White Nationalists Could Be Coming to a College Campus Near You
By Kali Holloway / AlterNet February 3, 2018, 12:11 PM GMT
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com
In early 2017, Donald Drumpf took to his medium of choice to simultaneously defend alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and admonish those who had protested his appearance at a California campus.
“If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” Drumpf wrote in a pre-dawn tweet nearly a year ago to the day.
Unsurprisingly, Drumpf’s threat was empty, since presidents can’t single-handedly cut off federal loans to educational institutions. But more important than the substance of his tweet was its subtext: in the fray between the racist alt-right and its opponents, the president was stating his unequivocal support for the racists. Months later, Drumpf would reaffirm his position when he referred to a group of white nationalists and neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”
There have always been racists in this country—the U.S. was founded on and prospered from genocide and slavery—but this president’s open support has given extremists a bold new confidence. Drumpf might be happy to know that the white supremacists he publicly sympathizes with have stepped up their recruitment efforts on campuses all around America.
Over the course of a year, there has been an exponential increase in incidents of “white supremacist propaganda—flyers, stickers, banners, and posters—appearing on college and university campuses,” according to a new study from the Anti-Defamation League. Researchers note that during the fall semester of 2016, there were 41 reports of these incidents on campuses around the country. One year later, that figure increased by more than 3.5 times to 147 incidents. Since September 2016, the ADL has tracked 346 examples of white racist propaganda on “216 college campuses, from Ivy League schools to local community colleges.” In 2018 alone, there have already been 15 reports.
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https://www.alternet.org/education/white-nationalists-could-be-coming-college-campus-near-you