SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER – WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY DO

COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY

BY LUCY WARNER

SEPTEMBER 2, 2019

PROUD BOYS VS ANTIFA MIX IT UP IN PORTLAND OREGON

AUGUST 17, 2019

SEE VIDEO: https://www.cbsnews.com/live/

ONLY THREE FIGHTERS WERE ARRESTED, ALL OF WHOM WERE WITH ANTIFA. POLICE LATER, AFTER BEING QUESTIONED ABOUT THE LACK OF PROUD BOY ARRESTS, HAVE PROMISED TO LOOK AT IT AGAIN FOR CRIMINAL CHARGES AGAINST SOME HALF DOZEN PROUD BOY MEMBERS AND THREE MORE FROM ANTIFA. HERE IS ONE OF THEIR MELEES ON YOUTUBE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPD1-awWmhg

`Proud Boys' fight with masked antifa demonstrators on UES: NYPD

HOW DO CRIMINALS THINK? THIS IS A PROUDBOY QUOTE: “WE’RE JUST A FRATERNAL ORGANIZATION.” DOES HE MEAN SOMETHING LIKE THE ROTARY CLUB? OF COURSE, EVEN SOME OF THOSE TRADITIONAL MEN’S FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS DO HAVE RACIST LINKS, AT LEAST IN THE PAST.

OUR SOCIETY JUST ISN’T NEARLY AS CLEAN AS I THOUGHT DURING THE FIRST TWO DECADES OF MY LIFE. I THOUGHT THE BEAUTY OF OUR TRADITIONS, CONSTITUTION AND LEGAL STRUCTURE PROTECTED US FROM THE WORST CHARACTERISTICS OF HUMAN NATURE. I THOUGHT THAT WE WERE INTELLIGENT ENOUGH AND HONEST ENOUGH NOT TO KEEP REPEATING THOSE THINGS OVER AND OVER. HERE WE ARE IN ANOTHER PERIOD OF NATIONAL PERIL, WITH HUMAN NATURE PROVING ITSELF TO BE UNCHANGED.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7f4b1o6BKM

#SpecialBroadcastingService #DatelineSBS #Documentary

Meet the Proud Boys, a group that says it speaks for a new minority: the disenfranchised young male

VIDEO BY SBS, an Australian public broadcast service. 

Wikipedia 

THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER (SPLC) ON THE PROUD BOYS

THE SPLC IS ONE OF THE PRIMARY ORGANIZATIONS WHO DAILY FIGHT HATE CRIMES AND TRACK HATE GROUPS, EXPOSING THEM AND THEIR ACTIONS TO AUTHORITIES AND TO THE PUBLIC. THEY COMMENT ON THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE PROUD BOYS AND ANTIFA. WHY ARE THE PROUD BOYS CONSIDERED A HATE GROUP WHEN ANTIFA IS NOT? IS IT MERELY THE SPLC’S LIBERAL PREJUDICE, OR IS A CRIME BASED ON GROUP HATRED WORSE THAN AN ORDINARY RAPE, ARSON, MURDER OR GENERAL HARASSMENT? IF THOSE ARE ALREADY CRIMES UNDER THE LAW, WHY IS A HATE CRIME SUCH AN ISSUE? WHAT CAN WE SEE FROM HISTORY AND THE DEPTHS TO WHICH GROUP HYSTERIA CAN DRIVE PEOPLE?  

THEN, IN THE ARTICLE BELOW, SEE ALSO THE SEGMENT ON WELL-KNOWN AND RESPECTED LEADERS WHO ARE LINKED WITH A HATE GROUP. https://www.splcenter.org/20170427/100-days-trumps-america

OF PARTICULAR INTEREST IS THE LIST OF THOSE WHO ARE OR WERE IN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND ADMINISTRATION. IT’S ENOUGH TO MAKE EVEN ME FEEL SHOCK, THOUGH I’VE BEEN WATCHING THE NEWS ON A DAILY BASIS. ON THE TRUMP YEARS SO FAR, THERE HAS BEEN SO MUCH PURE CHAOS AND PURPOSEFUL CORRUPTION THAT IT IS HARD TO KEEP UP WITH EVERYTHING. I KNEW, FOR INSTANCE, THAT MICHAEL FLYNN WAS LINKED WITH THE INTERNATIONAL RUSSIAN SCANDAL, BUT NOT THAT HE ALSO HAD TIES TO A HATE GROUP. ON THE MAINSTREAMING OF HORROR, TO THE POINT THAT IT IS BECOMING “NORMAL,” GO TO: “WHITE NATIONALISTS AND THEIR AGENDA INFILTRATE THE MAINSTREAM.”

