| | | 2 Men Stockpiled Guns and Far-Right Propaganda in New Jersey. Are They Alone?
Ali Watkins and Nick Corasaniti
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The New York Times•November 29, 2019
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) speaks to a server as she takes a break at Tom Sawyer Diner in Paramus, N.J., on Friday, Sept. 27, 2019. (Bryan Anselm/The New York Times)NEWTON, N.J. — New Jersey investigators were looking into a routine complaint from a woman who said her ex-boyfriend was harassing her when they uncovered something far more dire: The 25-year-old man had stockpiled weapons and far-right propaganda and had talked about shooting up a hospital.
Two months later, New Jersey State Police responding to a crash in the same county discovered illegal assault weapons in the back seat of a van. Later, they found 17 more firearms, a grenade launcher and neo-Nazi paraphernalia in the driver’s home.
The arrests of the two men rocked law enforcement officials in Sussex County, raising fears that far-right extremism had crept into this sleepy, rural area in New Jersey.
It is impossible to know if the two arrests so close together are a fluke or signal of a growing white supremacist movement in the county, law enforcement officials said. The two men appear to have no connection to each other.
Sussex has lately been seeing ugly signs of increasing racism and anti-Semitism. Vandals have scrawled swastikas in schools, and in a highly publicized incident last fall, supporters of a Jewish congressman found their Sussex County home vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti.
Bias-related crimes rose from four in 2016, when President Donald Trump was elected, to seven in 2018, prosecutors said. Although the numbers are small, officials say the general upward trend is troubling in a county of only 141,000 people and reflects similar increases across the state.
“One hundred percent certainty, the numbers of reports have increased,” said New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal. “I can’t say that belief system is isolated to Sussex. We’ve seen it in all parts of the state.”
At the same time, there has been a rise in right-wing extremism across the country. White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed more people than any other category of domestic extremist in the past 18 years. In August, for example, a white supremacist targeting Mexicans killed 22 in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
Only recently have federal law enforcement officials come to grips with that threat, and local prosecutors like those in Sussex County have often found themselves doing investigations they are ill-equipped to undertake.
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