White supremacist propaganda in the US more than doubled in 2019 — report

White supremacy becomes more and more visible and mainstream in the US year by year, according to a report compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a New York-based Jewish nonprofit. 

The report says the distribution of white supremacist propaganda across the US has risen by more than 120 per cent between 2018 and 2019.

From 2017 to 2018, the ADL also recorded a 180 per cent rise in fake news, disinformation campaign, rumour-mongering and other forms of propaganda propagated by the far-right groups that espouse racist views against non-whites.  

  Founded in 1913 to combat anti-Semitism and discrimination against other minorities, the ADL reported 2,713 cases of circulated propaganda by white supremacist groups including fliers, posters and banners. 

The propaganda essentially targets Jews, Muslims, African-Americans and non-white immigrants. 

University campuses were main targets for the propaganda as the last year saw incidents on college campuses nearly double, encompassing 433 separate campuses. 

About two-thirds of the total propaganda in the report was traced back to a single white supremacist group, Patriot Front, which was founded after the Charlottesville incident in which an anti-Trump protester was killed. 

The ADL describes the Patriot Front ¨stating: “[It] falls into the alt-right segment of the white supremacist movement but presents itself as a ‘patriotic’ nationalist group.”

The group’s manifesto calls for “American Fascism” which it describes as a “return to the traditions and virtues of our forefathers”. 

The manifesto also made clear that no one is “American” except white people. 

Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism says by emphasising language “about empowerment”, white supremacists are employing “a tactic to try to get eyes onto their ideas in a way that is cheap and that brings it to a new generation of people who are learning how to even make sense out of these messages”. 

According to the FBI, US law enforcement agencies have arrested more suspects related to white supremacist movements or what the FBI described as “domestic terrorism” than those who allegedly have connections to international terror groups such as Al Qaeda and Daesh. 

By calling it domestic terrorism, the FBI has identified far-right violence as a bigger threat to national security than any foreign terror group. 

Since the anti-immigrant, far-right rhetoric has become mainstream under the presidency of Donald Trump, white supremacist violence has increased. 

The rhetoric is followed by frequent attacks on minorities. 

Notably, last August, a 21-year-old white man shot and killed 22 people and wounded two dozen more shortly after he posted his ‘manifesto’ online. In the manifesto, he talked about the “Hispanic invasion” of the US, the word “invasion” Trump has used repeatedly to describe the flow of migrants along the US-Mexico border. 

Trump used the phrase “very fine people” to describe far-right attackers who carried guns and assaulted the anti-Trump protesters in Charlottesville. 

And when he was asked about the white nationalist who killed 49 Muslims at mosques in New Zealand, he said that white nationalism is not a real danger, claiming “it is a small group of people”. 

The attacker who left documents that outlined his motivations called Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose”. 

But despite endorsements by multiple far-right nationalist groups and individuals, Trump has not accepted claims that his own anti-immigrant and racially charged rhetoric about Muslims, Latinos and blacks have contributed to the rising violence of white nationalists.