THAT STORY ISN’T JUST A CONSPIRACY THEORY. IT’S LIFE TODAY. SO MUCH OF THE REASON FOR THAT IS THE FACT THAT OUR GENERALLY RESPECTABLE WHITE MIDDLE CLASS OF THE OLDER GENERATION DO TEND TO CONSIDER CHAMPIONING “CONSERVATISM” OR HARASSING SOMEONE OF ANY GROUP, BUT PARTICULARLY A DISADVANTAGED GROUP, TO BE THE GUARANTEED RIGHT OF A CITIZEN, NO MATTER WHAT THAT REALLY MEANS IN DAILY LIFE; AND ACCEPTANCE OF ABUSE IS SIMPLY A RITE OF PASSAGE. TO BE A GOOD CITIZEN WE HAVE TO BEND THE KNEE EVERY TIME WE ENCOUNTER SOMEONE STRONGER OR RICHER.

IF YOU READ ENOUGH OLD CLASSIC BRITISH NOVELS, YOU WILL COME ACROSS THE PHRASE “HE PULLED HIS FORELOCK.” WHAT COULD THAT MEAN? IF A “GENTLEMAN” WALKED BY (A MEMBER OF THE “LANDED GENTRY,” THAT IS) A MAN WHO WAS OF A LESSER STATUS, WHICH WAS NEARLY EVERYBODY, MUST EITHER TAKE OFF HIS HAT OR LITERALLY PULL THE FORELOCK OF HIS HAIR, AND WOMEN MUST CURTSY. SOME FIND THAT COURTLY AND BEAUTIFUL, BUT I FIND IT DISGUSTING. SOME OF US JUST DON’T BUY ANY OF THAT NONSENSE, SO WE REBEL. IF BEING ABUSIVE IS THE RIGHT OF THE POWERFUL, THEN FIGHTING BACK IS THE RIGHT OF THE HUMBLER CLASSES, AND TO FAIL TO ALLOW THAT JUSTICE IS CORRUPTION.

WE SHOULDN’T DO THAT CORRECTION OF JUSTICE BY VIOLENCE, THOUGH, WHEN WE HAVE THE LAW TO USE INSTEAD. THAT’S THE PURPOSE OF THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER. A REBEL ATTORNEY NAMED MORRIS DEES STARTED THE ORGANIZATION, AND THEY FIGHT IN COURT FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE FACED ABUSE OR BEEN IMPRISONED UNJUSTLY. WHEN THEY WIN A CASE IN COURT, IT BECOMES LEGAL PRECEDENT, AND THUS IMPROVES OUR LEGAL SYSTEM BIT BY BIT, ESPECIALLY IF THE SUPREME COURT RULES IN THEIR FAVOR.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/proud-boys?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI29KonKCw5AIVhZ6zCh1zwQXbEAAYASAAEgKvT_D_BwE

PROUD BOYS

EXTREMIST GROUP INFO:

SPLC DESIGNATED HATE GROUP

Date Founded 2016

Location

New York City, New York

Ideology -- General Hate

Established in the midst of the 2016 presidential election by VICE Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys are self-described “western chauvinists” who adamantly deny any connection to the racist “alt-right,” insisting they are simply a fraternal group spreading an “anti-political correctness” and “anti-white guilt” agenda.

Their disavowals of bigotry are belied by their actions: rank-and-file Proud Boys and leaders regularly spout white nationalist memes and maintain affiliations with known extremists. They are known for anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric. Proud Boys have appeared alongside other hate groups at extremist gatherings like the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. Indeed, former Proud Boys member Jason Kessler helped to organize the event, which brought together Klansmen, antisemites, Southern racists, and militias. Kessler was only “expelled” from the group after the violence and near-universal condemnation of the Charlottesville rally-goers.

From the blog
Oct. 13, 2018
Far-right skinheads join Proud Boys in assaulting protesters in New York City following Gavin McInnes event

Other hardcore members of the so-called "alt-right" have argued that the “western chauvinist” label is just a “PR cuck term” McInnes crafted to gain mainstream acceptance. “Let’s not bullshit,” Brian Brathovd, aka Caeralus Rex, told his co-hosts on the antisemitic The Daily Shoah — one of the most popular alt-right podcasts. If the Proud Boys “were pressed on the issue, I guarantee you that like 90% of them would tell you something along the lines of ‘Hitler was right. Gas the Jews.’”

