Justice

Facebook Post About a 'Creepy' Flyer Exposes a Scary Movement in America

September 21st 2016

A resident of a Pennsylvania town reported waking up this weekend to find a flyer that read "You can sleep well tonight knowing the Klan is awake."

"KKK trying to invade Coudersport."Facebook/Joe Leschner - facebook.com

The fliers, which Coudersport, Pennsylvania resident Joe Leschner displayed in a Facebook Live video, features a drawing of what appears to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, an American flag, and the white supremacist group's insignia.

In a Facebook video that's been viewed more than 40,000 times, Leschner also showed several plastic baggies filled with rocks and lollipops, which he says were left on residents' lawns overnight.

"I was alerted by a video and my sister this morning that the KKK were in the area sometime overnight distributing pamphlets and rocks and suckers in the form of little baggies to our friends and neighbors," Leschner says in the video.

Then Leschner reads the message on the flyer out loud.

"'Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and neighborhood watch. You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake. Are there troubles in your neighborhood? Contact the traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan today!' And there's a phone number. It appears to be a legitimate number but it says the mail box is full. So it's kind of creepy. It's not in everybody's yards just in some people's."

Leschner, whose wife is black, told ATTN: that white supremacist groups associated with the Aryan Nation had come to Coudersport to hold rallies in recent months, but the people of the town reject those groups.

"There's not a lot of black people here and I think that's why they feel a little emboldened," he said. "But 99.9 percent of the people here are very kind, loving, and accepting people."

Another reason these groups could be targeting Coudersport is that infamous Aryan Nations leader August Kreis once owned a home in the town, according to Leschner. Kreis called for the murder of Jews, racial minorities, and "race traitors," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Last year Kreis was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the sexual molestation of a child.

Coudersport is not the only place to receive strange packages from white supremacists.

For more than a year, people across the country have been receiving strange items that are supposedly from the KKK, according to The Washington Post. People in California, Kansas, Indiana, New Jersey and other states have walked outside to find baggies with candy and racist propaganda.

The KKK and other white supremacist groups are still active in the U.S.

The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that there are more than 190 active KKK groups across the country with 5,000 to 8,000 Klan members.

Southern Poverty Law Center's hate map. Southern Poverty Law Center - splcenter.org

Earlier this month, George Washington University's Center for Cyber and Homeland Security found that white nationalists and Nazis have more accounts and Twitter followers in the U.S. than the web-savvy terrorist group ISIS.

A report by J.M. Berger, a fellow at GWU's Program on Extremism, found that white nationalists and Nazis are active on Twitter at an explosive rate.

"On Twitter, ISIS’s preferred social platform, American white nationalist movements have seen their followers grow by more than 600% since 2012," wrote Berger. "Today, they outperform ISIS in nearly every social metric, from follower counts to tweets per day."

The two most popular topics on Twitter for white nationalists are "white genocide" or the idea that society's increasing racial diversity puts white people in danger, and presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to Berger.

The federal government has been concerned about white supremacist groups for several years.

In 2006, the FBI Counterterrorism Division wrote a report about white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement departments.

"White supremacist presence among law enforcement personnel is a concern due to the access they may possess to restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage and to elected officials or protected persons, whom they could see as potential targets for violence," said the report.

"White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement." FBI - documentcloud.org

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security released a controversial report about domestic right-wing terrorists. The report cited "the economic downturn and the election of the first African American president as unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment."

Watch Leschner's full video below:

RELATED: There's Another Dangerous Group With More Twitter Followers Than ISIS

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