White supremacists at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017. Photo: Anthony Crider via Wikicommons.

There was a precipitous 77% increase in the dissemination of white supremacist propaganda on US college campuses this year, according to new data published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Thursday.

The ADL’s Center on Extremism found 292 cases of white supremacist propaganda on campuses during the 2017-2018 academic year, compared to 165 the previous year. Since 2016, a total of 478 incidents have been recorded on 287 campuses across the US.

The ADL noted that the propaganda included everything from “veiled white supremacist language to explicitly racist images and words that attack minority groups, including Jews, Blacks, Muslims, non-white immigrants, and the LGBT community.”

Most prominent among the organizations involved was Identity Evropa — a white nationalist group — which committed 230 of the incidents. The new group Patriot Front was responsible for 70.

These groups are were most active in Texas and California, which are also the most frequent sites of white supremacist incidents. Next on the list were Florida and Washington state.

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said of the results, “College campuses and their communities should be places for learning, growing and the future, not close-minded racism and hate-filled rhetoric from the past. We’re concerned to see that white supremacists are accelerating their efforts to target schools with propaganda in hopes of recruiting young people to support their bigoted worldview.”

“It’s always important for university administrators to respect and protect free speech,” he added, “but it’s equally vital that they take the necessary steps to counter the hateful messages of these groups. These steps can include educating faculty and students on the parameters of their First Amendment rights, and also improving training for campus officials charged with responding to bias incidents and hate crimes.”

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