McInnes himself has ties to the racist right and has contributed to hate sites like VDare.com and American Renaissance, both of which publish the work of white supremacists and so-called “race realists.” He even used Taki’s Magazine — a far-right publication whose contributors include Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor — to announce the founding of the Proud Boys. McInnes plays a duplicitous rhetorical game: rejecting white nationalism and, in particular, the term “alt-right” while espousing some of its central tenets. For example, McInnes has himself said it is fair to call him Islamophobic.

In its own words

"It’s such a rape culture with these immigrants, I don’t even think these women see it as rape. They see it as just like having a teeth [sic] pulled. ‘It’s a Monday. I don’t really enjoy it,’ but that’s what you do. I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t have the same trauma as it would for a middle-class white girl in the suburbs because it’s so entrenched into their culture.” — Gavin McInnes, Get Off My Lawn, June 19, 2018

"Muslims have a problem with inbreeding. They tend to marry their first cousins…and that is a major problem here because when you have mentally damaged inbreds — which not all Muslims are, but a disproportionate number are — and you have a hate book called the Koran…you end up with a perfect recipe for mass murder." — Gavin McInnes, Get Off My Lawn, April 24, 2018

“We brought roads and infrastructure to India and they are still using them as toilets. Our criminals built nice roads in Australia but aboriginals keep using them as a bed. The next time someone bitches about colonization, the correct response is ‘You’re welcome.’”
—Gavin McInnes, “10 Things I like About White Guys,” Taki’s Magazine, March 2, 2017

“Well look at the canary in the coal mine called Britain. We see guys get away with raping children regularly, and they have excuses like ‘I didn’t understand the word ‘no.’’ We have a woman raped several times in one night. All these guys seem to…they don’t all get away but they seem to get away way too often. And then you have people being jailed for rude tweets and comments when they’re white, so…people in America say ‘Muslim are what? One or two percent of the population? There’s never gonna be sharia law here.’ And I say have a look at Britain. Have a look at Europe. That’s where we’re headed.”
—Gavin McInnes, “Get Off My Lawn”, November 4, 2017

“Maybe the reason I’m sexist is because women are dumb. No, I’m just kidding, ladies. But you do tend to not thrive in certain areas — like writing.”
—Gavin McInnes, The Gavin McInnes Show, June 28, 2017

“I just realized something. Cory Booker is kind of like Sambo. He’s kind of shucking and jiving for the white man. Cory Booker grew up rich in an all-white suburb. He’s basically a white guy. His parents were very wealthy executives at IBM… .But he wants to be a black dude, so he pretends that he’s down with the brothers and he acts outraged about racism all the time — for white people. That gets him votes from whites.”
—Gavin McInnes on his CRTV show “Get Off My Lawn,” January 17, 2018

“The white liberal ethos tells us blacks aren’t at MIT because of racism. They say blacks dominate the prison population for the same reason. They insist America is a racist hellhole where ‘people of color’ have no future. This does way more damage to black youth than the KKK. When you strip people of culpability and tell them the odds are stacked against them, they don’t feel like trying. White liberals make this worse by then using affirmative action to “correct” society’s mistakes. When blacks are forced into schools they aren’t qualified for they have no choice but to drop out. Instead of going back a step to a school they can handle, they tend to give up on higher education entirely. Thanks to the Marxist myth of ubiquitous equality, this ‘mismatch’ leaves blacks less educated than they would have been had they been left to their own devices.”
—Gavin McInnes, “America in 2034,” American Renaissance, June 17, 2014

“I’m not a fan of Islam. I think it’s fair to call me Islamophobic.”
—Gavin McInnes, NBC interview, 2017

“Palestinians are stupid. Muslims are stupid. And the only thing they really respect is violence and being tough.”
—Gavin McInnes, The Gavin McInnes Show, March 8, 2017

“Why don’t we take back Bethlehem? Why don’t we take back Northern Iraq? Why don’t we start our own Crusades? That’s what the Crusades were. They weren’t just someone picking on Muslims for no reason — they were a reaction to Muslim tyranny. We finally fought back.”
—Gavin McInnes, The Gavin McInnes Show, March 8, 2017

“Buying woman parts from a hospital and calling yourself a broad trivializes what it is to be a woman. Womanhood is not on a shelf next to wigs and makeup. Similarly, being a dude is quite involved. Ripping your vaginal canal out of your fly doesn’t mean you are going to start inventing shit and knowing how cement works. Being a man is awesome. So is being a woman. We should revere these creations, not revel in their bastardization.”
—Gavin McInnes, “Transphobia is Perfectly Natural,” Thought Catalog, August 8, 2014

“I am not afraid to speak out about the atrocities that whites and people of European descent face not only here in this country but in Western nations across the world. The war against whites, and Europeans and Western society is very real and it’s time we all started talking about it and stopped worrying about political correctness and optics.”
—Kyle Chapman, who formed the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, a wing of the Proud Boys, Unite America First Peace Rally, Sacramento, California, July 8, 2017

