REPORT: HATE PROPAGANDA SOARED IN 2022
Antisemitic leaflets dropped at private homes in Southern California. Flyers saying “Stand Up White Man” left in driveways in suburban Indiana. A laser projector casting hateful messages outside a football stadium in Florida.
Propaganda efforts by White supremacist groups soared in 2022 as such incidents reached a five-year high across the country, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
In the report, released Thursday, researchers for the ADL say they have identified more than 6,750 separate occasions last year on which White supremacist organizations distributed racist, antisemitic or otherwise hateful flyers, stickers, banners, images, posters or graffiti. That is a nearly 40 percent rise in similar incidents compared with 2021 and a more than fivefold increase since 2018, according to the report.
Propaganda by hate groups serves not only to frighten and harass those who see it, but can also act as a powerful recruiting tool. Moreover, it can desensitize people to acts of aggression against victims — and even inspire violence in its viewers, scholars of political violence say.
While most propaganda efforts by White supremacist groups are targeted at local communities and are often limited in scope, in many cases they seek to capitalize on more prominent events. The ADL has previously pointed out that some groups piggybacked on hateful behavior last year by rapper Kanye West, who made a torrent of antisemitic remarks and attended a highly publicized dinner in November with Nick Fuentes, a White supremacist leader, and former President Donald Trump.
“There’s no question that white supremacists and antisemites are trying to terrorize and harass Americans and have significantly stepped up their use of propaganda as a tactic to make their presence known in communities nationwide,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the ADL, said in a statement that accompanied the report.
While the ADL’s researchers determined that at least 50 separate organizations distributed White supremacist propaganda last year, three groups — Patriot Front, Goyim Defense League and the White Lives Matter movement — were responsible for more than 90 percent of the incidents. While these groups are not household names, as are other far-right organizations like the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers militia, they have steadily promoted their racist, antisemitic and White supremacist messages by a variety of means in recent years, including at marches, rallies and public harassment campaigns.