Number of Hate Groups Skyrocket as White Supremacists Lead the Way – Thanks to Trump: SPLC

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a venerable decades-old civil rights organization, has just released its “Year in Hate and Extremism” report for 2018, and finds the number of active hate groups has skyrocketed, to 1020. There has been a 30 percent increase over the past four years, and a seven percent increase in just the last year, as NPR notes. The majority of active U.S. hate groups are now based in white supremacism.

President Donald Trump, the SPLC suggests, is a leading cause of the rise in hate. A search of their report turns up “Trump” 115 times.

NPR notes that “white supremacists are emboldened under the Trump administration and driven by the fear of the United States changing demographics.”

“President Trump,” the SPLC says in its report, “has opened the White House doors to extremism, not only consulting with hate groups on policies that erode our country’s civil rights protections, but also enabling the infiltration of extremist ideas into the administration’s rhetoric and agenda. Once relegated to the fringes, the radical right now has a toehold in the White House.”

“One of the main reasons for the rise of Donald Trump, the electoral success of his bigotry and our country’s rising white supremacy is this: Trump has activated a growing fear in many white Americans who view their power as threatened by our country’s rapidly changing demographics. He is taking advantage of their rage against change. Trump tests us nearly daily with his racism, nativism and hateful policies.”

In 1999 there were 457 active hate groups in America. The number grew steadily to 926, when President Barack Obama was elected. It reached a high of 1018 in 2011, dropping dramatically to 784 in 2014.

Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign in June of 2015. That year the number of hate groups mushroomed, to 892, an increase of more than 100. It increased steadily but skyrocketed over the past year, to 1020.

“Anti-LGBT hate groups also now enjoy access never afforded to extremist groups by a modern administration,” the SPLC reports. “Groups like the Family Research Council (FRC) and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) meet regularly with high-level administration officials to further their bigoted policy positions.”

The SPLC’s report also contains a section titled, “The Pence Problem,” pointing to the “vice president’s long career crusading against equal rights for women and LGBT Americans.”

NPR notes the SPLC “found that the majority of hate groups in the United States are driven by white supremacist ideology including neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, which is on the decline, white nationalists, racist skinheads and neo-Confederates. But in reaction to the flourishing of white supremacists, the center says that black nationalist groups are also ‘growing their ranks.’ The center said the groups are often anti-Semitic, anti-LGBT and anti-white but, unlike white nationalist groups, have little support and basically no sway in politics.”