Shawn Vestal: Racist groups ramped up a ‘barrage of propaganda’ in 2020

When a neo-Nazi spray-painted Spokane’s Temple Beth Shalom with swastikas and other hateful graffiti, he said he was trying to recruit more people to his cause.

He’s far from the only one. The past year has seen a resurgent “barrage of propaganda” by white supremacists around the region, state and country, deploying graffiti, fliers, posters, banners and stickers at a far greater pace than in the past, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual report.

The number of such incidents almost doubled in 2020, the report says, growing from 2,724 in 2019 to 5,125 last year. Washington was among the states with the most activity, with 345 reported incidents, and the incidents occurred throughout the Inland Northwest with a steady regularity.

In April, fliers from the white supremacist Patriot Front showed up at Gonzaga University, then in separate incidents around town: “To ourselves and our posterity,” “Reclaim America,” “Not stolen. Conquered.”

They showed up again in June and July, along with others from the neo-Nazi 14First – the synagogue vandal’s group. They read, in part: “Say no to race mixing all mixed couples thanks for taking our trash. White power sieg heil.” And “Ask yourselves why your city was taken over by ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter.”

In June and July, 14First fliers were distributed in Airway Heights. In June and November, Patriot Front fliers showed up in Post Falls. Repeatedly last fall, Patriot Front fliers were spread at Eastern Washington University.

We hear a lot about the internet and social media as platforms that foster and fuel the racist cesspools of the country. But racists have clearly not given up on good old-fashioned print-and-paper.

There is something particularly insidious about these incidents. Often, they draw only fleeting public attention. Fliers are plastered on car windshields. Stickers are attached to light posts. Posters show up around college campuses. Sometimes they receive brief media attention, but often they don’t, and there’s little factual information to report about them when they do.

But they are an important and increasingly common tool in injecting racism and white supremacy into the mainstream, ADL says in its report.

“Propaganda gives white supremacists the ability to maximize media and online attention, while limiting the risk of individual exposure, negative media coverage, arrests and public backlash that often accompanies more public events,” the report says. “The barrage of propaganda, which overwhelmingly features veiled white supremacist language with a patriotic slant, is an effort to normalize white supremacists’ message and bolster recruitment efforts while targeting minority groups including Jews, Blacks, Muslims, non-white immigrants, and the LGBTQ community.”

And all this is helping to fuel a domestic terror threat that federal officials expect to intensify in the coming year. A March 1 assessment by The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that violent extremists pose an “elevated threat” in 2021, and that groups motivated by racism and white supremacism, along with militia groups, pose the greatest danger of violence.

Racist groups present the highest likelihood of a “mass casualty event against civilians,” the report said, while the militia groups are most likely to target government and law enforcement personnel.

“Newer sociopolitical developments – such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence – will almost certainly spur some (domestic violent extremists) to try to engage in violence this year,” the report says.

The ADL mapped propaganda incidents all over the country and found that the most frequent propagandists smuggle racist beliefs under patriotic, pro-nationalist themes – “Reclaim America” or “United we stand.”

By far, the biggest propaganda spreader is Patriot Front, a Texas-based group that masks a white supremacist agenda in images and slogans that combine elements of fascism and patriotism. Lots of red, white and blue. Lots of angry “patriotic” rhetoric.

Lots of gibberish like this, from its website: “America lives in the hearts of its true inheritance. … The faithful of the nation will foster a social, moral, and civilizational health which will allow the people to prosper alongside the guidance of a State which ensures an existence for them and their posterity.”

It’s not hard to read between those awkward lines, but in case you can’t, the group makes its meaning clear in its manifesto. An example: “An African … may have lived, worked, and even been classed as a citizen in America for centuries, yet he is not American. He is, as he likely prefers to be labelled, an African in America. The same rule applies to others who are not of the founding stock of our people as well as to those who do not share the common unconscious that permeates throughout our greater civilization, and the European diaspora.”

Another major source of such propaganda is 14First – the Spokane group to which the man who spray-painted swastikas at the synagogue belongs. That man, Raymond Bryant, has been responsible for distributing fliers around the region; he and his pals act and present themselves more like the skinhead racists from the bad old days of Inland Northwest neo-Nazis, without any patriotic pretense or double-talk.

They’re a tiny group. But the ADL report shows they are unfortunately far from alone.