Hate group count hits 20-year high amid rise in white supremacy, report says
"White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots"
Chris Woodyard USA TODAY
Published and updated Feb. 2019
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Corrections & Clarifications: Corrects the number of white supremacy groups in 2017 and 2018.
The number of hate groups active in the USA rose to its highest level in two decades last year, according to an annual survey released Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The count of active groups that the civil rights organization labels as espousing hate climbed to 1,020, up from 784 four years ago, and was propelled by a rise in extremism, the center said. From 2017 to 2018 alone, the tally rose 7 percent.
The groups range from white supremacists to black nationalists, neo-Nazis to neo-Confederates.
The annual tally is controversial. It gives the same hate label to some conservative church or political groups such as Catholic Family Ministries (listed as a "general hate group") or Conservative Republicans of Texas (branded anti-gay) as it does to outfits such as the Ku Klux Klan or American Nazi Party. The SPLC said it has been sued by three groups that say they shouldn't be considered hate groups.
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Heidi Beirich, director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project, told USA TODAY the groups that the center considers to be hateful enough to make the survey are reviewed carefully before being added, and "we try to err on the side of caution."
"Much of the energy on the radical right this year was concentrated in the white supremacist milieu," the report says. "After a lull that followed the violence in Charlottesville, which brought criminal charges and civil suits that temporarily dampened the radical right's activism and organizing, newer groups gathered momentum."
Flowers surround a photo of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was killed when a car plowed into a crowd of people protesting against the white supremacist Unite the Right rally on Aug. 13, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
All are driven by concern about dwindling white power, as seen by Census Bureau projections that Caucasians will lose their majority by 2044, according to the report. After a sharp drop-off in the first half of the decade – Beirich said those groups had been driven underground – they revived as the 2016 election approached.
When told of the Southern Poverty Law Center's findings, an expert on hate groups said he, too, believes the problem is on the rise.
"It's depressing, but it's not surprising," said Jack McDevitt, director of the Institute on Race and Justice at Northeastern University. Based on recent data, he said, "you got a whole bunch of indications we're seeing a resurgence in hate activity."
In its annual hate crime report in November, the FBI listed 7,775 criminal incidents for 2017, up from 6,121 in 2016.
While many groups are adding members, the SPLC found one of the best known hate groups, the Ku Klux Klan, appears to be in decline. The group, despite a history .. https://www.history.com/topics/reconstruction/ku-klux-klan .. that stretches back more than a century, has been marked by infighting and difficulty connecting to a younger generation.
"The KKK has not been able to appeal to younger racists, with its antiquated traditions, odd dress and lack of digital savvy. Younger extremists prefer ... polo shirts and khakis to Klan robes," the report says.
But there is no shortage of hate-filled alternatives, whether they are neo-Nazis, racist skinheads or others who direct their anger at immigrants; lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individuals; Muslims or others.
Black nationalist groups, often described as anti-Semitic, hostile to lesbians, gay and transgender people and anti-white, have picked up steam. They have been driven by events such as the outcry around NFL players taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem and hot rhetoric from controversial figures such as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. These groups can be "very, very fringe, and they don't produce the violence that white supremacy does," Beirich said.
At least one of the outfits added to the SPLC list didn't seem to mind.
A leader of the American Freedom Party, a New York-based group that says on its website that the "core European American population" is being overwhelmed by "tens of millions of legal and illegal immigrants," was pleased.
"I am flattered," Chairman William Johnson told USA TODAY. "It really helps elevate our reputation" when the party is lumped with groups close to the mainstream supporting Trump and those linked to Catholicism. He said the list is so broad that it becomes meaningless.
"I don't know any organization that says I'm a hate group. I'm a love group," Johnson said. He said the American Freedom Party has "nationalists of many stripes and races" among its members, and "white people are becoming comfortable with being proud of their heritage.
25 Photos Klu Kluz Klan faces off with protestors in Charlottesville
We Have a White Nationalist Terrorist Problem [...] White supremacy, in other words, is a violent, interconnected transnational ideology. Its adherents are gathering in anonymous, online forums to spread their ideas, plotting attacks and cheering on acts of terrorism. P - The result is an evolving brand of social media-fueled bloodshed. Online communities like 4chan and 8chan have become hotbeds of white nationalist activity. Anonymous users flood the site’s “politics” board with racist, sexist and homophobic content designed to spread across the web. Users share old fascist fiction, Nazi propaganda and pseudoscientific texts about race and I.Q. and replacement theory, geared to radicalize their peers. [...] While its modern roots predate the Trump administration by many decades, white nationalism has attained a new mainstream legitimacy during Mr. Trump’s time in office. [...] Discussions of Americans being “replaced” by immigrants, for instance, are a recurring feature .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/technology/replacement-theory.html?module=inline .. on some programs on Fox News. Fox hosts Tucker Carlson .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/technology/replacement-theory.html?module=inline .. and Laura Ingraham .. https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/hate-lies-and-misinformation-laura-ingraham , for example, return to these themes frequently. Democrats, Ms. Ingraham told viewers last year .. https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/laura-ingraham-vote-republican-or-you-will-be-replaced-immigrants , “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=150415501
Fox News star Tucker Carlson's 'great replacement' segment used a new frame for an old fear
"White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots "Human Zoos: America's Forgotten History of Scientific Racism""
There are still plenty of Americans seeking confirmation that their rank nativism is right.
