Seeing Through the Rhetoric of the Alt-Right: Spotting White Supremacist Propaganda in West Virginia

A year ago this week, white supremacist groups descended on Pikeville, Kentucky, aiming to rally “white working families,” where they were met by anti-fascist groups from across Appalachia and elsewhere in the country. After a deadly incident in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, many of these white supremacist groups have fractured as a result of increased scrutiny and internal power struggles. But, there is evidence that remnants of those groups have recently sprung up in north-central West Virginia.

In late February, Fairmont resident Stephanie Carter was poking around on a community Facebook group when she saw a post that some suspicious flyers had gone up around town.

“The day after that post, I just went looking -- walked around for a couple of hours and they had kind of narrowed it down based on some of the buildings that were surrounding where they thought it was,” Carter said. “And so, actually, it was right here on this pole.”

Carter points to a telephone pole in her working-class neighborhood about a mile from downtown Fairmont. The flyers were from a group called The Patriot Front, a neo-Nazi white supremacist organization -- one that would fall under an umbrella known as the “alt-right.”

Read more: http://wvpublic.org/post/seeing-through-rhetoric-alt-right-spotting-white-supremacist-propaganda-wva