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The National Socialist Movement, which dubs itself America’s Nazi Party, has joined Colorado’s Adopt-a-Highway program. This weekend, members of the group will be on a stretch of road in Brighton picking up litter. “We’re here. We’re active. We’re doing good things,” Lochbuie resident Neal Land, a spokesman for the group, tells CBS4. There’s even a sign designating that the stretch of highway is cleaned by the supremacists. Stacey Stegman, a Colorado Department of Transportation spokeswoman, tells 9News any group is welcome to help keep highways clean. “We’re not the moral police,” Stegman says. “We’re not going to decide who’s right and who’s wrong. That’s not our role.”
Stegman adds that officials also spoke to the Anti-Defamation League, which raised concerns, but could find no legal grounds to deny the neo-Nazis. “We were considering denying them based on the fact that there could be a potential for violence, not that there was,” Stegman continues. “And so right now, we are giving them the benefit of the doubt.” Westword points out that legislators in Missouri attempted to counter similar neo-Nazi signage by re-naming the highway after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a civil-rights figure. The Southern Poverty Law Center maintains the National Socialist Movement on its map of “Active U.S. Hate Groups.”
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