The poster campaign, which mirrors KKK propaganda techniques, has cropped up on over 100 campuses in the last year. But are young people being won over?

White nationalist groups are making an unprecedented effort to recruit American college students by sneaking around campuses and putting mildly offensive posters on the walls. To spread their message of the power and glory of white civilization, they are using computer printouts and tape.

Under cover of darkness, the groups put up posters with slogans like “America is a white nation”, “Let’s Become Great Again”, “Serve Your People”, or “Our Destiny is Ours”. One group, which asks members to affirm their “non-semitic heritage”, splashes its slogans over black-and-white photos of marble icons, such as Michelangelo’s David, who is, of course, a famous Jewish hero. That group, Identity Evropa, tweets out photos of its paper conquests, proudly displaying the images it has deposited in the midst of advertisements for college improv performances, math tutors, Bible study groups and open mic nights. The group calls the effort “Project Siege”.

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A young Identity Evropa member in Washington DC could not even identify all the marble faces of the “great white men” on the propaganda posters he was helping to disseminate. But white nationalist posters on liberal college campuses spark outrage and widespread media coverage – delivering outsized returns on a flimsy investment.

There have been at least 220 white nationalist flyer incidents at 144 different campuses across the country over the past year, according the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate group activity.

This flyer tactic has been a “quite new” development, said Heidi Beirich, an SPLC analyst, and one that coincided with Donald Trump’s political rise. “We haven’t seen this kind of campus outreach in the 20 years that I’ve been at the center,” she said.

The more typical previous dissemination technique, she said, was Ku Klux Klan members leaving flyers at people’s homes.

While Trump’s rise has brought new attention and energy to far-right extremists, how much these groups have actually succeeded in attracting a new generation of extremists is far from clear.

White nationalists’ only unquestionable success so far is in making headlines, as far-right spokesman Richard Spencer did when he shouted “Hail Trump!” and received the Nazi salute at a post-election conference in November.

Matthew Heimbach, who led several white identity groups while in college in Maryland, is currently facing a lawsuit for shoving a young black protester at a Trump rally in Louisville last year. Trump is also a defendant in that case, in which he is accused of inciting violence against protesters.

Identity Evropa, the white nationalist group that put up posters around Georgetown and other schools across the country, is a new group created by Nathan Damigo, identified by the SPLC as an Iraq war veteran who served prison time for pulling a gun on a taxi driver in California. His incarceration gave him an opportunity to delve into racist literature and think about race and identity, he told the Los Angeles Times.

Damigo said Identity Evropa group includes about 350 members from across the country, who are primarily, “young, very intelligent, mostly college-educated or in college”.

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The new group uses terms and images borrowed from European far-right “identitarian” groups, Beirich said, and it was impossible to confirm just how many members it might actually have.

How much a handful of posters might actually sway the opinions of college students is dubious. On a recent sunny afternoon at Georgetown, a prestigious Catholic university in Washington DC, many students were only vaguely aware that white nationalist posters had recently popped up on their campus, and some said they knew nothing about them at all.

Media coverage provided its own strange feedback loops. One student said he had not heard about the posters, but since a journalist was on campus asking questions, he believed it must have been a serious incident, and that he was determined to read more about it.

Other students who had heard about the posters were dismissive. “It was very clear from the get-go that they were not from anyone on campus,” said Matthew Hinson, a Georgetown senior, in an interview in the university’s bustling Intercultural Center, though he said he did not know for sure who put the posters up.

How many of the college white nationalist postering campaigns are carried out by actual students of these schools is unknown. The group’s poster siege missions could easily be carried out by only one or two people, Beirich said, and might not actually involve current students.

Georgetown students had been much more outraged about a party hosted by actual students that was racially themed than they were by the posters, Hinson said. He did not think campus conservatives were interested in white supremacy. “Even the conservatives on the campus are very committed to diversity,” he said.

Bianca Corgan, a freshman who was working to found a student group for multiracial and multiethnic students, said she thought the school had responded in a strong and proactive way to the white nationalist propaganda.

“Georgetown students pride themselves on inclusivity,” she said.

In the wake of the posters being discovered, university officials condemned the posters as “acts of hate” and the Georgetown University police department pledged to investigate the incident.

“The posters appear to have been a part of a campaign by an outside group that has posted similar materials on campuses across the country. Acts of hate will not be tolerated on Georgetown’s campus,” the school said in a statement on Tuesday.

Online self-radicalization

One of Identity Evropa’s members, who claimed to be a college student in the DC area turning 21, agreed to an anonymous in-person interview at a local coffee shop. The man, who refused to give his real name or any proof he was affiliated with a DC-area college, was carefully dressed in preppy but unstylish clothes – white shirt, dark red paisley tie, black peacoat, his brown hair vaguely styled in the Nazi-aping “fashy” style, but a little grown out, a little fluffy.

He said that he had been a member of Identity Evropa since January, but was already starting to rise quickly in the ranks and think about what it would mean to go public as a white nationalist. He claimed he had been involved in the poster campaign around DC-area colleges, though he would not say exactly how. He had a black backpack with him full of more of the same posters that had popped up at Georgetown and elsewhere.

Damigo, the Identity Evropa founder, confirmed in a phone interview that the young man was a member of the group and said he had met him in person during a trip to the east coast and that he was “a really impressive guy”.

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The young man talked passionately about white identity and racism for more than three hours. He described a process of online self-radicalization over the past few months that culminated in seeing Spencer, the poster boy of America’s white nationalist “alt-right” speak, and then joining Identity Evropa.

He had awakened slowly to the reality of race, the young man said: starting out just as a libertarian conservative, getting excited about Donald Trump, and then having someone on the internet send him a link to a far-right antisemitic site that hosted blogposts and podcasts. When he first visited a neo-Nazi website he had been so shocked by the headlines, the young man said, that he slammed his computer shut. Then he read more. He thought the “jokes” on the site about Jews and ovens were hilarious.

The shootings of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin were moments that had helped radicalize him. While he was conflicted about the incidents at the time, he said, he now believes that the media coverage of the two shootings “forced me to confront that the media wants people to think [the shooter is] a racist”.

Asked if his own life experience lined up with the race theories he had read, he pointed to his high school cafeteria, where students had clustered in cliques by race, and where black students had occasionally gotten into fights – more often than white students, he said.

“My personal experience has not invalidated my ideology,” he said.

The young man was adept at at reciting the far-right political lines and at laughing knowingly at journalists’ questions, but he was new at this, and once or twice when his interviewer reacted strongly to something he said, he lifted up his hands and sat back, flinching at the negative reaction he had evoked.



The young man said that his parents didn’t yet know he was a white nationalist. He was giving them little hints sometimes, “red pills” to gradually awaken them to reality.

He said he now helped to interview new Identity Evropa members, screening them through Skype video interviews to make sure they were white, and that they weren’t fat, or dating someone who wasn’t white, or anything that would make them fail to fit the model: “We want you to be the best representation of European men possible.” But, he added, “It’s not like 100% Bavarian phenotype” was required.

The group did not make members take a 23andMe DNA test to measure their ancestry, although a lot of people did it and shared their results with each other and there was some teasing around that, although he refused to say whether the DNA test had ever led to anyone getting kicked out of the group.

At Georgetown, “Let’s Become Great Again” posters were replaced with new ones from anti-fascists. “This is an antifa zone,” and demanding, “Neo-Nazi propaganda off campus”.

The posters included links to anti-fascist websites and social media handles. Several had images of shattered and crumbled Greek statues. “Fuck Identity Evropa,” one read.