It has been well established at this point that Donald Trump united the nation's various white supremacist groups behind his candidacy in a way that hadn't been seen in decades. PBS famously ran a profile of a phone-banking Trump supporter without mentioning the large and prominent white supremacist tattoos covering both arms; human garbage pits like Jared Taylor and David Duke were forever going on about Trump; white supremacist sites were giddy with support for Donald Trump's anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim stances.
So it should be of little surprise that Trump's election has resulted in a steep rise in white supremacist activities.
Since the beginning of the school year in September, and particularly since January, college campuses across the country have seen an uptick in activity from white supremacist groups targeting students, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League out Monday.
The report found there have been 104 incidents involving white supremacists on college campuses since September, 63 of which have occurred since the beginning of 2017.
The ADL report notes that the attention to college campuses is intentional. White supremacist groups see American colleges as both prime recruitment territory and good targets for stirring up trouble in general.
White supremacists are mobilizing in hopes of translating their online activism to “real world” action, and campuses – and young people – are prime targets, in part because they are still figuring out who they are, and what they believe. Extremists also undoubtedly see value in recruiting a new generation that can carry the movement for years to come.
Longtime white supremacist Jared Taylor recently wrote on his website, American Renaissance, that colleges are of special interest “because they are bastions of anti-white propaganda.”
Whether or not this will result in a new, patriotic effort to punch Nazis in the face remains to be seen, though Nazis are among the most delicate flowers in America today and you can believe that if any of them so much as gets harshly reprimanded for their racist efforts on campus they will produce YouTube videos aplenty to describe their sad feelings and how terribly mean the "anti-white propagandists" were to them.
So that's another thing Trump has done in his first hundred days: He's elevated the presence of white supremacist groups on college campuses, groups that now feel that because their anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim president won they have a new mission to publicly expand their hate speech. Trump won't be saying anything about this report, either—it's been like pulling teeth to get him to acknowledge the attacks on Jewish cemeteries, the mosque burnings, and the race-motivated shootings that have marked the first month of his "administration" so you can presume he doesn't care even a tiny, tiny bit that his white nationalist allies have launched new recruitment drives to expand their ranks. Why would he?