In its annual Year In Hate and Extremism report, the Southern Poverty Law Center said the number of USA hate groups increased to 892 last year, up from 784 in 2014. The findings were published exclusively in the Washington Post. “They are angry over the coming loss of a white majority (predicted for 2043 by the Census Bureau), the falling fortunes of the white working class, worsening income inequality, the rise of left-wing movements like Black Lives Matter, major advances for LGBT people, growing numbers of refugees and undocumented workers, terrorism and more”, he added.
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At the same time, the number of anti-government “Patriot” groups-such as the Bundy family’s gang of armed militants that occupied an OR wildlife refuge-also rose 14 percent in 2015, from 874 to 998.
“We think that the growth of these groups is due nearly entirely to the very dramatic attention that has been paid over the past year to police violence against black men”, Potok said.
The group defines hate groups as organizations that attack people based on race, sexual orientation and religion.
Racist extremists were responsible for the spike previous year, SPLC found. From Waco to San Antonio, the SPLC listed seven different Klan groups in the region.
The groups listed in Tennessee included several chapters of white supremacist and white nationalist, black separatist, neo-Nazi and anti-Muslim groups, and stretched from Memphis to the farthest reaches of East Tennessee. Hate group activities include: criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing, SPLC’s website says.
“The real story was the deadly violence committed by extremists in city after city”, said Marc Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC.
“The SPLC is a non-governmental, private organization”, said Simi, who studies extremist movements.
In addition, a 2013 analysis by Foreign Policy found that the SPLC is not an “objective purveyor of data” and instead called them “anti-hate activists”.
In February 2015, SPLC officials apologized to Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson for the 2014 profile of him in their online “Extremist Files”.
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Leaders of the groups that remain on the SPLC’s lists insist the center makes more mistakes than it acknowledges and is as intolerant as it accuses its targets of being. “If you don’t support us, these people are going to come get you”. Twenty of these were killed by white supremacists, including the nine killed by 21-year-old Dylann Roof at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June. others were killed by Islamic extremists, including the 14 killed in San Bernardino, California, in December. In 1999 there were 457 hate groups, reacheing a peak of 1018 in 2011, three years after the global financial crash.
