IT WASN’T IMMEDIATELY CLEAR who challenged whom to a push-up contest at the Lewis County Pride festival in Centralia last June — the white supremacist or the Pride celebrant. It was a bright Saturday in the small southwestern Washington city, and the festival was in full swing at a brick plaza on Tower Avenue, the main street. Music blasted, people danced in rainbow tutus and rainbow hats and rainbow face paint; there was a drag performance, and across the plaza, large yellow umbrellas shaded tables. The theme was “Bee Yourself.”
Kyle Wheeler, one of the festival’s coorganizers, wore an oversized straw hat with antennas on top. Someone pulled him aside and told him a group dressed in black was headed toward the festival. Wheeler looked down Tower: White supremacists were marching toward the festival from every direction. One flew a Nazi black sun flag. Others carried a banner proclaiming “DEGENERACY NOTHING TO BE PROUD OF.” They wore black shirts and brown khakis, and most had covered their faces with skull-printed balaclavas. Some shirts read “Might is Right.”
“It was almost like a swarm of bees,” Wheeler recalled. Rainbow-clad Pride attendees bunched around the men in black, blocking the plaza with their bodies. The two groups traded insults. One white supremacist sneered that the people at Pride were so out of shape, they couldn’t do a push-up.
That’s when, as Wheeler watched, a Pride-goer in a pink T-shirt and a white supremacist dropped to their hands on the warm pavement.
A clear winner emerged: The Pride attendee quickened his pace, clapping between push-ups as the white supremacist crumpled. The Pride crowd cheered, dancing victoriously around the men. A remix of Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way” blared. A woman twerked in front of the group’s banner, edging one man away with her butt. “Look at all these cowards with their masks!” another woman yelled, filming the black-clad men. The white supremacists began to trickle away, and the party resumed.
But Centralia was not the only place in Lewis County where tensions were rising. Lewis is one of the most conservative counties in Washington: Though Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee won a third term handily, by roughly 13 percentage points statewide in 2020, 69.2% of voters here opted for his far-right Republican challenger.
Later that day in Chehalis, often called Centralia’s “Twin City,” the local Republican Party distributed literature and collected signatures opposing confidentiality for minors seeking gender-affirming care. A Pride-affiliated drag show was taking place a block away.
Tempers flared afterward. At a meeting on June 13, Republican County Commissioner Lindsey Pollock blamed her own party. “Last weekend, Neo-Nazis and leaders of the Lewis County Republican Party harassed Pride celebrants, ” she said. The groups were unaffiliated, but their intent was the same: to “intimidate a minority group,” she said.
During a Centralia City Council meeting that same day, people were visibly shaken by the hands-off approach taken by local law enforcement at Pride. “I’ve never felt so scared,” Usha Sahadeva-Brooks, a resident and community organizer, said. A white business owner who was at work that day warned that bigotry like this was worrisome, especially given Centralia’s history.
“I have deep roots in this place,” she said. “My great uncle was a logger and a Wobbly, so I’m familiar with the complex history of this place.”
Another Pride attendee told the council that she tried to flag down a police officer for help, but they just drove away.
Police Chief Stacy Denham defended his department’s inaction. “This is kind of new for us,” he said. “We just didn’t see this coming.”
Wheeler didn’t buy it. “It’s not that he or his department didn’t see any of this coming, it’s that they keep continuing to, noting previous attacks on queer spaces nationwide. “You can’t see something you don’t want to.”
