Huge surge seen in 2020 of hateful propaganda
NEW YORK — White supremacist propaganda reached alarming levels across the U.S. in 2020, according to a new report by the AntiDefamation League.
There were 5,125 cases of racist, antiSemitic, antiLGBTQ and other hateful messages spread through physical flyers, stickers, banners and posters, according to Wednesday’s report. That’s nearly double the 2,724 instances reported in 2019. Online propaganda is much harder to quantify, and it’s likely those cases reached into the millions, the antihate organization said.
The ADL, which was founded more than a century ago, said that last year marked the highest level of white supremacist propaganda seen in at least a decade. Its report comes as federal authorities investigate and prosecute those who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January, some of whom are accused of having ties to or expressing support for hate groups and antigovernment militias.
“As we try to understand and put in perspective the past four years, we will always have these bookends of Charlottesville and Capitol Hill,” group CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said.
“The reality is there’s a lot of things that happened in between those moments that set the stage,” he said.
Christian Picciolini, a former farright extremist who founded the deradicalization group Free Radicals Project, said the surge in propaganda tracks with white supremacist and extremist recruiters seeing crises as periods of opportunity.
“They use the uncertainty and fear caused by crisis to win over new recruits to their ‘us vs. them’ narrative, painting the ‘other’ as the cause of their pain, grievances or loss,” Picciolini said.“The current uncertainty caused by the pandemic, job loss, a heated election, protest over extrajudicial police killings of Black Americans, and a national reckoning sparked by our country’s long tradition of racism has created a perfect storm in which to recruit Americans who are fearful of change and progress.”
Propaganda, often distributed with the intention of garnering media and online attention, helps white supremacists normalize their messaging and bolster recruitment efforts, the ADL said in its report. Language used in the propaganda is frequently veiled with a patriotic slant, making it seem benign to an untrained eye.
But some flyers, stickers and posters are explicitly racist and antiSemitic. One piece of propaganda disseminated by the New Jersey European Heritage Association included the words “Black Crimes Matter,” a derisive reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, along with cherrypicked crime statistics about attacks on white victims by Black assailants.
A neoNazi group known as Folks Front distributed stickers that include the words “White Lives Matter.”
The propaganda appeared in every state except Hawaii. The highest levels were seen in Texas, Washington, California, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia and Pennsylvania, according to the report.