Southern Poverty Law Center: Hate surging under Trump

UPDATED 10:30 a.m., Feb. 21 to include section on immigration.

AS LONG AS Donald Trump remains in power, hope will continue to fester and grow in the United States, according to the latest report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Last year, reports the SPLC in its Intelligence Report, "The Year in Hate: Rage Against Change," the nation saw surging numbers of hate groups. The report was released Wednesday (Feb. 20).

In the U.S., white supremacist fear and anger reached a fever pitch last year as hysteria over losing a white-majority nation to demographic change — and a presumed lack of political will to stop it — engulfed the movement, says the report. 

As if to underscore the validity of the report, federal prosecutors alleged Wednesday (Feb. 20) that Lt. Christopher Hasson, a member of the Coast Guard arrested last week on drug and gun charges, was, in fact, a terrorist with a lengthy hit list of major Democratic politicians and media personalities from MSNBC and CNN that he wanted to target.

“The defendant is a domestic terrorist bent on committing acts dangerous to human life,” prosecutors said in new court filing.

The alt-right was linked to several multiple killings in the U.S. and Canada in 2018 — a van attack in Toronto; a deadly shooting at a Florida high school; a massacre at a synagogue; and a brutal stabbing outside a Pittsburgh nightspot, according to the SPLC.

Alarmed at the Democrats taking control of the House and a string of setbacks for Trump in obtaining his wall, “The Trump moment is over, and it’s time for us to move on,” said white supremacist leader Richard Spencer.

MAINSTREAM RACISM

The SPLC report continues: "These fears and frustrations, heightened by U.S. Census Bureau projections that white people will no longer be a majority by 2044, helped propel hate to a new high last year. The total number of hate groups rose to 1,020 in 2018, up about 7 percent from 2017. White nationalist groups alone surged by nearly 50 percent last year, growing from 100 chapters in 2017 to 148 in 2018. But at the same time, Trump has energized black nationalist hate groups — typically antisemitic and anti-LGBT organizations — with an increase to 264 from 233 in 2017."

Overall, though, the great majority of hate groups are those that despise racial, ethnic or religious minorities and they, unlike black nationalist groups, have moved from the fringes of our society into the mainstream, including into the Trump administration.

The previous all-time high number of hate groups the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted was 1,018 in 2011, when rage against President Obama, the first African American president, was roiling. Amid the era of Trump, hate groups continue to increase, rising 30 percent over the past four years.

The midterm elections tended to invigorate hate groups' fears. Many far-right candidates lost.. The election of dozens of women — who an increasingly misogynistic hate movement sees as allies to “white genocide” — stirred up the radical right's fears. Elected to the new U.S. Congress, including two Muslims, Native Americans and more people of color. "For white supremacists, these newly elected officials symbolize the country’s changing demographics — the future that white supremacists loathe and fear," says the report.

TARGETTING IMMIGRANTS

The SPLC was troubled by the administration's apparent anti-immigrant policies. "Whether it is unending ICE raids, abolishing temporary protected status, calling for the end of birthright citizenship, separating families, increasing the number of detentions or sending troops to the border, the administration’s willingness to enact vicious anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies is a travesty of American values," said the report.

Immigration is where Trump’s rhetoric is particularly toxic. He rants and raves about the criminals and drug dealers crossing the southern border and complains about the immigrants and refugees from "sh---hole countries." A Reuters/Ipsos poll from October revealed that immigration is now seen as the top issue for people likely to vote Republican, especially among those who are older and lack a college degree, says the report. Twenty-three percent of Republicans in that same poll said immigration was the “most important problem” facing the country, up from 4 percent in January 2012. Just five years ago, the issue wasn’t nearly so divisive. In 2013, the Senate passed an immigration bill with bipartisan support, something that is unlikely today.

There was a ray of hope, however. The article states, "Most Americans, including almost half of all white people, have come to see Trump as a racist, according to a March 2018 AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. And a majority disapproved of the comments Trump made after the Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' racist and deadly riot, when he said there were 'good people on both sides.'"

But at the same time, Trump’s words and actions are opening up for more hateful views to become "normal," for mainstream America.

Given these trends, there are no signs that the violence, which has been all too common over the past two decades, will let up, says the SPLC. In fact, if the hate movement abandons politics as a solution to demographic change, as recent denunciations of Trump by prominent white supremacists seem to indicate, more angry lone wolves like Hasson and Dylan Roof, who shot up a black church, may see violence as their only option.

