US hate groups have seen ideas enter mainstream in Trump era, report finds

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/20/trump-hate-groups-ideas-spread-report-southern-poverty-law-center

Jason Wilson
Wed 20 Feb 2019 11.52 EST
First published on Wed 20 Feb 2019 11.30 EST

A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says that hate groups in the US have continued to surge in the Trump era, and that the president himself has helped to mainstream hate by “fueling fears of a white minority country”.

The Alabama-based SPLC – one of the most long-standing and widely-cited anti-hate organizations – counted 1,020 hate groups in the United States in 2018, up 7% from the previous year.

This represented an all-time high since the SPLC began counting hate groups, beating the previous record in 2011, when the far right’s angry reaction to the Obama presidency was peaking.

In a press conference, Heidi Beirich, the director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project blamed in part the “words and imagery coming out of the Trump administration” which have been “heightening the fears” of demographic replacement.

The report points to a range of murders and violent attacks – like a mail-bombing spree that targeted Democrats and media organisations and a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue – as evidence that the conspiracy-fueled far right is increasingly willing to commit extreme acts.

Another similar recent report from the Anti-Defamation League suggested that extremist murders in the United States in 2018 were carried out almost exclusively by the far right.

But the SPLC also points to the increasingly strident expression of far right ideas in conservative media, and from Republican politicians, as evidence that hate is being mainstreamed.

•••••