“Put something on the table! Give us a reason to accept you, because you know what? Sharia law ain’t it. Raping women ain’t it. Cutting off clits ain’t it. Throwing gay people of roofs ain’t it. You are a disgrace.”
—Pawl Bazile, a production director of Proud Boys’ magazine, on Muslims, March against Sharia rally, New York City, New York, June 10, 2017

Background

Canadian Gavin McInnes has been flaunting his contempt for PC culture for decades. Before entering the fray of right-wing politics, McInnes co-founded VICE Magazine, a publication that came to epitomize hipster culture in the late 1990s and 2000s. While the magazine tended to dabble in provocative and taboo topics — generally under a veneer of irony — McInnes took pleasure in stepping over the line. In 2002, for instance, when a New York Press reporter asked McInnes what he thought about his neighbors in New York’s Williamsburg neighborhood, he responded, “Well, at least they’re not niggers or Puerto Ricans. At least they’re white.”

While presenting his observation as a joke and revenue-generating ruse (“incendiary political statements garnered endless publicity for us,” he later told Gawker), McInnes seems to have meant its underlying sentiment sincerely. “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of,” he told The New York Times a year later, revealing an ideology that would later form the foundation of the Proud Boys. “I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.” McInnes also started writing for VDare.com, a white nationalist hate site. In one 2005 article, he railed against Canadian multiculturalism and lamented that Jared Taylor, the editor of the race-science newsletter American Renaissance, had not been invited to speak at the University of Ottawa. Ten years later, McInnes would welcome Taylor onto his own show, where the white nationalist spent more than an hour explaining why he believes white people are “better” than African Americans.

McInnes left VICE in 2008, citing creative differences, and pursued a variety of other media projects. But his relationship with mainstream outlets started to erode in 2014 as he began to swap irony for earnestness. As part of an American Renaissance series featuring “race-realist commentators on the future of American race relations,” McInnes offered his predictions alongside fellow contributors like John Derbyshire, Paul Gottfried, Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor. In his piece, McInnes wrote that while he didn’t harbor any hate for minorities, he did for white liberals who subscribed to a “Marxist myth of ubiquitous equally” and refused to acknowledge innate disparities between people of different races — a notion he supported using the long-discredited work of Charles Murray. McInnes insisted he held out hope for the future of American race relations: once “we’re all forced to live side by side, we’ll quickly realize we’re incompatible, and agree to disagree,” he concluded. “The blind utopians at The New York Times will be crushed and the rest of us realists will be dancing in the streets.”

Only months later, McInnes published an article titled “Transphobia is perfectly natural” that prompted his then-employer, the ad agency Rooster, to indefinitely sever ties with him. “We’re all transphobic,” he wrote in the Thought Catalog piece. “We see there are no old trannies. They die of drug overdoses and suicide way before they’re 40 and nobody notices because nobody knows them. They are mentally ill gays who need help, and that doesn’t include being maimed by physicians.” McInnes has also referred to transgender people as “gender niggers” and “stupid lunatics.” McInnes’ repugnant rhetoric extends to women, too. He’s written that “through trial and error, I learned that women want to be downright abused” by men, and, in a tweet, that “Every guy I’ve ever known to be involved in a ‘domestic’ was the result of some cunt trying to ruin his life.”

With former business partners turning him away, in the spring of 2015 McInnes formed a partnership with the Canadian far-right video channel Rebel Media and, a couple months later, launched “The Gavin McInnes Show” with Compound Media. On both platforms, he regularly chatted with right-wing guests (his first show featured the far-right provocateur and former Breitbart reporter Milo Yiannopoulos) and carved out an ideological space for frustrated young men to rally around: western culture is superior to all others, racism is a myth created by guilty white liberals, Islam is a culture of violence, and feminism “is about de-masculinizing men,” he told his audience. A group of like-minded men at Compound Media — who bonded over their shared frustration with PC culture — began to meet in New York City dive bars. From these gatherings, the Proud Boys were born, and McInnes officially introduced the group in Taki’s in September 2016.

There are three degrees of membership within the Proud Boys, and to become a first degree in the “pro-West fraternal organization” a prospective member simply has to declare “I am a western chauvinist, and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.” To enter the second degree, a Proud Boy has to endure a beating until they can yell out the names of five breakfast cereals (in order to demonstrate “adrenaline control”) and give up masturbation because, in theory, it will leave them more inclined to go out and meet women. Those who enter the third degree have demonstrated their commitment by getting a Proud Boys tattoo. Any man — no matter his race or sexual-orientation — can join the fraternal organization as long as they “recognize that white men are not the problem.” Women have their own contingent called the Proud Boys’ Girls.

