After Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, hate crimes incidents rose dramatically across the country, including in Trump’s birthplace of Queens, New York. Once an enclave for whites fleeing Manhattan, after decades of immigration, Queens is now one of the most diverse places on Earth (its slogan: “The World’s Borough”). Despite facing housing discrimination and political and economic exclusion, its non-white population has flourished.

But this diversification has fueled generations of white resentment across the still deeply segregated borough. Queens has seen a range of far-right groups and individuals, from the Ku Klux Klan to neo-Nazis to ultra-nationalist organizations (including from immigrants’ countries of origin), along with incidents of shocking racist brutality, such as the 1986 attack on three Black men in Howard Beach.

Queens natives have played major roles in the recently resurgent far-right movement. For example, the alt-right celebrity Joseph Jordan (pseudonym “Eric Striker”), born in the largely Asian and Latino neighborhood of Flushing, has co-hosted a white supremacist podcast, written for the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, and participated in the Unite the Right rally. According to a 2019 Southern Poverty Law Center report, Jordan’s parents both have Latin American names, and his family still lives in Flushing.

Robert Rundo, co-founder of the Rise Against Movement (RAM), a violent white nationalist group with deep connections to the broader neo-Nazi movement, is also from Flushing. Before RAM, Rundo was in a gang called the Original Flushing Crew when he stabbed a member of an MS-13 affiliate. To produce and distribute clothing and music, RAM started the company Will2Rise, which has provided Queens contact information. Will2Rise now makes merchandise for Active Club, an international movement in which Rundo began to train white supremacists for a race war. 

More: Travels of Hate: An American Far-Right Extremist in Greece

The neo-Nazi group Patriot Front’s Network Director, Paul Michael Gancarz is an NYC native who has operated out of the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills. He manages Patriot Front’s mid-Atlantic activities, and often directs and participates in the group’s NYC-area activities. In June 2020, Patriot Front members posted stickers throughout the Forest Hills and Rego Park neighborhoods. And the NYC chapter of neo-Nazi group American Identity Movement (formerly Identity Evropa) met at an Astoria beer garden and planned posting propaganda around the area.

More: Identity Evropa’s Neo-Nazi Organizing Plans Revealed

The Proud Boys have members from Queens, including Irvin “Irv” Antillon, a resident of Jackson Heights. In October 2018, Antillon participated in a Proud Boys attack on protesters at the Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan. The Proud Boys hung a banner over the entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel in 2019. In 2022, they threatened counterprotesters at a Drag Queens Story Hour event in Jackson Heights. Antillon has been also a member of the ultra-nationalist, largely Latino group Batallion 49 and attended Unite the Right. Gancarz turned up dressed as a Proud Boy at Unite the Right in 2017.

Queens also has its share of internet-inspired far-right actors. Notably, Astoria resident Angel Almeida was arrested in 2021 for illegal firearm possession and sexual exploitation and coercion of minors. Almeida is an alleged adherent of 764, an offshoot of the Satanist neo-Nazi movement Order of the Nine Angles.

More: Sextortion Coms: Inside a Vile Child Exploitation Cult Run by Nazi-Linked Teens

Also in 2021, Bayside resident Joseph Miner was arrested for buying guns from an undercover law enforcement agent. On social media, Miner advocated racial holy war, “forming a well trained incel hit squad,” and posted pictures of a Queens Jewish community center and himself giving a Nazi salute. Prosecutors said he wrote he wanted to “die a hero” after attacking “Africans,” Pakistani people and law enforcement.

Right-wing extremism in Queens is not exclusive to its white Christian residents, but has also emerged from the borough’s religious and ethnic minorities. 

The Jewish Defense League (JDL), a Jewish nationalist organization founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, linked to multiple terrorist attacks and other violence, operated in Queens, and Kahane lived and worked throughout the borough. The FBI classified the JDL as a “right-wing terrorist group” in 2000, and since the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, the JDL has re-emerged, including organizing and posting propaganda across Queens.

The anti-Muslim Hindu supremacist movement Hindutva has found a home in Queens since the 1990’s. In 2001, for example, Flushing resident Rohit Vyasmaan helped run a Hindu supremacist website called HinduUnity, a backer of which was connected to a 1992 mosque attack in India. 

Additionally, the Greek neo-Nazi organization Golden Dawn established a branch in the heavily Greek neighborhood of Astoria in 2012, before residents ran it out of town.

More: Guilty on All Counts: The Historic Verdict Against Golden Dawn

These groups and individuals are the latest in a long continuum of far-right extremism in the borough, dating back to before the country’s independence. 

