White Supremacist Propaganda Soared Last Year, Report Finds

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 A.D.L. has previously pointed out that some groups piggybacked on hateful behavior last year by the 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 J. 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 A.D.L., said in a statement that accompanied the report.

While the A.D.L.’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.

Patriot Front, which promotes the idea of a white ethno-state in the United States, was responsible for the majority of the propaganda efforts last year, according to the report. It often cloaked its overtly white supremacist ideas in softer and more palatable phrases like “Reclaim America” and “One Nation Against Immigration.”

The group broke away from another organization, Vanguard America, in August 2017 after the bloody “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. Last year, it was involved in a number of public marches, including one that targeted a local Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and resulted in the arrests of dozens of its members, including its founder, Thomas Rousseau.