He singled out key Trump adviser Stephen Bannon, the former editor of the far-right website Breitbart, as evidence that the president’s election had emboldened extremists. And the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history was an explicitly anti-LGBTQ attack at a gay nightclub.
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While the overall number of hate groups in the USA showed a modest increase in 2016, from 892 to 917, the number of anti-Muslim hate groups almost tripled, from 34 to 101, the center said. Groups chronicled in the report range from black separatist to anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim, and Holocaust denial groups, anti-government fringe movements, and white nationalists. That number peaked in 2011, when the SPLC tracked 1,018 groups.
Anti-Muslim hate has been expanding rapidly over the last two years, said Potok, with groups being driven by the mass murder of 49 people at a gay club in Orlando, Florida, in June last year, and by Trump’s promise of creating a Muslim registry and banning Muslims entering the country. Another new group is ACT for America, a national “anti-Muslim” group, which now has a chapter in Mission Viejo. The findings come three months after the FBI’s annual hate crimes report discovered that anti-Muslim hate crimes jumped 67 percent in 2015.
‘We are going to do everything within our power to stop long simmering racism and every other thing that’s going on, ‘ he said.
“It’s true that the total numbers are misleading”, he told me. “That includes hate crimes that are just characterized as harassment”.
“You’re going to see a lot of love”, Trump said, in an attempt to assure critics who claimed that the president had hitched his wagon to a far-right ideology and emboldened American anti-Semites. “Trump has really unleashed [a kind of] right-wing hate in the country that is hard to remember”.
‘As far as people, Jewish people, so many friends; a daughter who happens to be here right now; a son-in-law, and three handsome grandchildren.
Moving in the other direction, however, the number of “Patriot”, or anti-government groups, declined 37.5 percent to 623 past year from 998 in 2015, the center said.
Not all types of SPLC-defined hate groups grew in 2016. “Continuing to push back against “alternative facts” with actual ones remains the best way to erode any credibility that these hate groups seek to win in the current political climate”.
The NYPD has already reported a rise in hate crimes in New York City in 2017.
Part of that is because much of the activity has migrated online, where some lone wolf attackers – such as Mateen and Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof – connected with fellow haters without actually joining any factions.
The Law Center – as it did in its 2016 report – pinpointed Donald Trump as one of the biggest causes for America hating again. But he clearly believes in numerous same ideas that empower hate groups.
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It has also been tracking the number of hate groups across the country. The Shoebat Foundation is classified as an anti-Muslim group while Catholic Counterpoint is considered a radical traditional Catholic group that espouses anti-Semitism.