Tear gas is released into a crowd of protesters during clashes with Capitol police at a rally at the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021.Shannon Stapleton / Reuters
April 13, 2021, 8:45 AM AEST / Updated April 13, 2021, 8:46 AM AEST
The Fox News host tried during the segment to dodge the obvious racial overtones, arguing that “everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it.” Everyone is making this about race, because it is about race. And that’s easily proved by looking at the primary proponents of this rhetoric.
And a few months thereafter, in one of the deadliest days in recent American history, a shooter slaughtered nearly two dozen bystanders in El Paso. In a manifesto, the shooter specifically cited the shifting demographics of Texas as his fascistic casus belli, writing that his actions .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/us/patrick-crusius-el-paso-shooter-manifesto.html .. were “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” — and to the political shifts currently under way in an increasingly purple Texas. Unsurprisingly, it’s that same misunderstanding — the notion that it is immigration, rather than native-born political shifts .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/09/texans-preferred-orourke-cruz-least-texans-born-texas-did/, that is changing Texas’ political map — that is now driving the upsurge in efforts to secede from the U.S.
The specific framing of this “great replacement” tracks back .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/us/el-paso-shooting-racism.html .. nearly a decade to a French author named Renaud Camus, centered on concerns about nonwhite immigration into Europe. But in the U.S., the bones of the idea — the notion that an entrenched white population now stands battered by an influx of outsiders, bent on upending traditional values and shifting America’s political dynamics – is nearly as old as the nation itself.
[INSERT: He may a little, but James will probably not change his political involvement much as he's been at odds with Rupert's positions for years. It's Lachlan that is in a bit of a fix, as he's top honcho at Fox now and is not as conservative-minded as Rupert either. “Executives Are Very Worried Fox & Friends Will Be Next”: After Taking Over Fox, Lachlan Murdoch Is in a Trump Trap [...] Though Lachlan hired West Wing stalwart Hope Hicks, staffers believe he is likely to nudge the network away from its close marriage to Trump. Sources close to Lachlan pointed out that Lachlan is a libertarian conservative, not a MAGA diehard, who in private has expressed annoyance at Trump. “He doesn't like Trump,” one person who has spoken with Lachlan told me. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=157304382]
Nor is such rhetoric finding a widening audience in the U.S. In one of the great ironies of the past few years, the rise of Trump — the author of a movement that, boiled down, is little more than nativism wrapped in a personality cult — may have jump-started American support for immigration writ large. As Gallup found last year .. https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/09/media/adl-letter-fox-news-tucker-carlson/index.html , 34 percent of Americans now say they would like to see immigration to the U.S. increased, the first time Gallup found that a plurality of Americans favored such expansion. - These racial revanchists believe they must do whatever it takes to hold on to their preferential place in the racial hierarchy. - Still, there are plenty of Americans seeking confirmation that their rank nativism is right: those (mostly) white Americans, terrified of change, who find succor in the anti-democratic racism of the American far-right. These racial revanchists believe they must do whatever it takes to hold on to their preferential place in the racial hierarchy.
This ideology — voiced by Carlson, embodied by Trump, but part of the American body politic for centuries — is clearly dangerous. Putting aside mass shootings, the Jan. 6 riot made that incredibly hard to ignore.
As one study in The Washington Post revealed .. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/pro-trump-whites-afraid-being-replaced-attacked-capitol-s-race-n1263216 , the clearest through-line among the insurrectionists wasn’t economic instability, or broader economic concerns. It was, rather, that “the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.”
Among the Insurrectionists [...] There was an eerie sense of inexorability, the throngs of Trump supporters advancing up the long lawn as if pulled by a current. Everyone seemed to understand what was about to happen. The past nine weeks had been steadily building toward this moment. On November 7th, mere hours after Biden’s win was projected, I attended a protest at the Pennsylvania state capitol, in Harrisburg. Hundreds of Trump supporters, including heavily armed militia members, vowed to revolt. When I asked a man with an assault rifle—a “combat-skills instructor” for a militia called the Pennsylvania Three Percent—how likely he considered the prospect of civil conflict, he told me, “It’s coming.” Since then, Trump and his allies had done everything they could to spread and intensify this bitter aggrievement. On December 5th, Trump acknowledged,“I’ve probably worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever have in my life.” (He was not talking about managing the pandemic, which since the election has claimed a hundred and fifty thousand American lives.) Militant pro-Trump outfits like the Proud Boys—a national organization dedicated to “reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism” in America—had been openly gearing up for major violence. In early January, on Parler, an unfiltered social-media site favored by conservatives, Joe Biggs, a top Proud Boys leader, had written, “Every law makers who breaks their own stupid Fucking laws should be dragged out of office and hung.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=160979441
Read Sacha Baron Cohen's scathing attack on Facebook in full: 'greatest propaganda machine in history' [...] The truth is, I’ve been passionate about challenging bigotry and intolerance throughout my life. As a teenager in the UK, I marched against the fascist National Front and to abolish apartheid. As an undergraduate, I traveled around America and wrote my thesis about the civil rights movement, with the help of the archives of the ADL. And as a comedian, I’ve tried to use my characters to get people to let down their guard and reveal what they actually believe, including their own prejudice. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=152547988
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