DOWNLOAD the full SPLC report: The Year in Hate: Rage Against Change

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Number of hate groups rise in Trump's first year

The number of U.S. hate groups expanded last year in Donald Trump's first year in office, fueled by his immigration stance and the perception that he sympathized with those espousing white supremacy, the Southern Poverty Law Center said on Wednesday (Feb. 26).

“President Trump in 2017 reflected what white supremacist groups want to see: a country where racism is sanctioned by the highest office, immigrants are given the boot and Muslims banned,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. 

The report seems to indicate that it's not cool to be Klan anymore, but white supremacy is alive and well in the growing “alt-right” movement that embraces a khaki-and-memes aesthetic.

There were 954 hate groups in the country in 2017, marking a 4 percent increase over the previous year when the number rose 2.8 percent, the civil rights watchdog said in its annual census of such groups.

Since 2014, the number has jumped 20 percent, it said.

Among the more than 600 white supremacist groups, neo-Nazi organizations rose to 121 from 99. Anti-Muslim groups increased for a third year in a row, to 114 from 101 in 2016, the report said.

Last year brought “a substantial emboldening of the radical right, and that is largely due to the actions of President Trump, who’s tweeted out hate materials and made light of the threats to our society posed by hate groups,” Beirich told reporters.

It was a year that saw the “alt-right,” the latest incarnation of white supremacy, break through the firewall that for decades kept overt racists largely out of the political and media mainstream.

List of Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Muslim groups

Most of the increase in hate groups was driven in part by a backlash from the Nation of Islam and other fringe black nationalist groups that see Trump as the symbol of the rising white supremacist movement, a powerful reassertion of the same centuries-old racism that has always fueled their desire to break away from white America.

Typified by their anti-Semitic, anti-LGBT, anti-white rhetoric and conspiracy theories, these black nationalist groups should not be confused with activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and others that work for civil rights and to eliminate systemic racism.

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan blamed Trump for encouraging a “growing sentiment” to “put the Black, the Brown, the Red back in a place they have cut out for us.”

Not surprisingly, the ranks of black nationalist hate groups – groups that have always been a reaction to white racism – expanded to 233 chapters in 2017, from 193 the previous year.

Aside from hate groups, the SPLC identified 689 active antigovernment groups that comprised the “Patriot” movement in 2017, up from 623. Of these, 273 were armed militias.

Historically, these groups rise during Democratic presidencies out of fear of gun control measures and federal law enforcement action against them. They typically decline under GOP presidencies. This has not been the case under Trump, whose radical views and bigotry may be energizing them in the same way he has invigorated hate groups.

White supremacist groups openly rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

Other highlights of the report include:

• Trump appointed key administration advisers with ties to the radical right, including Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart News who boasted of turning the website into “the platform for the alt-right.” The president thrilled white supremacists with his policy initiatives, such as revving up the country’s deportation machinery and curtailing civil rights enforcement.
• For the first time, the SPLC added two male supremacy groups to the hate group list: A Voice for Men, based in Houston, and Return of Kings, based in Washington, D.C. The vilification of women by these groups makes them no different than other groups that demean entire populations, such as the LGBT community, Muslims or Jews, based on their inherent characteristics.
• Reinvigorated white supremacists staged their largest rally in a decade – the demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left an anti-racist counterprotester dead and Trump equivocating over condemning racism. Former Klan boss David Duke called the rally a “turning point” and vowed that white supremacists would “fulfill the promises of Donald Trump” to “take our country back.”
• White supremacist groups ramped up their recruiting of college students. White nationalist leader Richard Spencer – who previously had prompted Nazi salutes from a post-election audience in Washington when he shouted “Hail Trump” – held a rally at the Lincoln Memorial and appeared on college campuses. The SPLC documented some 300 incidents of racist flyers being distributed on more than 200 campuses.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, founded in 1971, defines hate groups as organizations with beliefs or practices that demonize a class of people.

In the past, some groups have criticized the Alabama-based organization’s findings, with skeptics saying it has mislabeled legitimate organizations as “hate groups.”

“When you consider that only days into 2018, Trump called African countries ‘shitholes,’ it’s clear he’s not changing his tune. And that’s music to the ears of white supremacists,” said the SPLC's Beirich.
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