CT town targeted by white supremacist recruiters

BRISTOL — Flyers promoting white separatism were strewn around Bristol this week, the latest Connecticut community hit with the racist recruiting effort.

Several hundred flyers from the New England Nationalist Social Club were flung around streets in the city's northernmost section, Deputy Police Chief Matthew Moskowitz said Wednesday. The daylight hour dumping followed similar distributions by the same neo-Nazi group in West Hartford and other towns earlier this year.

Rooted in the Boston area, the organization has been making forays into Connecticut. Flyers strewn in East Hartford and Southington in April declared a stand "for the security and prosperity of white New Englanders." On Market Street in Hartford, group members wearing black jackets, ball caps and facemasks unfurled banners that said "White Lives Matter," "Defend New England" and "Defend White Lives."

In late April, flyers from the organization were tossed on West Hartford's Whitman Avenue, Fernridge Park, Walton Drive and Braeburn Road, police said. Detectives were investigating and police said they were working with state and federal law enforcement partners on the matter, according to The Hartford Courant.

Bristol police are pooling information with police in other affected towns to generate leads, Moskowitz said. Police also are looking for surveillance footage from homeowners in the area to identify suspects, who would be charged with illegal dumping, he said.

The Anti Defamation League defines the Nationalist Social Club as a neo-Nazi group active in the U.S. and abroad. Using the number "131," alpha-numeric code for Anti Communist Action, group members "see themselves as soldiers at war with a hostile, Jewish-controlled system that is deliberately plotting the extinction of the white race," according to ADL.

The group emerged in December 2019 in eastern Massachusetts with a focus on blotting out anarchist and gang graffiti with their own spray-painted messages. Asked about terms used to describe his group, including "racist," "white supremacist" and "Nazi," founder Christopher Hood told the Boston Globe in 2020, "If anyone calls me them, I don't tell them they're wrong."

Hood told the Globe his group was "not inclined to commit violence," but a hate group expert quoted in the article described the organization's ideology as a mix of Neo-Nazism and violent white supremacy with an end game of creating an all-white society.

"We oppose the criminal antiAmerican & anti-White street gangs such as MS13, Black Lives Matter and Antifa," one of the flyers spread around an East Hartford neighborhood said. "We are for us. By Us. And against those against us."

"Our motivations to carry out this mission," the group declared, "do not come from a place of hatred, but a love for our own people. No one else will protect us!"

The area Black Lives Matter chapter, BLM 860, held a counterdemonstration after the flyers were strewn in West Hartford, and community leaders there and in other towns have condemned the group.

“Many of these white supremacy groups do require that their members perform incidents of stickering and flyering,” Stacey Sobel, Connecticut's regional director of the ADL, said during a news conference in West Hartford in early May.

“We're going to see this as these groups gain a foothold. We're going to see more of these incidents.”

Sobel said the flyers are part of a rising trend in antisemitic incidents in Connecticut and elsewhere. A recent ADL report found that antisemitic incidents were up 42 percent in Connecticut in 2021.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal announced at the same news conference in May that federal funds were available in the state to combat hate crimes. Blumenthal said there would be $26 million in federal funding dedicated to combating hate crimes, including $5 million from the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act available to states and municipalities to improve hate crime reporting. The other $21 million will be allocated to the Department of Justice's Community Relations Service, which provides consultation and assistance to communities.