Members are identifiable by more than ink: they sport yellow-trimmed black Fred Perry polos and yell the tongue-in-cheek catchphrase “Uhuru!” — a Swahili word they picked up from a YouTube video in which an activist talks to white people about reparations. Their name comes from an Aladdin song, “Proud of Your Boy.” They adhere to a list of libertarian-leaning principles, including opposition to the drug war, racial guilt, and political correctness, and support for small government, closed borders, and “Venerating the Housewife.”

The oddball humor that tinges Proud Boys culture, and creates a set of references incomprehensible to those on the outside, has attracted a surprisingly large number of men. There is an obvious overlap between their views and those of President Donald Trump, whose election in 2016 played a clear role in increasing Proud Boys’ membership. A red MAGA hat is nearly as prominent at Proud Boys gatherings as their Fred Perry polos, and, in fact, one of their first public outings was at a pro-Trump art show – called #DaddyWillSaveUS – where McInnes displayed photos of himself as a white slave. It’s a favorite mythical reference of his as well as neo-Nazis and white nationalists; one episode of his Rebel Media show centered on the notion that the “history of slavery is rife with white slaves.”

The Proud Boys took off after the presidential election. Each of their official Facebook and Twitter pages had over 20,000 followers at the end of 2017. The website Rewire estimates there are roughly 6,000 members. Group meetings, according to McInnes, “usually consist of drinking, fighting, and reading aloud from Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West.”

For McInnes and the Proud Boys, much like Buchanan, pro-Westernism is indistinguishable from outright opposition to Islam. McInnes’s Rebel Media videos feature titles like “Donald Trump’s Muslim ban is exactly what we need right now,” “10 examples of the Koran being violent,” and “Islam isn’t ‘dope.’ It’s sexist.” He’s also hosted Pamela Geller, among the most prominent figures in today’s anti-Muslim movement, on his newest show on the conservative online outlet CRTV, “Get Off My Lawn.” “People in America say ‘Muslims are what? One or two percent of the population? There’s never gonna be sharia law here,’” he said during the interview before assuring viewers that Britain, where Muslims are “raping children regularly” and where “women are raped several times in one night,” is the “canary in the coalmine.” In an interview with NBC, McInnes admitted “I’m not a fan of Islam. I think it’s fair to call me Islamophobic.”

The Proud Boys’ pro-western posture allows them to position themselves— somewhat counterintuitively — as a tolerant and progressive social force. If Islamic backwardness, as they imagine, threatens gay people and women, then they serve as their guardians by protecting and promoting “western values.” Their opposition to Muslims and Islam, improbably, stands as a marker of their own tolerance. In that way, their ideology is similar to many European far-right groups — like the French National Front and Danish Party for Freedom — who push hardline anti-immigration policies at the same time they call for greater tolerance in the form of secularism and gender equality, all the while attempting to distance themselves from overt racists. According to the sociologist Rogers Brubaker, the concurrent embrace of intolerance and inclusion is not only a rhetorical strategy but a political one, employed to “reach out to new constituencies and gain mainstream acceptance” from people who might otherwise hold an aversion toward extremist groups.

Proud Boys do their best to muddy right-wing taxonomies. Despite the pains they’ve taken to distance themselves from open white nationalists and antisemites, Proud Boys have been present at high-profile alt-right events, including the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “[J]ust don’t fucking wear your Fred Perry, or decide to belt: ‘Proud of Your Boy,’” McInnes limply warned followers before the event. “[I]f you decide to rub elbows with those people [while] in colors, you very well could find yourself disavowed.”

But they did show up, which McInnes evidently expected. In the first episode of his Compound Media show after the August rally, McInnes said he had been “just combing through all the media reports going, ‘Don’t say Proud Boys, don’t say Proud Boys, don’t say Proud Boys,’” hoping the “lunatic Nazi” who allegedly killed Heather Heyer wasn’t a member of his group. He wasn’t, but the white nationalist Jason Kessler — who has been filmed undergoing his second-degree Proud Boy initiation — was the rally’s principal organizer. Less than two months earlier, Kessler had been a guest on “The Gavin McInnes Show,” where he promoted Unite the Right and, in a chummy interview, laid out the ideological overlap he and McInnes shared. “What’s really under attack is if you say, ‘I want to stand up for white people. I want to stand up for western civilization. I want to stand up for men. I want to stand up for Christians,’” to which McInnes nodded in agreement and added other examples: “I’m against immigration…I’m against jihadis. I’m against radical Islam.”

