Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Over 1,000 Hate Groups Are Now Active in United States, Civil Rights Group Says

Most hate groups in the United States, including the Ku Klux Klan, espouse some form of white supremacist ideology, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.Credit...Andrea Morales for The New York Times

The number of hate groups in the United States rose for the fourth year in a row in 2018, pushed to a record high by a toxic combination of political polarization, anti-immigrant sentiment and technologies that help spread propaganda online, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Wednesday.

The law center said the number of hate groups rose by 7 percent last year to 1,020, a 30 percent jump from 2014. That broadly echoes other worrying developments, including a 30 percent increase in the number of hate crimes reported to the F.B.I. from 2015 through 2017 and a surge of right-wing violence that the Anti-Defamation League said had killed at least 50 people in 2018.

“We’re seeing a lot of bad trends,” Heidi Beirich, the director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in an interview on Wednesday. “There are more hate groups, more hate crimes and more domestic terrorism in that same vein. It is a troubling set of circumstances.”

Ms. Beirich said the increase in extremist activity tracked by her team began in earnest in the early days of the 2016 presidential election, when anxieties over immigration helped propel President Trump to the White House. Before that, she said, the number of hate groups had fallen for three straight years.

“Trump has made people in the white supremacist movement move back into politics and the public domain,” Ms. Beirich said. “He is a critical aspect of this dynamic, but he is not the only reason why the ranks of hate groups are growing. The ability to propagate hate in the online space is key.”

The center said in a statement that most hate groups in the United States espoused some form of white supremacist ideology, including neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederates and white nationalists. It said the number of white nationalist groups jumped by almost 50 percent, to 148 in 2018 from 100.

For the purposes of its study, the center said it considered any organization whose leaders, activities or statement of principles attacks an entire class of people to be a hate group. Violence is not a prerequisite.

The center’s findings run parallel to a report on extremist-related killings in the United States that was issued last month by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

Image
White nationalists, led by Jason Kessler, center, wearing a suit and carrying a flag, marched in the “Unite the Right 2” rally in Washington.Credit...Craig Hudson/Charleston Gazette-Mail, via Associated Press

That report said that right-wing extremism was linked to every extremist-related killing the group tracked in 2018, at least 50, and that jihadist groups were linked to none. It said that made 2018 the deadliest year for right-wing extremism since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The law center and the Anti-Defamation League both pointed to the killing of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in October as a symptom of the increasingly combustible mix of anti-immigrant sentiment, violence and online conspiracy-mongering.

“The white supremacist attack in Pittsburgh should serve as a wake-up call to everyone about the deadly consequences of hateful rhetoric,” Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the president of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement accompanying its report. “It’s time for our nation’s leaders to appropriately recognize the severity of the threat and to devote the necessary resources to address the scourge of right-wing extremism.”

But the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment had also created “an equal yet opposite reaction,” the Southern Poverty Law Center said. As the number of white supremacist groups rose, so did the number of radical black nationalist groups that espoused anti-white, anti-Semitic or anti-gay and anti-transgender views.

The center said the number of those groups had risen to 264 in 2018 from 233 in 2017, but it noted that the influence of black nationalism in mainstream politics was highly limited.

It did, however, point specifically to comments by the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who the center said echoed white supremacist myths of a looming white genocide in his rhetoric about President Trump, whom he has accused of “planning genocide” against African-Americans.

Mr. Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam have been connected to a continuing controversy surrounding the anti-Trump Women’s March organization, two of whose national leaders have been accused of sympathizing with Mr. Farrakhan and privately expressing anti-Semitic opinions.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which is based in Montgomery, Ala., has tracked domestic extremism since 1971, but in recent years conservatives have accused it of politicizing its findings and falsely labeling right-leaning organizations as hate groups.

The group paid $3.4 million to Maajid Nawaz, a British campaigner against Islamic extremism who sometimes works with conservative anti-Muslim politicians, after it included him on a list of anti-Muslim extremists in 2016. Richard Cohen, the center’s president, said in a public apology that the inclusion of Mr. Nawaz on the list had been “wrong.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT