By MICHELLE BOORSTEIN Washington Post
White-supremacist groups continued in 2021 to distribute propaganda at a historically high rate, a report published Thursday says, part of what some experts call an increasingly panicked reaction to growing diversity in America.
The Anti-Defamation League’s research found 4,851 reported cases of white supremacist propaganda in 2021, including racist, anti- Semitic and anti-LGBTQ items.
That’s down 5% from 2020 but way up from 294 cases in 2017, when the anti-hate organization began observing a rise in white-supremacist activity.
ADL researchers found 1,206 incidents of propaganda in 2018 and 2,714 in 2019.
The ADL found a 27% increase in distributions of anti-Semitic propaganda, with 277 incidents in 2020 and 352 in 2021, including stickers outside a California synagogue proclaiming “Hitler was right” and dozens of drops across the country of fliers blaming Jews for the coronavirus.
Carla Hill, the report’s author and associate director of the ADL Center On Extremism, said white-supremacist activity and organizing took off in the past decade as racists became “more and more desperate, losing the chance to have America be white. And 2017 was the pinnacle point.”
Hill said there was a buildup of white-supremacist groups leading up to the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017.
Before then, such groups had focused on college campuses.
However, the event was considered a failure, she said, and the different groups “only held it together for a little while after and then fractured.”
More than a dozen of the nation’s most prominent white supremacists and hate groups involved in the deadly Unite the Right rally were found liable in November by a jury who said the men and their racist organizations should pay $26 million in damages.
After Charlottesville, Hill said, the movement shifted to anonymous distribution of propaganda.
Throughout 2021, at least 38 white-supremacist groups distributed propaganda, but three groups — Patriot Front, New Jersey European Heritage Association (NJEHA) and Folkish Resistance Movement (FRM), formerly known as Folksfront — were responsible for 91% of the incidents, the ADL report found.
The Anti-Defamation League’s research found 4,851 reported cases of white supremacist propaganda in 2021, including racist, anti- Semitic and anti-LGBTQ items.
That’s down 5% from 2020 but way up from 294 cases in 2017, when the anti-hate organization began observing a rise in white-supremacist activity.
ADL researchers found 1,206 incidents of propaganda in 2018 and 2,714 in 2019.
The ADL found a 27% increase in distributions of anti-Semitic propaganda, with 277 incidents in 2020 and 352 in 2021, including stickers outside a California synagogue proclaiming “Hitler was right” and dozens of drops across the country of fliers blaming Jews for the coronavirus.
Carla Hill, the report’s author and associate director of the ADL Center On Extremism, said white-supremacist activity and organizing took off in the past decade as racists became “more and more desperate, losing the chance to have America be white. And 2017 was the pinnacle point.”
Hill said there was a buildup of white-supremacist groups leading up to the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017.
Before then, such groups had focused on college campuses.
However, the event was considered a failure, she said, and the different groups “only held it together for a little while after and then fractured.”
More than a dozen of the nation’s most prominent white supremacists and hate groups involved in the deadly Unite the Right rally were found liable in November by a jury who said the men and their racist organizations should pay $26 million in damages.
After Charlottesville, Hill said, the movement shifted to anonymous distribution of propaganda.
Throughout 2021, at least 38 white-supremacist groups distributed propaganda, but three groups — Patriot Front, New Jersey European Heritage Association (NJEHA) and Folkish Resistance Movement (FRM), formerly known as Folksfront — were responsible for 91% of the incidents, the ADL report found.
Comments (0)