White supremacist ideas seeping into mainstream
Incidents show startling jump in the past year
Colin P. Clarke has been teaching a course on terrorism and insurgency at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for four years, and much more of his class these days is devoted to white supremacy than in the past.
So Clarke was not one bit surprised when a new report by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism revealed that efforts to spread white supremacy propaganda – often through discriminatory fliers, banners and posters – more than doubled from 2018 to last year.
Moreover, the university is located just a short walk from scene of a mass shooting the Tree of Life synagogue; Clarke has seen up close the consequences of hateful words turning into violent action.
“It’s concerning because, for all the people who don’t move on to become threats of violence, some will, and some will get their start by seeing pieces of propaganda that will alert them to the fact this group exists,” Clarke said.
The ADL report represents a sobering warning about the reach of white supremacist groups, which can take advantage of the efficiency and anonymity provided by social media to disseminate their ideology with little fear of backlash.
Last year, the ADL recorded a record number of propaganda incidents with 2,713 cases, compared with 1,214 in 2018. College campuses, full of impressionable young minds open to new ideas, are a favorite target, receiving about onefourth of the propaganda against minority groups like immigrants, blacks, Jews, Muslims and members of the LGBTQ community.
The report also said all states except Hawaii registered instances of this kind of messaging, which is often cloaked in patriotic themes and serves as a recruiting tool. In addition, the ADL said the use of announced white supremacist rallies has given way to flash demonstrations, which are less likely to draw counter-protests and negative media coverage.
John Cohen, a former counterterrorism coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security and now an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, said white supremacists have become more sophisticated in their communication.
“They’ve rebranded themselves,” Cohen said. “In the past, they were viewed as racist individuals who were on the fringe or outside of mainstream society. Now their thoughts and ideas and messaging have been incorporated into the mainstream political discourse by a growing number of elected officials.”
Although emphasizing he’s not singling out either party, Cohen warned about the danger of normalizing white supremacist ideology.
In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, President Donald Trump often railed against the caravans of migrants from Central America making their way to the U.S. to request asylum.
On Oct. 27 of that year, 10 days before the election, a gunman burst into the Tree of Life synagogue and killed 11 people in a shooting rampage. Robert Bowers is charged in the attack; authorities said he posted anti-Semitic comments online, blaming Jews for aiding caravans of “invaders that kill our people.”
Less than a year later, on Aug. 3, 2019, a gunman linked to a hateful manifesto decrying a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” gunned down 22 people and wounded 24 others at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Charged is 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, whose screed warned about foreigners replacing white people in the U.S.
Cohen said political leaders are playing with fire when they promote white supremacist talking points, such as exaggerated claims of the security threat immigrants present and their supposed drain on public resources, to stoke their supporters.
“By mainstreaming those ideological beliefs for the purposes of inspiring their political base, they have also inspired disaffected, violence-prone individuals to conduct attacks,” Cohen said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re seeing an increase in acts of domestic terrorism in the country.”
Equating immigration with an “invasion,” as Bowers and Crusius did, has been a common tactic of Trump’s campaign.
According to research by Media Matters, in January and February 2019 alone his Facebook page ran more than 2,000 ads using that term.
The president is far from the only elected leader to make that analogy, but his voice carries the farthest.
“When you have the person with the biggest bullhorn not only in the country but in the world using this language, doesn’t that give cover to other people to use it?” said Clarke, who is also a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center, a nonprofit that focuses on global security issues.
Both Cohen and Clarke said educating the public is crucial to countering white supremacist propaganda, especially getting the word out about the means those groups use, such as radicalizing teenagers online through messages distributed in the gaming community.