Hate can grow like a weed in Conn.

There should be no need to editorialize about racist messages being distributed in the streets of Connecticut

Such thinking should have expired a century ago. By now, the stand against hate should be united.

Despite its reputation, however, time does not reliably deliver maturity, or healing.

Back in the 1920s, Stamford residents found invitations to a KKK meeting in mailboxes, including the threat to “kindly attend or suffer the consequences.”

Even in the days before characters could talk in motion pictures, residents spoke up to oppose such groups. But they could not silence bigotry.

Nearly a century later, and just a few blocks away, Stamford resident Brian Franklin was walking his dog Sunday when he discovered flyers left by a white supremacy group. Text on the paper points to how the white population has decreased in various corners of New England over the last 10 years, punctuated by “Connecticut has become 13.6 % less white.”

“Where is this going?” asks the flyer from the Nationalist Social Club 131. Turn it over and it looks like it could have been printed even more than a century ago, with an illustration of an armed figure that resembles a Revolutionary War soldier. “New Englanders! You are being replaced. Organize and resist!”

Condemnation of the flyers was swift, coming from Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons and the United Jewish Federation of Greater Stamford, New Canaan and Darien.

But the clearest clarion call came from the man who found the flyers.

“I think it’s imperative that we speak out against this robustly so they know they aren’t welcome here,” Franklin said.

The volume needs to be cranked up because such incidents are becoming increasingly commonplace. Just last week, the group Patriot Front distributed recruitment stickers in Westport while racist graffiti is showing up throughout the town.

This comes on the heels of a report from the ADL that such propaganda spiked by 115 percent in 2022, the result of 220 documented incidents involving racist, homophobic and antisemitic messages in state parks, at homes and on car windows.

A collective shrug cannot be the reflexive response. Hate is not as ephemeral as words on paper. Ignoring the problem normalizes it, which has only led to 10 Black people being shot down in Buffalo, N.Y.; to 23 deaths in a Walmart in

El Paso three years ago; to 11 people being killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.

Outrage at racism should not be divided by political lines, it should be universal. Instead, the existence of systemic racism is denied. Lessons of tolerance are discouraged, even mocked.

So take note of those elected officials who stay silent as hate creeps through Connecticut.

If anything, bigotry has become even more insidious with the passage of time. A century ago, after the flyers turned up in Stamford, police went straight to the home of a KKK leader in Darien to investigate (he denied it). These days, the distribution of hate on pieces of paper is just as stealth, though leaders suggested neighbors to check home security cameras for footage.

Do not be silent in the face of bigotry. It should have been buried in the past, but has a future as long as it is ignored. It is the weed that can consume the garden.