Hate Groups Are at a Record High in America, and We Need to Pay Attention
Far-right hate groups are at a record high in America, according to a disturbing new intelligence report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. For evidence of the phenomenon, we need look no further than today’s headlines: Yesterday, it was revealed that an active duty U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant arrested last week on gun and drug charges was also allegedly planning the mass murder of Democratic politicians (including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar), media personalities, writers, editors, journalists, and academics. In a draft email to an American neo-Nazi leader, he wrote: “We need a white homeland as Europe seems lost.” Police found an arsenal of 15 guns and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition in the man’s home.
Of course, instead of tweeting about that, President Donald Trump decided to focus his attention on Jussie Smollett, the actor who police say paid two people to stage a racist, homophobic attack in which they placed a noose around Smollett’s neck. Voicing his empathy for “MAGA and the tens of millions of people you insulted with your racist and dangerous comments”—side note: Is MAGA operating grammatically here as an ideological concept? A person? A hat?—makes sense for Trump: His presidency has seen a terrifying increase in white supremacist violence, and his rhetoric, policies, and appointees are partially responsible. No wonder he would rather afford concern to an accessory than to the possibility of more political violence in America.
The general trend in the massive survey of the state of far-right and extremist hate is that it’s getting worse, according to the SPLC. They report that “the total number of hate groups rose to 1,020 in 2018, up about 7 percent from 2017.” What’s more, “white nationalist groups alone surged by nearly 50 percent last year, growing from 100 chapters in 2017 to 148 in 2018.” On the other (and also incredibly troublesome) hand, “Trump has energized black nationalist hate groups—typically antisemitic and anti-LGBT organizations—with an increase to 264 from 233 in 2017.”
The very recent increases, the report also shows, track within an increase in extremist and right-wing activity that has been building since before 2016, fomenting toward the end of President Barack Obama’s time in office (“the previous all-time high number of hate groups . . . counted was 1,018 in 2011”), the nation’s first black president. Over the last four years, the number of hate groups rose over 30 percent, and “last year marked the fourth year in a row that hate group numbers increased.”
It’s not all Trump, specifically; white nationalists, in particular, have been apparently motivated by ire related to sweeping demographic changes in the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau now projects that white people will no longer be a majority by 2044. The swearing in of the most diverse Congress ever, with record numbers of women, women of color, and LGBTQ politicians, likely generated even more hate this year. Remember that at least two of those freshman congressional representatives appeared on the aforementioned Coast Guard’s kill list.
Though Trump might not use white supremacist rhetoric as explicitly as calling for a “white homeland,” he has time and again characterized black and brown people, Muslims, Mexicans, and many more in bigoted, racist terms. Recall when he described certain majority nonwhite countries as “shitholes.” Or when he said that if he were a team owner, he would tell NFL players protesting police brutality—“the son of a bitch”—to get off the field. Or when he signed his original “travel ban,” the brainchild of advisor Stephen Miller, that barred all refugees and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. There was the despicable use of the phrase “good people on both sides” when describing the horrific far-right violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, that killed Heather Heyer. The opposite of such measured language is used to describe members of the migrant caravan and others seeking legal asylum at the Mexican border, whom he has characterized as “rapists” and “criminals.”
Now, the SPLC intelligence report reinforces, we aren’t just seeing state intimidation at our ports of entry: Extremists are enacting it themselves, in acts of domestic terrorism and street violence. “White supremacists in Canada and the U.S. killed at least 40 people, up from 17 in 2017,” the SPLC says. That includes the more than a dozen people murdered in the run-up to the primary elections that brought in all those nonwhite, non-male legislators, in violent shooting rampages of two black customers in a Kroger supermarket and at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Not to mention violent street fights waged by the Proud Boys, and the failed pipe bombs that Cesar Sayoc is accused to have sent to media organizations in several U.S. cities. (The study did not even take into account violence against journalists.)
So while the high-profile, high-drama, and yes, highly offensive Jussie Smollett story engulfs our feeds, we need to pay attention to the real trend, and it isn’t a bias against red MAGA hats. The high school shooter, who killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida, apparently liked to wear one.
