White Nationalist Group's Posters Pop Up In Park Slope: Report

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — The day before hundreds gathered in Bay Ridge to condemn white nationalist posters found throughout the neighborhood, similar flyers popped up in Park Slope, tipsters told the Brooklyn Reporter.

The posters, donning the website and a slogan of the notorious group Patriot Front, were spotted on Saturday glued to buildings along Eighth Avenue between Fourth and 15th streets, resident Richard Land told the outlet.

They came days after similar posters and a giant banner from Patriot Front popped up in Bay Ridge and only 24 hours before hundreds of Brooklynites gathered near Third Avenue and 86th Street, where some of the original posters were found, to speak out against them.

“It’s really disturbing that this group feels free to promote itself in Brooklyn," Land told the Reporter about the latest posters, which he said his son ripped down Saturday. "White nationalist and neo-Nazi groups have been operating in this country for years. But they have been mostly underground. Now, it seems that with our current political climate, they feel more emboldened to come out into the open,” he said.

Patriot Front is identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist hate group that previously was part of Vanguard America, a neo-Nazi organization that played a part in the deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, V.A. in 2017. Patriot Front broke off from Vanguard after the Charlottesville rally, according to SPLC.

The Brooklyn posters are among many the group has distributed across the country in the last week, according to its Twitter. The group took responsibility to putting up its "promotional materials" in Idaho, Connecticut and Vermont, along with Brooklyn.

Brooklynites reacted strongly against the white nationalist propaganda in their neighborhoods, which came as city officials and locals try to deal with a spike in anti-Semitic crimes across the borough.

(Twitter user @TheMrJayBrown, used with permission). The rally in Bay Ridge on Sunday.

"If you are a neo-Nazi, get the F out of my neighborhood," Council Member Justin Brannan Tweeted about the Bay Ridge posters. "My constituents have a right to live without fear. We will not be intimidated by clowns and cowards."

The rally in Bay Ridge, where protesters linked hands in a human chain and held signs condemning the hate group, came the same day as thousands marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in an anti-hate march responding to the anti-Semitic crime spike.

(Council Member Mark D. Levine, via Twitter). The anti-hate rally in Foley Square in Manhattan.

Recent incidents have included a man threatening to shoot up a religious institution in Crown Heights, three women slapped in the face by another woman who admitted it was because they were Jewish and two young Hasidic Jewish boys getting punched as the exited an elevator in a Williamsburg apartment building.

The attacks led Mayor Bill de Blasio to announce a new anti-hate plan, including extra cops in several Brooklyn neighborhoods with large Jewish populations, a new anti-hate curriculum for city schools and that neighborhood safety coalitions would be started to try and prevent more attacks.