NEW YORK (AP) – White supremacist white propaganda has reached alarming levels in the US by 2020, according to a new report which the Anti-Defamation League provided to The Associated Press.
There were 5,125 cases of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ and other hateful messages distributed according to physical leaflets, stickers, banners and posters, according to Wednesday’s report. This is almost double the 2,724 cases reported in 2019. Online propaganda is much harder to quantify, and the cases are likely to be reached in millions of countries, the anti-hate organization said.
The ADL, founded more than a century ago, said last year it was the highest level of white supremacist propaganda seen in at least a decade. The report comes as federal authorities investigate and prosecute those who stormed the U.S. capital in January. Some of them are accused of having ties to hate groups and military militias against the government.
“As we try to understand and put into perspective for the past four years, we will always have these bookends from Charlottesville and Capitol Hill,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the group.
“The reality is that a lot of things happened between the moments that the stage presents,” he said.
Christian Picciolini, a former right-wing extremist who founded the deradicalization group Free Radicals Project, said the increase in propaganda tracks with white supremacist and extremist recruiters viewed crises as periods.
“They use the uncertainty and fear caused by crisis to win new recruits for their ‘us versus them’ narrative, and paint the ‘other’ as the cause of their pain, grievances or loss,” Picciolini told AP ‘The current insecurity caused by the pandemic, job loss, a violent election, protests over extrajudicial killings of the black American police and a national settlement unleashed by the country’s long tradition of racism’ created a perfect storm to recruit Americans who are afraid of change and progress. ”
Propaganda, which is often disseminated with the aim of attracting media and online attention, helps white people to normalize their messages and strengthen recruitment efforts, the ADL said in its report. The language used in propaganda is often covered with a patriotic slant, which it seems to an untrained eye.
But some leaflets, stickers and posters are explicitly racist and anti-Semitic. One piece of propaganda distributed by the New Jersey European Heritage Association included the words ‘Black Crimes Matter’, a ridiculous reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, along with crime statistics about the attacks on white victims by black attackers.
A neo-Nazi group, known as the Folks Front, distributed stickers containing the words “White Lives Matter”.
According to the report, at least 30 well-known white supremacist groups were behind hate propaganda. But three groups – NJEHA, Patriot Front and Nationalist Social Club – were responsible for 92% of the activity.
The propaganda appears in every state except Hawaii. According to the report, the highest levels were seen in Texas, Washington, California, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Despite the overall increase, the ADL reported a sharp decline in the spread of white supremacist propaganda among colleges and universities, mainly due to the coronavirus pandemic and the lack of students living and studying on campus. There were 303 reports of propaganda on university campuses in 2020, compared to 630 in 2019.
Greenblatt acknowledged that freedom of speech allows for rhetoric that ‘we do not like and we detest. But when the speech incites violence or creates conditions for the normalization of extremism, he must oppose it.
“There’s no pixie fabric you can sprinkle on this, because it’s all going to disappear,” Greenblatt said. “We need to realize that the roots of this problem run deep.”
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Morrison is a member of the AP’s race and ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.