There has been a nearly 80 percent increase in white supremacist propaganda campaigns on US college campuses in the last year, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League.
The Jewish civil rights group claims that white supremacist groups have been targeting schools since 2016, fueling the spread of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic material on campuses.
The ADL has documented 292 cases of white supremacist propaganda at colleges across the nation between last September and May, a 77 percent increase from the previous academic year.
College campuses across the country saw a dramatic rise white supremacist propaganda incidents during the last school year, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League
The report details the spread of propaganda messages ranging from ‘veiled white supremacist language to explicitly racist images and words that attack minority groups’
The flier above was found at Texas A&M’s campus in Corpus Christi this year, sparking outrage
‘We’re concerned to see that white supremacists are accelerating their efforts to target schools with propaganda in hopes of recruiting young people to support their bigoted worldview,’ ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a news release on the findings.
The ADL’s Center on Extremism has counted a total of 478 cases since September 1, 2016, on 287 campuses in 47 states and the District of Columbia.
It claims that one group, Identity Evropa, was responsible for nearly half of those incidents.
Colleges in Texas and California collectively were targeted in more than a quarter of the cases.
‘The propaganda messages range from veiled white supremacist language to explicitly racist images and words that attack minority groups, including Jews, Blacks, Muslims, non-white immigrants, and the LGBTQ community,’ the report says.
Propaganda materials cited in the report included posters, fliers, stickers and banners.
Many of the more recent campus campaigns have been centered around the immigration debate, calling for students to report ‘any and all illegal aliens’
Another flier found at Texas A&M this year refers to illegal immigrants as ‘rapugees’
Santa Clara University in California was among the colleges mentioned in the report, which says that Identity Evropa fliers were posted on the school’s Ethnic Studies Department bulletin board in January.
The same month racist fliers were posted on top of photos of black historical figures outside the department of African-American studies at the University of South Carolina.
At the University of Tennessee, fliers referencing Hitler were plastered over posters promoting Black History Month in February.
At Weber State University in Utah, another group called Patriot Front posted a flier that read: ‘Not here not ever’ over a sign promoting a learning series on the issue of ‘civility’.
The ADL report is based largely on complaints, news reports, and posts from the extremist groups themselves.
The group aimed to establish the credibility of the reports through photos and confirmation from third parties.