The sign had to be making its first appearance. It was too white, too unblemished. Its bold black square lettering jarring against the color, curve, and crookedness that marks the Bywater. I wouldn't expect a neighborhood with a reputation for Crass patches to allow this. But the sign hung fifteen feet above the ground, chained and zip-tied to the ornate facade of a historic New Orleans shotgun with hippie glass mosaics and charming columns. Someone had gone out of their way to custom print this sign and to secure it at the height of a low hanging power line so that a casual passerby would be powerless to do anything.
I was driving my Silverado down Clouet St when I saw it. My body seized up before my mind could process why. I hit the brakes hard enough to feel the truck's weight shift, had to take a minute to make sure I wasn't dreaming. The rage and fright filled me simultaneously, familiar yet foreign, like some ancestral alarm bell ringing in my DNA.
There it was: a swastika. A big, black swastika, followed by the letters "RUMP" - someone's clever idea to replace the ’T’, to make their point about fascism by deploying its most successful brand.
I pulled over, engine still running. My mind caught up slowly. Ah, they're calling Trump a Nazi. Making a statement. Being provocative. But the rational understanding didn't match the physical reaction. This wasn't just offensive - it was a visceral assault. The casual display of my family's killers' banner, hung like decor. It was a reminder of genocide, a normalization of Nazi symbols, and frankly the sign’s message was so clouded it would have found a home at a white flower rally. The sign was professionally printed. White background, black text, clean lines - it could have been a campaign banner for the America Nazi party. The worst part was how casually they'd displayed this symbol of genocide, as if it were just another piece of political speech.
There's offensive speech, and then there's violence dressed as speech. A swastika isn't just offensive - it's a promise, a threat, a reminder that genocide isn't just history. The symbol itself is an act of violence, each display a small act of terror against those who remember, those who survived, those who still carry the weight of what it means.
I'd called the Jewish Federation to report the symbol. "We take this very seriously," they'd said, voices grave with institutional concern. Then: "But we're not sure who to connect you with or what to do about it. Can we call you back?" The perfect distillation of official response to unofficial hate - all concern, no action.
I got back in my truck, reversed into the intersection, and drove onto the corner sidewalk, front bumper almost touching the house. The sign hung directly overhead now. I wasn't thinking about blocking traffic or property lines - my vision had narrowed to that black symbol, everything else fading to background noise. I was not sure if I could reach the sign — intentionally hung so high. But I was going to try my hardest.
Standing on the hood of my truck, I could just reach the top edge. The sign was secured better than I'd expected - heavy chains wrapped through metal grommets, industrial zip-ties double-layered at every corner. Someone had spent time on this, planning exactly how to make their hate symbol permanent. I flipped the sign to check the back: some message about billionaire oligarchs. Confirming they were trying to be anti-fascist. But they'd managed to create the opposite - a stark black swastika on white, no context, no crossed-out circle, nothing to mark it as protest. Just hate on display.
A week earlier, I'd been wrestling with this very question of confronting hate symbols in public. Kanye West had just released that Super Bowl ad - a plain white shirt with a black swastika, nothing else. No context, no commentary, just normalized hate. He claims to have made $40,000,000 selling the shirt. I'd spent days asking myself: What would I do if I saw someone wearing that shirt? Would I walk past, preserve the peace? Would I confront them? Would I choose violence over words and pour gasoline on them before striking a match? I hadn't found my answer, but here I was, facing that same symbol, that same choice.
I'd only seen two other swastikas in person before this. One on a white guy covered in Hindu tattoos, desperately trying to belong to something. He'd insisted it was about reclaiming the symbol's original meaning. I'd told him I understood the hindu history, but some things can't be reclaimed, shouldn't be reclaimed. There are countless symbols of spirituality - why choose the one that triggers genocide survivors? The other was on a Nazi in Nome, Alaska, a thousand miles from anywhere, working construction. When he realized I was Jewish, he'd tried to backpedal, claimed he wasn't that person anymore. But the swastika stayed on his forearm, his regret not quite deep enough to warrant removal.
"Is this normal?" I asked a guy walking past, gesturing upward. He followed my gaze, physically recoiling when he saw it. "Jesus, no," he said, shocked. "That's - that's a lot. How long has that been there?"
I climbed down from the hood, thinking through options. No paint with me - I'd just cleaned out my truck last week, all my usual tools gone. But I still had a Swiss Army knife gifted by my father. I pulled it out, testing the blade against my thumb. This was about refusing to let hate symbols become wallpaper in our lives, refusing to let the unthinkable become ordinary. Simple as that.
The Jewish Federation's response echoed in my head: "We take this very seriously." But seriousness without action is just another form of acceptance. Sometimes resistance doesn't look like committees and condemnations. Sometimes it looks like a truck, a knife, and the willingness to act.
I climbed back onto the top of truck and began the work. The saw blade caught against the plastic, making an awful sound but little progress. My hands were already shaking - from the awkward angle, from nerves, from rage. I kept going until a voice cut through the noise.
"What are you doing?" A white woman in her thirties, standing on her porch across the street, arms crossed.
"Cutting down this swastika." My voice steadier than I felt. "It's hate speech. A crime."
"It's not your property," she said, like that settled everything. "Freedom of speech."
"This isn't protected speech." I felt the absurdity of having to explain this. "This is a hate crime."
"I'm just watching out for my neighbor," she said, and I wondered what kind of neighbor you had to be to guard someone's swastika.
A man unlocking his bike nearby unexpectedly entered the scene: "No, I agree. The swastika is weird."