After Charlottesville, in a move to protect the fratty and innocuous Proud Boys’ brand he’s worked so hard to cultivate, McInnes ejected Kessler from the organization and insisted he had never really been a Proud Boy. “I’m suspicious of you, coming to Proud Boys meetings saying you’re not alt-right…and I think you were there to try to recruit guys,” McInnes told Kessler when they spoke on his show two days after the rally. It was only after the violence in Charlottesville, when any doubts about the true nature of the movement were stripped away, that Mcinnes attempted to earnestly distance the Proud Boys from the alt-right label. Before that, he seemed content to let the Proud Boys brand appear more ideologically ambiguous, profiting off the alt-right’s rising popularity until things got ugly.

Although McInnes has attempted to distance his organization from the violence of Charlottesville, violence is firmly entrenched in Proud Boy dogma. McInnes was filmed punching a counter-protestor outside of the Deploraball in January 2017, and after a speaking engagement at New York University the next month turned violent, he wryly declared, “I cannot recommend violence enough. It’s a really effective way to solve problems.” In fact, in early 2017, the Proud Boys added another degree to their membership hierarchy: in order to enter the 4^th degree, a member needs to “get involved in a major fight for the cause.” “You get beat up, kick the crap out of an antifa,” McInnes explained to Metro. Though he claimed in the interview he was ready to “get violent and beat the f--k out of everybody,” he later backtracked in a Proud Boys Magazine piece, assuring the public the fraternal group was opposed to “senseless violence.” “We don’t start fights, we finish them,” McInnes wrote.

Around the same time, Proud Boys member Kyle Chapman announced he was forming a new “tactical defense arm” of the Proud Boys — with McInnes’ “full approval” — called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (FOAK). The paramilitary wing positions itself as a defensive organization formed to protect right-wing activists at political demonstrations. Chapman, who has an extensive criminal history, first gained renown within the alt-right when he was photographed hitting a counter-protestor over the head with a stick at a March 4, 2017, pro-Trump rally in Berkeley, California.

Now referring to himself as “Based Stick Man,” Chapman has been making the rounds of far-right rallies around the country, doing little to create rhetorical distance between the Proud Boys and outright white nationalism. “I am not afraid to speak out about the atrocities that whites and people of European descent face not only here in this country,” he told a crowd at the July Unite America First Peace Rally in Sacramento, “but in Western nations across the world. The war against whites and Europeans and Western society is very real.” It’s an idea he brings up over and over again. “Whites are being discriminated against en masse,” he told a reporter at The Atlantic. On social media, he’s used the tags #ItsOkayToBeWhite and #WhiteGenocide — both of which originated in white nationalist web forums.

Chapman openly encourages fellow Proud Boys and others on the far right to “sacrifice” for their beliefs. “You are also gonna have to come to the realization that you may have to bleed to keep this going,” he told the crowd in Sacramento. “You’re maybe gonna have to do some time in jail and you very may well have to die…I’m willing to die. Are you guys willing to die?” he asked, and was met with cheers.

Similar calls have come from Augustus Invictus — born Austin Gillespie — a former Florida attorney and Senate candidate Chapman named his second-in-command in FOAK. Invictus’ ideology is a bizarre mix: he holds many mainstream libertarian beliefs but also claims Nazi and antisemitic thinkers (from the likes of Carl Schmitt and Francis Parker Yockey) as his chief intellectual influences and paganism as his faith. During his Senate run in 2016, journalists discovered that the candidate had slaughtered a goat and drank its blood as part of a pagan ritual. In campaign material, he criticized the federal government for abandoning eugenics programs. He’s also an admitted Holocaust denier.

McInnes welcomed Invictus onto his show on July 28, 2017, where the conversation repeatedly dipped into Invictus’s interest in armed revolution. He explained that he’d fallen out with his fellow attorneys because they took offense to his suggestions that “maybe lawyers should be hanged in a revolution and…if people get in our way, shoot them.” With regard to journalists, he continued, “I’ll tell them, ‘you’re the first ones that are gonna be hanging from a lamppost in the event of revolution.’” McInnes only nodded along and, in response, offered up his own frustrations with liberal journalists.

Like some former members of the Proud Boys, Invictus eventually left the group for more hard-core parts of the white nationalist movement. Two months after the interview, Invictus severed his ties with FOAK and, by implication, the Proud Boys, explaining in a Facebook video that he was frustrated with Chapman’s lack of professionalism. He has since focused on strengthening his relationship with the alt-right, becoming a board member for Kyle Bristow’s white nationalist legal outfit, Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas.

