Southern Hurricane Law Center Report Shows Record Number of Hate Groups

February 20, 2019, 17:52 GMT

By Ben Kesslen

Hate groups have increased by 30% over the past four years, reaching a record high, according to a report released Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The center, which has been monitoring hate groups and other extremists since the 1980s, had 1,020 hate groups in the United States – "the maximum the SPLC has ever had," said Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project in the United States. legal center.

Hate crimes experienced a "short period of decline", down 23% between 2011 and 2014, but the justice center report said there had been a steady increase over the past four years years.

"National terrorism has also increased," Beirich said at a press conference on the publication of the center's annual intelligence report. Citing examples such as the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings and the two blacks murdered in a Kroger grocery store in Kentucky, the legal center documented 40 people murdered in the United States and Canada by radical right-wing extremists.

These murders, explained the center, are often motivated by the fear of demographic changes that these extremists think, wrongly, to be at the origin of the "white genocide".

Beirich added that anti-woman sentiment is becoming more prevalent in hate groups. "Rapid misogyny is now an integral part of the hate scene in the United States," she said, citing the fatal killing of two women at a yoga class in Tallahassee, Florida, among others .

In 2017, the legal center added "male supremacy groups" to its hate list, claiming that this group was reproducing the behavior of hate groups. Beirich said that these groups, many of which have close ties to white supremacist groups, are largely online and "massive".

The center of law also said black nationalist hate groups use President Donald Trump's derogatory remarks about African nations and black football players to recruit members. These groups are "typically anti-Semitic, anti-LGBT and anti-white," but Beirich pointed out that they were "very different from the white hate groups that we are tracking" in part because they do not have a "white hate group". have "no partisan in traditional politics".

Beirich said the white nationalist groups had been "particularly electrified by the Trump presidency". They "grew by almost 50% last year, from 100 chapters in 2017 to 148 in 2018," the legal center announced.