According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), 2016 was a banner year for hate with the number of anti-Muslim hate groups increasing by a staggering 197 percent. It should come as no surprise that experts say that the anti-immigrant rhetoric which was the hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was a driving force behind this increase.
In a Wednesday briefing call with reporters, SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok called Trump “the most important factor” behind the staggering increase in anti-Muslim hate groups. The group tracked 34 of those groups in 2015, compared to 101 in 2016.
The President’s executive order temporarily barring immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, suggestion that American Muslims decline to tell law enforcement about terrorist attacks being planned in their communities, and pledges to surveil mosques and Muslim neighborhoods played into this “vilification” of Muslims, Potok said.
Dig a little deeper into the surge of hate directed at Muslims and it’s easy to see how Trump has energized the extreme right-wing—once considered to be living on the fringe of society.
Trump’s run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country. [...]
The reaction to Trump’s victory by the radical right was ecstatic. “Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor,” wrote Andrew Anglin, who runs the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. “Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were not for us, it wouldn’t have been possible.” Jared Taylor, a white nationalist who edits a racist journal, said that “overwhelmingly white Americans” had shown they were not “obedient zombies” by choosing to vote “for America as a distinct nation with a distinct people who deserve a government devoted to that people.”
When Nazis and KKK members see themselves in his victory, you know that he is associating with the dregs of humanity. And since white supremacists have found a home with this particular president, it isn’t a shock that they are lashing out at the groups he has targeted the most.
In 2016, reports proliferated about arsons at mosques throughout the country, women having their hijabs pulled off in public and Sikh men being physically assaulted. [...]
“There hardly seemed a reason to organize their own rallies when extremists could attend a Trump event filled with just as much anti-establishment vitriol as any extremist rally,” the report reads.
Do we need anymore proof that Trump, Bannon and friends with their racist agenda are unfit for the White House? Impeach him and his entire administration, now!
