A giant red swastika was projected on the outside wall of a campus dorm at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater on Sunday evening, hours before the start of the spring semester, according to school officials and video posted to social media.
The swastika was projected by a group of four people chanting what Chancellor Corey King called “racist remarks” in a statement to the campus community. The group were also lighting what appeared to be road flares, according to King.
Footage of the incident that circulated on social media shows four people decked out in red and black, filming each other as they yell about “white men” and blood: “We are everywhere. There will be blood, blood, blood.” The group also projected slogans like “Tread or Die” and “Blood Tribe” on the dorm wall, according to WISN.
“The actions of the group last night are abhorrent and go against our core values,” King said. “At UW-Whitewater, we strive to create a safe community where everyone feels a sense of belonging. We take pride in our Warhawk family. We reject hate in all its forms.”
The group was not affiliated with the university, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. They had cleared out of the area by the time police were summoned to the scene, around 5:40 p.m., according to King. No further sightings were reported.
“It’s very disturbing. I think it is a deplorable act of terrorism, in my opinion,” Milwaukee resident Tori Pharm told CBS 58. Pharm said she’d received a text from her daughter about the incident hours after she’d moved her daughter into her dorm that day, asking, “‘Why are there Nazis on campus?’”
“Hate, you know what I’m saying, there is no room for that. It shouldn’t be here,” student Ammiel Jackson told the station. “I feel like it puts a bad image on our school as well.”
The incident comes just two months after a neo-Nazi faction sporting “Blood Tribe” symbols marched through the nearby city of Madison, carrying swastika flags. The Anti-Defamation League has identified the Blood Tribe as a “growing” and “hardcore” white supremacist group that sees itself “as both the last remaining bulwark against enemies of the white race and the only path to a white ethnostate.”
College campuses have come to be seen as battlegrounds for far-right groups in increasing numbers in recent years. The number of recorded bias incidents on campuses have also spiked in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza. The alarming rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia at schools nationwide prompted the U.S. Department of Education to open a federal probe in November.