the occasion and posted the video on social media.
“This isn’t something strange and unique onto itself,” Garland, 37, mentioned. “Fascism and dangerous extremity on the right are something that has been here for a long time.”
One individual was seen banging on the window as others shouted slurs. Pic: Twitter/Juicy Garland
It follows an escalating sequence of threats and assaults in opposition to America’s LGBT+ group in current months.
The espresso store’s proprietor, Emmett Soldati, mentioned the store hosted drag story hour occasions for the previous decade.
While there have been demonstrations earlier than, they’ve elevated in dimension and severity over the previous 12 months, Soldati mentioned.
“This kind of response is very new,” Soldati mentioned. “There appears to tactically be a shift, even if six years ago people did have a problem with what we did.”
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Since June 2022, there was a median of 39 anti-LGBT+ protests within the US every month, in accordance with a current report by the Crowd Counting Consortium, a analysis group that tracks the scale of political protests.
In comparability, the group recorded simply three protests per 30 days from January 2017 by May 2022.
“The reason why we’re seeing this here in this way in Concord and in other places around the US is because these people feel like they have permission to be violent and aggressive and loud,” Garland mentioned, citing a current legislative marketing campaign to restrict some drag performances.
Content Source: information.sky.com