Antisemitic posters in Sterling Heights, Michigan (and other places) from the National Socialist Legion

The city of Sterling Heights, Michigan, has recently been plastered with antisemitic and racist posters.

Here's are couple of examples:

The posters are from a group called National Socialist Legion (nslegion.org), which has a large assortment of other disgusting posters on its website.

Earlier this year, Richard Spencer and his band of Neo-Nazi antisemites planned to hold a meeting at a large German-American cultural association in the city, the Carpathia Club. When the police informed the club who the group was, the management closed the club for the day.

Carsten Grotloh, hall manager of the Carpathia Club, said he was contacted Saturday night by the Sterling Heights Police, which shared information about the Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas, as well as "the negativity that surrounds the event."

Grotloh said he emailed the group about 2 a.m. Sunday, saying he would have to cancel its event. Grotloh says he received an "OK" as a response and a request to get the security deposit back.

"I don't Facebook stalk people when they book rooms," said Grotloh. "The police asked me if we were aware when we booked the event who these individuals were. I said I had no clue. I don't do a background check."

The NSL's posters have been up in various places around the country:

Eastern Florida State College in Cocoa, Florida - Racially offensive fliers placed on cars at Eastern Florida State College.

Antisemitic posters from the National Socialist Legion were also found earlier this year in Durham, NC, near the Duke University campus. (This image is from the Twitter feed of Israeli Matzav

Duke professor Gavin Yamey reported seeing anti-Semitic posters near Duke’s East Campus. He contacted the Duke campus rabbi and other officials, according to the student newspaper the Duke Chronicle. 

“It’s not subtle—it’s violent anti-Semitic imagery, so I take this obviously very seriously,” Yamey told the student newspaper. 

He told the Herald Sun: “I was deeply disturbed and, to be honest, frightened. I’m Jewish and these vile anti-Semitic threats, including the image of a gun pointing to a Jew, really rattled me.” 

“I lost family to pogroms and in the Holocaust,” he added. “Seeing incitements to shoot Jews in my hometown is not something I ever imagined.”

NS Legion posters were also found at Columbian Park, in Lafayette, Indiana, on September 1, and were denounced by the Interfaith Leaders of Greater Lafayette. This wasn't the first incident there of racist or antisemitic fliers being found.

LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The concession stand area at Loeb Stadium and other spots in Lafayette’s Columbian park were papered over Saturday with fliers touting Nazi symbols and the rhetoric of a white nationalist group. 

Tobi Beck, a Democrat from Avon running for the 4th District seat in Congress, said she was at the park in central Lafayette for a Labor Day weekend event when Cindy Shriner, a Lafayette resident walking to the park Saturday morning, came up to her with a flier and asked what she should do with it. 

“My whole team and I went and scoured the area looking for these things,” Beck said.
Beck said they found a handful of fliers – one that featured a swastika and read, “Satanism is for the weak, and the weak will be crushed” – taped to the walls of the concession stand at Loeb Stadium and on posts in other parts of the park. 

The fliers included the web address of the National Socialist Legion, a spinoff of Vanguard America, a white nationalist group – then known as American Vanguard – that has distributed posters and propaganda in the past two years at Purdue University. 

The group’s site includes a page of posters, including the ones found in Columbian Park, ready to download and print out. The posters include a number of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli messages, calls to defend the white race and tributes to Adolf Hitler.

According to its website, the National Socialist Legion is “dedicated to protecting the white European race” and performs “both activism and readiness for the coming racial holy war” and “to protect our people from the ‘browning’ of America.” 

A June 2018 report from the Washington-based Anti-Defamation League said the National Socialist Legion recently split from Vanguard America. In November 2016, posters designed by Vanguard America – complete with images and rhetoric that recalled Nazi-era Germany propaganda – were found on kiosks and in classrooms at Purdue. Posters from the National Socialist Legion collection online were found under wiper blades on windshields at a Purdue parking garage in recent months. 

The Anti-Defamation League report stated that reports of white nationalist activity were up 77 percent on college campuses between the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years. The report referenced reports of propaganda that included “veiled white supremacist language to explicitly racist images and words, often includes a recruitment element, and frequently attacks minority groups including Jews, Blacks, Muslims, non-white immigrants and the LGBT community.” 

There have been other fliers and threats tied to white supremacists found in Greater Lafayette in the past 18 months. Among them: 

► In May 2017, West Lafayette police received numerous complaints about fliers rolled up and delivered on doors and in driveways near campus with unsigned, uncredited death threats to singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, with warnings to residents: “Hey, you p---- college liberal’s (sic), its Trump time now, shut your mouth or pay the consequences!! Just like this (piece of crap)!!” Police investigated but did not report arrests. 

► On Jan. 12, business and drivers in downtown Lafayette found Ku Klux Klan recruiting pamphlets on their doors and under windshield wipers. Those fliers, distributed just ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, read: "Why you should become a Klansman.” Police took a handful of reports about those fliers, which listed the phone number of a group calling itself Soldiers of Christ, American Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Moselle, Mississippi. A J&C review of video surveillance footage from downtown Lafayette security cameras showed a lone man distributing the fliers, but no one took credit or was identified. 

► On Jan. 21, someone tied bedsheet-sized banners on a fence outside the Unitarian Universalist Church, 333 Meridian St. in West Lafayette, with slurs about gays and lesbians, African Americans, Hispanics and – again – Jackson Browne. Those banners included threats, referencing a mass shooting in at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas that killed 58 and injured more than 500 more people. West Lafayette police, assisted by federal law enforcement, investigated but made no arrests. A rally at the church a few nights later drew an overflow crowd of church members, city officials and clergy from other congregations.

Other places that National Socialist Legion has posted its antisemitic fliers are in Colorado, California, and Tennessee.

In summer of 2018, the ADL published a study showing that:

From Sept. 1, 2017 to May 31, 2018, ADL’s Center on Extremism documented 292 cases of white supremacist propaganda on college campuses — including fliers, stickers, banners, and posters — compared to 165 during the 2016-17 academic year. Since Sept. 1, 2016, ADL has recorded 478 propaganda incidents, targeting 287 college campuses in 47 states and the District of Columbia.

The propaganda messages range from veiled white supremacist language to explicitly racist images and words that attack minority groups, including Jews, Blacks, Muslims, non-white immigrants, and the LGBTQ community. Some recent examples focus on the baseless perception of danger posed by undocumented immigrants traveling toward the Mexican-American border. 

Identity Evropa (IE), a group focused on the preservation of “white American culture” and promoting white European identity, was responsible for nearly half (230) of the 478 incidents. Patriot Front — which was formed within the last year — was responsible for 70 incidents. 

Campuses in Texas and California were the most frequent targets of white supremacist propaganda, with 67 and 58 incidents, respectively, since September 2016. Those states are home to the most concentrated and active memberships for both IE and Patriot Front. Florida and Washington state followed with 24 incidents each.

In addition to on-campus activity, white supremacist groups have stepped up their propaganda efforts in other public spaces, targeting locations such as highway overpasses (see March 2018 ADL report about this trend). ADL has recorded 185 non-campus propaganda distributions since January 2018 — an average of more than one incident every day so far this year.

“Our data shows that white supremacists’ propaganda campaign continues to accelerate, both on and off campus, online and on the ground,” said Oren Segal, director of the Center on Extremism. “The alt-right segment of the white supremacist movement remains a driving force behind this activity.”