The turn toward violence — and the blurring borders between ‘alt-lite’ and ‘alt-right’ — is typified by Brien James, the state representative for the Indiana Proud Boys and a member of FOAK. James gained his racist skinhead credentials in the Outlaw Hammerskins and the Hoosier State Skinheads before becoming one of the founding members of the Vinlanders Social Club (VSC), a racist gang known for its extreme violence. Since its creation in 2003, the VSC has been linked to at least nine murders nationwide. James once bragged that his Joint Terrorism Task Force file was “a mile long,” and allegedly nearly beat a man to death for refusing to Seig Heil at a party.

James no longer considers himself a white nationalist but does identify as a member of the alt-right. In June 2017, he posted a video on YouTube in which he painstakingly attempted to categorize the groups that fit under the alt-right’s umbrella, drawing distinctions between white nationalists and what he calls “constitutional nationalist organizations” that put “ America first” and are ostensibly racially inclusive. He explains that the Proud Boys and American Guard — an organization James founded as a modern version of the nineteenth-century anti-nativist group the Bowery Boys — fall into the latter category. But American Guard appears to draw a large portion of his membership from the racist skinhead VSC. And, even though James has stated that he refuses to mingle with National Socialists, he marched alongside them in Charlottesville. A video captured by Charlottesville Weekly shows James in an American Guard t-shirt trudging behind a man yelling “Black lives don’t matter” and “Hitler did nothing wrong” at the August rally.

Proud Boys have become a staple at anti-Muslim and other far-right demonstrations, like when a group of Halifax Proud Boys disrupted a July 2017 ceremony held to mourn the murders of indigenous people by declaring the land “a British colony” and singing “God Save the Queen.” Both rank-and-file and FOAK members were in attendance at the anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America’s “March Against Sharia” rallies held in 28 cities around the country on June 10, 2017. At the New York City event — where Chapman harassed counter-protesters — local Proud Boy Pawl Bazile gave a speech contrasting his own Italian forebears with Muslim immigrants. “Give us a reason to accept you,” he yelled, “because you know what? Sharia law ain’t it. Raping women ain’t it. Cutting off clits ain’t it. Throwing gay people off roofs ain’t it. You are a disgrace.” He also referred to Burkas as a “ghost costume.”

Only weeks after the rally, the New York chapter gathered for an event they called “Islamberg Exposed: Ride for Homeland Security.” The Proud Boys, along with radical anti-government groups including the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, caravanned through the small, upstate New York African-American Muslim community of Islamberg, which they described as a “suspected ground for recruiting, housing, and training terrorists, as well as a place away from the public eye for stockpiling weapons.” In a film Bazile made of the “ride through,” one of the participants claimed to have conducted “night-vision reconnaissance” in the town, and allegedly witnessed “training” like “breaking-neck-practicing” and “hand-to-hand combat training.” Participants featured in the film, including Lisa Joseph from ACT for America, referred to the community as a “ no-go zone”: fictitious Muslim neighborhoods that are so dangerous even the police refuse to enter. Unsurprisingly, the outing turned up nothing to suggest anything nefarious happening in the community.

While it’s hard to imagine anyone but a racist would spend their weekend menacingly parading through a Muslim neighborhood, Proud Boys continue to forswear that label. A number of journalists who’ve written about the group have received cease-and-desistorders from Proud Boys’ lawyer Jason Van Dyke insisting they “do not now, nor have they ever, espoused white nationalist, white supremacist, anti-Semitic, or alt-right views.”

The statement is especially remarkable coming from Van Dyke, a member of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter and known neo-Confederate. Van Dyke’s affair with far right extremism stretches back until at least his college days, when Michigan State University police searching his dorm found extremist literature, including The Turner Diaries and Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 2000, the university suspended Van Dyke for several semesters after he was arrested for domestic violence, possession of a banned weapon and firearm safety violations. 

Van Dyke's penchant for violence appears on his Twitter page, where in 2014 he made death threats against another user. Alongside a picture of a noose, he wrote, “Look good and hard at this picture you fucking nigger. It’s where I am going to put your neck.” “Your kiddies are quite a nuisance,” he wrote to another, “My advice: run and hide. If I find you, I WILL kill both you and your family.” After the musician Talib Kweli drew attention to the tweets, Van Dyke tweeted a picture of an AR-15 with the caption, “Stupid Talib is trying to get a lynch mob on IG to attack my home, job, & family. It won’t end well for the attackers.” Twitter banned him in response.

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THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND MORE:

https://www.splcenter.org/20170427/100-days-trumps-america

White nationalists and their agenda infiltrate the mainstream

As he spoke to the nation on Jan. 20, Donald Trump reminded white nationalists why they had invested so much hope in him as their champion and redeemer.

