Nearly one in ten Americans find it “acceptable” to hold extremely racist and anti-Semitic views, a new poll conducted on behalf of ABC News and the Washington Post has found. 
According to the survey, which was conducted by Langer Research Associates, 9 percent of Americans, or 22 million people, "call it acceptable to hold Neo-Nazi or white supremacist views.”
Released on Monday in the wake of August 12th’s violent "Unite The Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia at which a woman was killed when a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of anti-fascist counter-demonstrators, the survey revealed that 10 percent of Americans support the so-called alt-right movement while 50 percent oppose it.
Despite the unexpectedly strong, if rather limited, support for Neo-Nazi views, 83 percent of Americans called such views unacceptable” and eight percent responded that they had no opinion on the matter. Four out of 10 respondents said they had no opinion on the alt-right, "indicating wide unfamiliarity.”
"Across groups, 4 to 17 percent call this acceptable, with the largest numbers among men, Republicans and strong conservatives, all 13 percent; young adults, 14 percent; and those who strongly approve of the president’s work in office, 17 percent,” ABC explained.
This unfamiliarity is further borne out by the wildly disparate views on the views of the heterogenous and largely internet-based movement. While nearly forty percent indicated that they believe the alt-right holds Neo-Nazi or white supremacist views, 21 percent disagreed and 4 out of ten respondents said they couldn’t say.
The survey was conducted between August 16-20 among a sampling of more than one thousand American adults and has a sampling error of 3.5 points.
There have been several incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism across the US since the Charlottesville rally, including the desecration of a Holocaust memorial in Boston, anti-Semitic graffiti in Washington D.C. and anti-Jewish signs hung from a highway overpass in Oregon.
During the Unite The Right rally armed white supremacists passed outside a local synagogue screaming anti-Semitic slogans.
