According to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League, white supremacist propaganda surged across America last year. The report did not include any updates as to whether or not water is still wet, if the sky still turns less blue when the weather is bad or whether today is, in fact, Wednesday.
OK, so obviously I plan to be an asshole throughout this entire write-up, but let’s start with the actual findings of the report.
From the Associated Press:
There were 5,125 cases of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ and other hateful messages spread through physical flyers, stickers, banners and posters, according to Wednesday’s report. That’s nearly double the 2,724 instances reported in 2019. Online propaganda is much harder to quantify, and it’s likely those cases reached into the millions, the anti-hate organization said.
The ADL, which was founded more than a century ago, said that last year marked the highest level of white supremacist propaganda seen in at least a decade. Its report comes as federal authorities investigate and prosecute those who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January, some of whom are accused of having ties to or expressing support for hate groups and antigovernment militias.
“As we try to understand and put in perspective the past four years, we will always have these bookends of Charlottesville and Capitol Hill,” group CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said.
“The reality is there’s a lot of things that happened in between those moments that set the stage,” he said.
See, already you can tell that reports like these are meant to inform white people who will undoubtedly be shocked by the revelation. For Black people, this report is the equivalent of watching paint dry on grass as it grows while reading an entire novel full of software terms and agreements.
Black people would tell Greenblatt that if he really wants to “understand and put in perspective” the recent surge in white people white peopleing as well as what “set the stage” for it, he need look no further than THE ENTIRE FUCKING HISTORY OF AMERICA!
Taking white supremacist propaganda out of America would be like taking basic counting and alphabet exercises out of Sesame Street. Up until a handful of decades ago, it likely would have been easier to quantify how many “physical flyers, stickers, banners and posters” didn’t contain “racist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ and other hateful messages.”
In fact, even now American jingoism is 99.999999—plus a bazillion more nines—percent white supremacist propaganda, because it’s basically a call for the adoration of traditional America. And if you consider the fact that Donald Trump’s entire presidency was just a long-ass infomercial for conservative jingoism and white supremacist political porn, it really ain’t shit to figure out how we got to where we are now.
But whatever; what else does this trailblazing report on shit negroes already knew reveal?
More from AP:
Propaganda, often distributed with the intention of garnering media and online attention, helps white supremacists normalize their messaging and bolster recruitment efforts, the ADL said in its report. Language used in the propaganda is frequently veiled with a patriotic slant, making it seem benign to an untrained eye.
But some flyers, stickers and posters are explicitly racist and anti-Semitic. One piece of propaganda disseminated by the New Jersey European Heritage Association included the words “Black Crimes Matter,” a derisive reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, along with cherry-picked crime statistics about attacks on white victims by Black assailants.
A neo-Nazi group known as Folks Front distributed stickers that include the words “White Lives Matter.”
According to the report, at least 30 known white supremacist groups were behind hate propaganda. But three groups — NJEHA, Patriot Front and Nationalist Social Club — were responsible for 92% of the activity.
The report also noted that the propaganda appeared in every American state except Hawaii and that it rose to its highest levels every fucking where white people and non-white people both exist in Texas, Washington, California, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
The ADL report was so full of Trump-probably-wasn’t-born-orange type news, that even the good news was no news at all. The reports stated that there has been a sharp decline in the distribution of white supremacist propaganda at colleges and universities as there were only 303 reports of propaganda on college campuses in 2020, down from 630 in 2019. The decline was “due in large part to the coronavirus pandemic and the lack of students living and studying on campus,” AP reports.
Bruh...did the ADL really just report that there was less racism on college campuses because fewer white people were there to be racist?
Yeah, I think we’re done here.