Since the beginning of the school year in September, and particularly since January, college campuses across the country have seen an uptick in activity from white supremacist groups targeting students, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League out Monday.
The report found there have been 104 incidents involving white supremacists on college campuses since September, 63 of which have occurred since the beginning of 2017.
“White supremacists have consciously made the decision to focus their recruitment efforts on students and have in some cases openly boasted of efforts to establish a physical presence on campus,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “While there have been recruitment efforts in the past, never have we seen anti-Semites and white supremacists so focused on outreach to students on campus.”
The ADL linked this uptick in white supremacist activity on college campuses to rhetoric in the 2016 election.
“White supremacists, emboldened by the rhetoric of the 2016 presidential campaign, are stepping out of the shadows and into the mainstream,” the report reads, noting that white nationalist Jared Taylor wrote in January that “the election of Donald Trump is a sign of rising white consciousness.”
The report found the “vast majority of incidents” on college campuses involving white supremacists involved fliers and stickers. It linked a majority of the incidents to two groups, Identity Evropa and American Vanguard, while noting a white supremacist group founded by Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, has launched a campaign to place posters on college campuses. White supremacist hacker Andrew Auernheimer, known by his psuedonym “weev,” also sent racist fliers with swastikas to campus printers across the U.S., per the report.
White supremacist fliers and stickers have appeared on campuses in at least 25 states, according to the ADL.
But white supremacist groups have been stepping up their physical presence on college campuses, too, the report found.
Identity Evropa launched “Project Siege,” which urges members to “create space for our ideas” on college campuses by talking to students, according to the report. A student employee at the University of Wisconsin—who’d been convicted years ago of setting fires at predominantly black churches—tried to form a Madison branch of the American Freedom Party, a white nationalist group that cheered on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Prominent white nationalist leader Richard Spencer also spoke at Texas A&M in December, the report noted.
Read the full report below:
Though both my parents were Jewish and I went to Hebrew school as a kid, I haven’t been in a synagogue in decades. I’ve been an atheist since I was 13 or 14 and started reading about existentialism and Zen, and consider myself an American and Human before Jewish. But as a student of history, I know that in the minds of the bigots my ethnic heritage trumps my education and beliefs–and could cause me to be attacked or worse. Now watching the rollback of voting rights for minorities, protections for gay and trans folks, and the vicious attacks on immigrants, I am deeply worried about our nation.
One of the few Jewish things I paid attention to and was proud of as a kid was the Anti Defamation League. That they walked beside Blacks at Selma and Montgomery. That they understood that an attack on any minority is an attack on all minorities. That they stood up for our Muslim “enemies” when they were unfairly attacked. Then came the right-wing Republican Abe Foxman at the top of the ADL, and the knee-jerk defense of Israel no matter what failings and real awfulness that country perpetrated. I’m glad to see the ADL getting its mojo back. The current racism and anti-Semitism is the worst I’ve seen in some sixty years of being aware of hate as a human motivator. And yes, I attribute the current climate of hate towards all minorities as a direct result of Trump and his refusal to call out a core element of his supporters.
First of all, his pupils are huge. Second, he looks really evil. I read an article someone did about him a while ago about how normal and handsome he is and how surprising it was that he was just so laid back and easy going.
Screw that.
He’s also a fragile flower considering how he went down like a lamp when he got punched on Inauguration Day. Damn, that was awesome
The only person who might be “surprised” at this news is Dear Leader himself, who is shocked! shocked! that such things could in any way be attributed to anything he has said or done.
Not only do you get to pay a fortune for college, now you get to worry that your child is being approached by Nazi sympathizers who believe violence is the way to solve problems.
Think these guys take no for an answer?