Mar 18, 2022 5 min read

We’d like Pennsylvania to be No. 1 in, say, state education funding (it’s not close). Or in national sports championships.

But not in hate propaganda.

This dubious distinction makes us ill.

It does, however, make clear why the Lancaster County Local Journalism Fund, an initiative seeded and supported by The Steinman Foundation, is funding Carter Walker’s investigative reporting. (The Steinman Foundation is a local, independent family foundation that was funded by the companies that make up Steinman Communications; those companies include LNP Media Group.)

The hate propaganda disseminated in Lancaster County and across the commonwealth is not just a threat to minority and marginalized groups, but to democracy. As the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, the “reactionary and racist beliefs that propelled a mob” into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have “coalesced into a political movement that is now one of the most powerful forces shaping politics in the United States.”

That should worry us all.

As Walker reported, the ADL report “linked most of the propaganda to groups like the Keystone Nationalist Active Club, the New Jersey European Heritage Association, White Lives Matter and Keystone United. … The most active group by far in Pennsylvania was Patriot Front, a Texas-based white nationalist group whose recruiting in Lancaster County and surrounding areas was the subject of an LNP/LancasterOnline story last month.”

We wrote an editorial Feb. 13 in response to that article, explaining why even a relatively small number of right-wing men cosplaying as fascists in Lancaster County should spark alarm. We also explained why we believe stickers spreading hate propaganda are a problem.

They “declare a group’s presence,” we wrote. “They seek to attract others to the group’s abhorrent cause. They test a community’s tolerance for the white supremacist beliefs the group is trying to perpetuate.”

Not everyone was convinced.

Michael D. Witmer, a West Hempfield Township resident who taught history at Millersville University, Alvernia University and HACC, wrote a column Feb. 23 accusing us of being divisive, unnecessarily alarmist and “afflicted with a sense of ‘historical guilt’ ” that approached self-loathing.

In a March 2 letter to the editor, Chris Beiler of Akron called Witmer’s argument that Patriot Front shouldn’t be taken seriously because of its relatively small presence here “absurd.” Asked Beiler: “At what size should a malignant tumor be removed?”

Indeed.

For many of us, this isn’t an academic debate.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center points out, the scapegoating of Asian Americans for COVID-19 has led to violent attacks on members of that community. Public health officials, lawmakers, election administrators and even school board members have been targeted for violence. Hate groups have encouraged and exploited the ferocious backlash to the 2020 protests over George Floyd’s murder.

And, according to Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s chief executive officer, “violent antisemitic assaults are on the rise,” even as white supremacist groups “are dialing-up their hateful rhetoric against Jews and canvassing entire communities with hate literature.”

For all these reasons, fighting “hate in Pennsylvania has never been more important,” Andrew Goretsky, regional director for ADL Philadelphia, said.

The ADL database shows that 425 of the instances of hate propaganda in Pennsylvania were attributed to Patriot Front, Walker noted. “The number is possibly an undercount, as Patriot Front claims on its social media pages that its members posted over 600 pieces of propaganda in the state last year.

“An LNP analysis of photos posted online by Patriot Front and cross referenced with the ADL database found there were at least 611 instances of the group’s members posting propaganda in the state in 2021.”

While this propaganda is often rendered in language that is not overtly hateful, private and public chats from groups such as Patriot Front, White Lives Matter and the Keystone Nationalists reveal members using antisemitic language or expressing adulation for Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, Walker reported.

“Hate starts with white supremacist propaganda and hate propaganda, but it then escalates from there into more criminal behavior,” Goretsky said.

This is evident in the sharp increase in hate crimes in Pennsylvania in 2021, Walker reported. According to data maintained by the Pennsylvania State Police, 255 such crimes were reported last year – more than any other year since cases first were tracked in 1997, and nearly as many as the previous three years combined.

Walker reported that the state police data show that the majority of offenders in those cases were white. The documented hate crimes include a February 2021 incident in which a Mount Joy man threw Molotov cocktails at the home of neighbors, whom he described as “the Mexicans,” according to a police report, as well as a September 2021 incident in which a man in Pittsburgh entered a synagogue and shouted antisemitic remarks, Walker noted.

During a stop in Lancaster County a few weeks ago, Gov. Tom Wolf said the commonwealth’s top ranking in hate propaganda is “not who we are.”

“This can’t be who we are,” Wolf said. “Pennsylvania was founded as a commonwealth, as a place which was open to folks from every religious background and any part of the world.”

Living up to that heritage will require action. We cannot dismiss reports of hate group activity as insignificant and idly wait until hatred turns into violence before we pay it heed. We cannot allow hate propaganda to become a normalized part of the scenery here. We must oppose hatred and report any tangible signs of it in our public spaces. And, in our private lives, we may need to take uncomfortable stands against racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic language.

If the prevalence of hate propaganda in Pennsylvania doesn’t truly reflect who we are, we must prove it.