A white supremacist has taken out an advertisement in a small northern Maine newspaper promoting a book-burning event later this year — a public display that reflected a growing comfort that hate groups have felt in promoting their messages in Maine and elsewhere in recent years.

While racist groups have long used keyboard activism to spread their messages online, where it’s easy to remain anonymous, they’re now using various tactics to spend more time in the public eye.

That has included harassing local officials, testifying on state and local policy changes, disrupting public meetings and distributing signs and other promotional materials. Those activities have coincided with a nationwide jump in reports of anti-semitic and anti-immigrant behavior in recent years, according to experts who track those incidents.

The New England White Network, led by New Hampshire activist Ryan Murdough, was behind the recent advertisement in the Aroostook County newspaper, along with some other recent public demonstrations across Maine.  

“The ad was an opportunity to post something pretty extreme and draw attention,” said Christopher Magyarics, a senior investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism who has tracked Murdough’s activities.

Magyarics pointed to other recent cases in which Murdough’s group has tried to put its views into wider circulation. Last year, his group began posting messages on community bulletin boards, along hiking trails and on magazine racks around Maine, Magyarics said. Its materials have generally taken aim at Jewish-owned businesses and public officials it views as anti-white, including Maine Gov. Janet Mills.

In one case from January 2024, Murdough sent a letter to Mohammed Albehadli, who was then the coordinator for diversity, equity and inclusion in the South Portland schools. The letter pushed Albehadli to quit his job and move his family out of the state, according to the Press Herald.

The district’s superintendent called the email “the most vile” message he had seen during 35 years in education, and Albehadli told the newspaper that the “message raised safety concerns for my family and I … We could not feel safe again after receiving it.”

In March, the New England White Network provided testimony against Maine legislation that would recognize certain Muslim celebrations as state holidays.

“As White Nationalists, it’s our job to stand up for White people and hold elected leaders’ feet to the fire when they implicitly express solutions for our people,” said Jay Gonzalez, director of the group’s Maine chapter, in written testimony. “It’s also our duty to publicize our grievances and force them into the mainstream.”

In recent years, there has been a broader increase in reports of hateful acts across the nation.

The Anti-Defamation League found there was a 200 percent increase in reports of anti-semitic incidents from October 2023 to September 2024 — in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel — compared with a year earlier. The number of incidents topped 10,000.

Immigrants and refugees also faced more harassment during that time, especially after a viral disinformation campaign last fall about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, which was embraced by President Donald Trump, according to ADL.

Jeff Tischauser, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, attributed some of the uptick to Trump, who in his new administration has attacked diversity initiatives and pardoned Jan. 6 insurrectionists, including those linked to racist groups such the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

“There is a sense that the Trump administration and the FBI under Kash Patel is not going to take violence against the left as seriously as previous administrations,” Tischauser said.

While hate groups have long shared their views online, they have also been happy to trumpet examples of their message getting a wider audience.

Last fall, Christopher Pohlhaus, a former Maine resident who founded the notorious Blood Tribe neo-Nazi group, claimed credit for stoking the online rumors about Springfield, Ohio.

Magyarics noted that Murdough ran as a white supremacist in 2010 for the New Hampshire State House.

In response to questions from the Bangor Daily News, Murdough said that the New England White Network has multiple chapters that are promoting their causes in venues such as town council and school board meetings.

He noted that the only people allowed to attend the upcoming book burning in Maine will be vetted members of the network.

But that isn’t stopping Murdough from using the event to promote his group. After the ad recently ran in the Fort Fairfield Journal, he shared photos of it online and declared the Aroostook County publication “the most pro-White newspaper” in the nation.

The paper’s editor and publisher, David Deschesne, said in an email response to the BDN that his newspaper is not pro-white, but rather that he accepted the ad from Murdough in the interest of allowing free speech.

“I am just the middleman providing information — albeit information about an ideology I do not agree with — which is a position all newspapers/news organizations should be doing,” he said. “One cannot provide that service by arbitrarily gatekeeping and deciding whose speech should be protected and whose speech shouldn’t be.”

The letter’s publication caused an outcry among some local readers. Deschesne pointed to a letter he received from a Mapleton woman that was published in the April 2 issue.

In the letter, Nicole Gamblin questioned why the paper accepted an ad for such “a heinous and horrific event.”

“By choosing to take a buck and post this, you are promoting hate and violence,” Gamblin wrote. “We have too much of this in our world right now. We must do better.”