White Supremacy Is Terrorism, Not a Difference of Opinion
Police and local governments routinely create and legitimize legal rationales for aggressively targeting some groups—the homeless, people of color, anti-hate activists, people in possession of recreational drugs—yet when white nationalism and racism are involved, they feign powerlessness until the situation grows out of hand. When the community organizes counterprotests, law enforcement rediscovers its confidence to act. The protesters, not the people they protest, are defined as the problem.
This is where law enforcement, elected officials, the media, and much of the country get it wrong about white supremacy. The ideology is violence, and its adherents are by definition a threat. Their presence makes other people—people of color, people of targeted religions—unsafe. White supremacy is treated as a difference of political opinion instead of as terrorism. People who devote their lives to purging "their" country of nonwhites are a threat; their presence at a community event makes others unsafe. People may reasonably differ on political issues; whether or not people of color have a right to exist is not one such issue.