White supremacist groups might be thuggish and stupid on a lot of fronts, but they can be pretty clever about promoting themselves. High school newspapers in California and Indiana recently found out that the hard way.
Last month, the two newspapers ran ads for an organization called “Victory Forever,” which seemed to innocently promote free music downloads. Only later did the schools find out that Victory Forever’s actual purpose is to “disseminate White resistance music as widely as possible around the world.”
Both schools naturally checked up on Victory Forever before the ads ran. A fake web site fooled one school. Staffers at the other school saw a blank web site that they were told was under construction.
The warning to teachers and parents should be clear: Victory Forever wants to reach your kids. For anyone not convinced, a Victory Forever spokesperson spelled it out to eSchool News:
"More so than any other group, young people still have the ability and natural rebelliousness to think independently of the prevailing social order. Additionally, young people are not burdened by the many responsibilities faced by most adults – maintaining high-paid careers, making the mortgage payment every month, providing for a wife and children, et cetera, so they have a much larger degree of freedom to engage in politically incorrect ideas and actions.”
The spokesperson added that the group plans to place more ads in more high school newspapers.
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Comments
Strictly from a journalistic
Strictly from a journalistic perspective, the two schools should probably be named and even better journalism would be to provide a link or state if a link was available.
Also, in what order did the events occur? First, the article states, "Only later did the schools find out" and then it says, "Both schools naturally checked up on... before the ads ran."
Sincerely,
A confused reader.
Actually, the post does
Actually, the post does provide a link. Due to technical problems, that link originally did not show up unless the reader ran a cursor over it. This has now been corrected. Thanks. As for identifying the schools, we saw no need to re-live their embarrassment in any more detail than necessary. The point of this post was simply to alert people that a white supremacist group had used student newspapers to get its message into public schools.