White supremacist groups don’t have to find an enclave in remote Idaho compounds anymore. They now have social media that allows far and wide distribution of their hate speech to like-thinking others.

It’s a trend we must take seriously.

An Associated Press report out of Spokane, Washington, notes the sentiments of white supremacy never really left the Pacific Northwest 20 years ago when the Aryan Nation compound was shut down over lawsuits and bankruptcy.

The Southern Poverty Law Center helped shut down that compound with a lawsuit, and now tracks hate groups all over the country. The Spokane area has nine. Minnesota has 12 such groups, according to the center’s research.

The number of hate groups in the United States reached 1020 in 2018, according to the group’s latest report. That’s a 30 percent increase since 2014, the last year where the number of groups declined. Hate crimes, as reported by the FBI, have also increased 30 percent from 2014 to 2017.

The hate groups of today have become good at framing and marketing their “brands” as it were, into something that emphasizes the identity of white people as in the group called the “Identitarians.” Other groups use words like Evropa suggesting a European basis. But all these groups have the same underlying message of the Aryan Nation from decades past: white supremacy, race purity and discrimination because of one’s race.

Yet, some groups are gaining a kind of dangerous legitimacy in a post-truth world of social media. In Idaho, Brittany Pettibone, who describes herself as an “American Nationalist,” asked Kootenai County Republicans to pass a resolution urging the U.S. government to allow her boyfriend, Martin Sellner, to come to America so they could marry. Sellner is the leader of the “Identitarian” movement and admitted exchanging emails with the New Zealand mosque shooter.

While Sellner said he did not have anything to do with the shooting, the Idaho Republicans passed a resolution saying he was being held out of America for “political reasons.”

Pettibone was a big promoter of the “Pizzagate” myth that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex trafficking operation out of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

Experts say the incidents of white supremacy that continue to pop up around the country are not isolated. Kristine Hoover, director of the Gonzaga Institute for Hate Studies, in Spokane, calls the white supremacy activity a “movement” that uses the internet to easily bring them together now.

We must call attention to these groups and condemn their messages of hate. Their ideas can spread like a disease to the ill-informed.

Most of all, we need our political leaders to publicly condemn such groups as anti-patriotic and anti-American.

— Mankato Free Press, May 29