White supremacy groups have seldom, if ever, been more active, the top official for the Anti-Defamation League’s Philadelphia Region told an audience of about 50 during a May 25 presentation at the Free Library of Northampton Township.
During a talk organized by the Bucks County Human Relations Council, ADL Philadelphia Regional Director Andrew Goretsky said Pennsylvania had the highest level of white supremacist propaganda in the country in 2021, with 473 incidents including racist, antisemitic and other hateful messages. The next highest state was Virginia at 375.
White supremacist propaganda distribution remained at historic levels across the United States in 2021, with a total of 4,851 cases of racist, antisemitic and other hateful messages reported by the ADL, added Goretsky, who oversees an ADL region that includes Eastern Pennsylvania, Southern New Jersey and Delaware.
He spoke in Northampton on the second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, and less than two weeks after a mass shooting being described as a racial massacre claimed 10 lives at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.
It was also just a day after 21 died at the hands of a shooter at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
“We don’t know yet if there is an extremist ideology connected to the Texas massacre,” Goretsky said. “I use the term massacre to describe these events because I don’t think mass shootings defines it.”
He said everyone needs to educate themselves on white supremacist groups and be ready to combat hate and intolerance in all its forms.
Some of the ways that can be done, Goretsky said, is for public officials to immediately condemn white supremacist flyers or propaganda as acts of hate, arrange for community-wide shows of solidarity with those targeted and engage in public awareness campaigns to expose those behind propaganda efforts and extremists.
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