"See?" I called down to the woman. "I've asked others. I'm not being sensitive. This needs to go."
The Bywater has its own relationship with property rights - a neighborhood where punk houses share blocks with million-dollar renovations, where performative anarchist book clubs meet in coffee shops owned by the rich children of industrialists. Every other building sports some kind of protest sign: "Stop the Grain Train," "Cease Fire," manifestos against gentrification posted on gentrified porches. But this sign was different - stark black on white, positioned with the deliberate height of someone who understood both visibility and deniability.
I switched blades on the Swiss Army knife - the straight edge instead of the saw. The knife sliced through the corrugated plastic channels like butter, each stroke a clean line instead of the saw blade's angry tear. I'd decided to cut just the swastika - leave the rest of the anti-Trump message intact. My hands were still shaking as I worked, balanced on the truck's hood, but there was something almost sacred about the act. How often do you get the chance to literally cut hate out of the world? To surgically extract something malignant? I found myself thinking about doctors, about how they must feel cutting out tumors, about the necessity of steady hands even when dealing with something deadly.
Then it was done, this foot-square piece of Coroplast in my hands. I hadn't thought this far ahead. What do you do with a swastika once you've taken it down? Save it like some twisted trophy? Burn it? Bury it? People keep Nazi memorabilia in museums, in archives, but this wasn't history. This was happening now, on my street, in my time.
I slid off the truck, swastika in hand, heart pounding. The neighbor woman was still glaring, so I called over: "Hey, you seem really interested in this swastika. You want it?" That shut her up. For a moment, everything was quiet.
There's a particular kind of American privilege that lets someone treat genocide as metaphor, that lets them custom-print hate symbols to make political points.
Then the front door burst open. A tall white man came charging out, face twisted red with rage. He ran up on me. Me a jew with a ‘blue collar for fun’ lifestyle - covered in metal shop dust, heavy duty overalls, and a big ol’ truck - and stopped just short of swinging. But the fury poured out of his mouth instead.
"You're an asshole!" he screamed.
I held out the swastika. "You want this?"
He snatched ‘his property’ from my hand.
"You're the one holding a swastika," I said. "Who's the asshole?"
Replying with raw emotion and instinct he shouted "The real Nazis are what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians!" That's when I noticed the Palestinian flag on his house, the collection of left-wing political signs covering the facade. He jabbed a finger toward the flag.
The words hit like a reveal - this wasn't just about clumsy political commentary. Here was something deeper, uglier. I'd thought he was just someone who'd gone too far making a point about Trump. But his instant pivot to "the Israelis” when confronted? That was something else entirely. I’m not pro-israel, but what an absurd way to defend his choice to display a swastika.
The pivot was so quick, so honest - from defending his swastika to invoking Palestinian deaths, as if one horror justifies another, as if forty thousand dead somehow made it okay to hang Nazi symbols in New Orleans. The particular choreography of American political discourse: use one people's tragedy to excuse displaying the symbols of another's genocide.
He pulled out his phone, trying to photograph me as I got in my truck. I almost laughed - what was he going to do? Post about the guy who cut down his swastika? Tell that story at parties? My white truck had no plates. I was anonymous as could be. But my hands were still shaking as I drove away, thinking about how quickly he'd gone from defending "protest art" to spitting centuries-old poison.
You can criticize Trump without a swastika. You can support Palestinians without invoking the Holocaust. But he'd chosen to display that symbol - had it custom printed, mounted it high, intended to defend it with violence. Some part of him wanted that swastika in the world. Needed it there, fifteen feet up, forcing everyone to look at it, to live with it, to accept it as normal.
Later, parked by the river, I turned it over in my mind. Had I made him more or less likely to hate? Had I reinforced whatever beliefs led him to hang that symbol in the first place? There's an argument that I should have left it - after all it was meant to be anti-Trump message. The same message I agree with, just expressed terribly. Maybe I should have knocked on his door first, had a conversation about why the symbol was harmful, tried to educate rather than confront.
But that line of thinking assumes hate symbols are just speech, just politics. That they're fodder for debate rather than acts of violence in themselves. A swastika isn't a political statement - it's a threat. It says: the people who did this could do it again. It says: someone in your community wants you to remember that. When you let hate symbols fly, you tell their targets they're not really welcome here. You make their fear part of the landscape.
The philosophers would have their own takes, of course. Kant might say we have a categorical duty to remove symbols of genocide - that we couldn't universalize a world where such symbols are tolerated. Mill would weigh the harm: the property damage against the community damage, the risk of escalation against the risk of normalization. Aristotle might focus on virtue - what qualities of character does it take to act against hate? What qualities does it take to walk past it?
But in the end, it comes down to something simpler: power and responsibility. I had a truck tall enough to reach. I had the physical capability to act. I had the privilege of being able to risk confrontation. Those aren't accidents - they're obligations. If you can safely remove a symbol of hate from your community, you should. The philosophical arguments just justify what we already know in our bones.
Did I change his mind? Almost certainly not. Did I make him angry? Definitely. But maybe I showed the neighbor who opposed me, or the guy unlocking his bike, or someone else walking past, that you don't have to accept hate in your community. You don't have to debate it or reason with it or try to understand it. Sometimes you just have to cut it down.
I thought about my grandfather's family, wiped out in the Holocaust. About the Hindu guy searching for meaning in other people's symbols. About the Nazi in Nome, living with his regret but not enough to do anything about it. About Kanye selling swastika shirts. About all the ways hate becomes normal, becomes wallpaper, becomes just another thing we live with.
Not today. Not in my city. Not if I can reach it.