Prior to its establishment as a colony in 1683, slavery flourished across Queens, and the Dutch administrator of New York City, Peter Stuyvesant, persecuted religious minorities, attempting to banish them altogether.

Once incorporated into New York City, Queens transitioned from farming and manufacturing to housing. Rife with discrimination, many neighborhoods excluded all but white Christians.

Through the 1920’s and 1930’s, the Ku Klux Klan operated openly in Queens, wielding extensive political and social influence. Some members held Queens County public office, including the Queens County Sheriff appointing the head of Queens Klan operations to a Special Deputy position.

Queens Borough President George U. Harvey, who was born in Ireland, had belonged to the American Krusaders, a Klan group for non-native Americans.

Klan members attempted to march in the borough’s 1927 Memorial Day parade, and when police, other marching groups, and spectators attempted to stop them, the event turned into a full-blown riot. 

The Klan also hosted regular events at the Triangle Ballroom in Richmond Hill. According to “The Ku Klux Klan Memorial Day Riot of 1927,” by Jeff Gottlieb, archived at the Queens Library, in 1927, Alabama U.S. Senator J. Thomas Hefflin addressed a gathering of 3,000 people and asked the Klansmen in the crowd to stand. Reportedly, “very few in the room remained seated.” 

The Klan’s presence waned after its pre-war heyday, but it re-emerged in various incarnations, holding rallies, cross burnings, violence, and intimidation campaigns across the borough into the 2010’s. In 1977, a branch was revealed in Far Rockaway, and in 1987, Klan spokesperson Hank Schmidt publicly announced that he was opening a branch in Astoria. Schmidt claimed to have worked with Tom Metzger, founder of White Aryan Resistance.

Like the Klan, Nazi-affiliated groups and individuals found a home in Queens for decades, often openly. Before World War II, the Bund (U.S. supporters of the German Nazi party) organized and held regular rallies across the borough. The Bund’s leader Fritz Kuhn lived in the then-segregated neighborhood of Jackson Heights. 

During the war, some German immigrants in Queens acted as Nazi spies. Ridgewood resident Herman Lang was a participant in Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch before moving to the United States. From Queens, Lang sent military secrets to the Nazis as part of the infamous Duquesne Spy Ring.

Alongside the Bund, a fascist group called The Christian Front was extremely active in Queens, promoting antisemitism and anti-Communism. In January 1940, the FBI carried out a wave of arrests of Christian Front members in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, for plotting to violently overthrow the U.S. government. J. Edgar Hoover told reporters that the group planned attacks on American institutions and infrastructure, “so that a dictatorship could be set up here, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany,” and that they wanted “the eradication of the Jews of the United States.” Queens Borough President Harvey defended the group, stating, “They’re Americans.”

After World War II, neo-Nazi groups popped up in Queens. The United Nordic Federation operated in Forest Hills, seeking “to unite and purify all the Nordic peoples of the world.” In 1958, members preparing to establish a camp in upstate New York were arrested with an array of weapons and plans to rob a Kew Gardens bank. The police estimated the ranks of the group as potentially being in the “hundreds.”

Though based in Yorkville, Manhattan, the neo-Nazi group National Renaissance Party (NRP) had a sizable membership in Queens, having absorbed The Christian Front. The NRP held rallies across the borough throughout the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s, targeting white working-class areas like Ridgewood and Glendale. NRP head James Madole was a major figure in the international neo-Nazi movement until his death in 1979, and spoke frequently at Queens rallies.

One NRP member, Queens native Daniel Burros, traveled to Virginia to join George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party in the 1950’s, rising through the ranks before returning to Queens to live with his parents in South Ozone Park and lead two KKK chapters in Manhattan. Burros was Jewish, which he kept hidden throughout his far-right involvement, before killing himself when the New York Times exposed his ethnicity. Burros was later the inspiration for the film “The Believer,” in which Ryan Gosling plays a secretly Jewish neo-Nazi. Burros mirrors other far-right activists, like Joseph Jordan, who are not ethnically “white” but support white supremacist/nationalist causes.

Related: Nazis of Color

Throughout Queens’ history, far-right extremism has grown in reaction to, and out of the same diversity that makes the borough so eclectic and vibrant. With Trump’s 2024 election and his second administration’s far-right policies (e.g., the crackdown on undocumented immigrants, including in Queens), far-right-wing extremists are emboldened. And given Queens’ history, the World’s Borough will likely not be spared.

Archival photos courtesy Archives at Queens Public Library. Cover image composition, image contrast and halftones adjusted by Dan Feidt for Unicorn Riot.

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