Tribune Chronicle/Vindicator Editor Ed Puskas…by R. Michael Semple

“People … not a big fan.”

A friend and I stumbled upon T-shirts featuring that phrase, and we couldn’t resist buying them.

Mine eventually disappeared. I believe it suffered the same fate as my favorite red T-shirt paying homage to President Ronald Reagan.

By “fate,” I mean that my wife — who didn’t like either of them — somehow concocted a plan to make them disappear.

But my friend still has his “People … not a big fan” T-shirt. He texted me a photo of it the other day as a sort of exclamation point to a conversation we were having. You see, we’ve reached that age when old guys sit around and kvetch (not exactly the word I’d choose) about all the problems with our favorite sports teams, politics and the world at large.

And by “kvetch,” I mean we essentially solve all those problems in 45 minutes or less with heaping measures of sarcasm and extended soliloquies about how things were better in the 1980s. (They were. This cannot be disputed.)

Soon, we’ll both be old enough to join that early morning crowd of grumpy old men who hang out at McDonald’s or Panera.

I thought about my long lost “People … not a big fan” T-shirt last Saturday while watching a video of a neo-Nazi march in Columbus. Someone had taken a cellphone video of these “people” — I use that term as loosely as I can — march along High Street in the city’s Short North district while waving swastika flags and chanting racist garbage about Jewish people and white power.

Soon, more and more videos of the march began popping up on social media.

The men were armed, dressed in black and wore red masks.

Why? If these cretins believe so fervently in the hatred they espouse, why not ditch the masks and show everyone who they are?

It’s the same reason members of the Ku Klux Klan used to parade around in bed sheets and pointy hats. All of these hatemongers want to do what they do while pretending they are something else in their regular lives. Disguising themselves also was meant to be intimidating to the people the KKK didn’t like — blacks, Jews, Catholics and anyone else who didn’t look or act like them.

As reports of the march came in to Columbus police, officers were dispatched to the Short North. The neo-Nazis quickly dispersed and left the area, according to published reports. A van carrying some of the men was stopped by police who were investigating reports that one of the neo-Nazis used Mace or pepper spray on a passerby, but the Columbus Dispatch reported that no arrests were made.

Video eventually surfaced and corroborated that report about the use of Mace or pepper spray.

The reaction to the neo-Nazi march was swift. Columbus officials and Gov. Mike DeWine took to social media to register disgust that the group was bringing hate to the heart of Ohio. President Joe Biden issued a statement Monday.

I understand that the First Amendment legally permits groups to assemble, demonstrate or march for whatever causes they’ve chosen to adopt. People of a certain age will remember the Skokie Affair in 1977, when the National Socialist Party of America intended to march in Skokie, Illinois, which had a large Jewish population, including many Holocaust survivors.

Village officials in Skokie initially intended to ignore the NSPA, but Jewish citizens pushed for an injunction against the group and the case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The American Civil Liberties Union argued for the NSPA’s right to demonstrate. The court ruled 5-4 on behalf of the NSPA in the landmark NSPA vs. Village of Skokie case.

I’m not sure there is a better example of “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” which has been attributed to Voltaire.

But the Skokie decision doesn’t mean we should support hate groups like the one that appeared in Columbus a week ago. It’s 2024. With the technology available to us, we ought to be able to find out who those miscreants are so they can learn the lesson that the First Amendment allows for free speech — even for hate groups — but doesn’t protect them from the potential consequences of those actions.

More than 40 years ago, KKK representatives came to the sleepy little town where I went to high school. The newspapers there carried advance stories about their impending appearance, but since the Skokie decision was less than a decade old at that time, the rights of these monsters to come to our town and try to spread hate was still fresh in everyone’s minds.

On the appointed day, there was no march, no swastika flags and no bed sheets and pointy hats.

What we saw was a bunch of middle-aged white guys hanging out on the corners of the main intersection near the courthouse and passing out flyers to whomever would take them.

We didn’t want their flyers. A few of us piled into someone’s car and drove up and down the main street to jeer those guys.

We might have even exercised our own First Amendment rights with some colorful language.

We wanted to make it clear that they weren’t welcome in our town. We were not fans of those “men” and we let them know it. Ohioans should do the same now.

Stupid, repugnant people? Not a big fan. Not a fan at all.

Ed Puskas is editor of the Tribune Chronicle and The Vindicator. Contact him at epuskas@tribtoday.com or 330-841-1786.