He painted a bleak picture of America: a nation of crumbling, third-world infrastructure, “rusted-out factories,” leaky borders, inner cities wallowing in poverty, a depleted military and a feckless political class that prospered as the country fell into ruin.

He promised an “America First” policy that would turn it all around. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” Trump declared.

The inaugural address echoed the themes of a campaign that had electrified the white nationalist – or “alt-right” – movement with its promise to stop all Muslim travelers at the border and deport millions of undocumented immigrants – killers and “rapists,” Trump called them.

Four days after the inauguration, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer told a TV interviewer, “Trump is a white nationalist, so to speak. He is alt-right whether he likes it or not.”

In his first 100 days, despite his failure to achieve any major legislative victories, Trump has not disappointed his alt-right followers. His actions suggest that – unlike the economic populism of his campaign – Trump’s appeals to the radical right did indeed presage his White House agenda.

On Jan. 31, former Klan leader David Duke tweeted: “everything I’ve been talking about for decades is coming true and the ideas I’ve fought for have won.”

The extremist advisers

Along with an array of conservative billionaires, Trump installed a handful of advisers who are closer to the radical right than to the mainstream. They include:

·         Chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who bragged about turning Breitbart News into “the platform for the alt-right.”

·         Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a conspiracy theory peddler with close ties to Muslim-bashing extremists. Named national security adviser, he was fired less than a month into office, ostensibly for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.

·         Stephen Miller, a former right hand to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions and a one-time acolyte of anti-Muslim extremist David Horowitz. From his previous perch in the Senate, the senior presidential adviser served as a bridge to Breitbart and a key player in helping defeat efforts to reform the immigration system.

·         Sebastian Gorka, a terrorism adviser who is associated with neo-Nazis in his native Hungary. Gorka has been aligned with anti-Muslim extremist groups since immigrating to the United States in 2008.

Bannon, in particular, embodied the hopes and dreams of white nationalists with his blow-it-all-up style and apocalyptic worldview. He thrilled them with his hyper-nationalism, his firebrand attacks on “globalists” and Republican “cucks,” and his stated desire to “deconstruct” the “administrative state.”

Trump brought into the White House two writers from Bannon’s Breitbart: Gorka, as a deputy assistant, and Julia Hahn, as special assistant to the president.

As chief of staff for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Trump appointed Julie Kirchner, who spent nearly a decade as executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The group, which is included on the SPLC’s list of hate groups, has deep ties to white nationalists and eugenicists. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hired Jon Feere, a legal analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies. The group is an offshoot of FAIR and also listed as a hate group by the SPLC.

Perhaps Trump’s most consequential appointment was Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Sessions, who was once denied a federal judgeship amid allegations of racism, was the most powerful ally of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim extremist groups while serving as a U.S. senator from Alabama.

The white nationalist agenda

Trump moved quickly to make good on his most inflammatory promises, particularly those related to immigration, his core issue. Here are the major policy actions of his agenda over the first 100 days:

·         Immigration. Trump signed executive orders instructing the Department of Homeland Security to hire 5,000 new Border Patrol agents; build detention facilities near the border; take steps to begin building a border wall; and prioritize the deportation of undocumented immigrations charged “with any criminal offense” or who “pose a risk to public safety or national security.” In addition, he ordered the withholding of federal funds from so-called “sanctuary cities” that refuse to use local police to enforce federal immigration law – though the order was later blocked in court. Implementing Trump’s orders, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly directed ICE to hire 10,000 new agents and gave the agency broad new discretion to arrest and deport immigrants, including parents who can now be accused of participating in “smuggling” or “trafficking” if they bring their children into the country. The administration began publishing a weekly list of crimes committed by immigrants; directed federal prosecutors to bring more felony charges against detained immigrants; and announced it will hire 125 new immigration judges over the next two years. It also is reportedly considering curtailing safeguards intended to protect the rights and safety of detained immigrants.

·         Muslim ban. Trump signed an executive order indefinitely suspending the entry of Syrian refugees and temporarily barring citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries – Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – from entering the United States. After the order was struck down as unconstitutional, he tried again with a similar order. It, too, was blocked in court.

·         Criminal justice. Sessions has signaled that he will abandon the Justice Department’s work to rein in discriminatory policing practices. He has ordered a review of Obama-era consent decrees intended to remedy systemic constitutional violations by police departments. And he has suggested he will ramp up the drug war and oppose the bipartisan push to reform sentencing laws. In a memo, he reversed an Obama administration policy reducing the federal government’s use of prisons operated by private, for-profit companies.

·         Other civil rights issues. Sessions dropped the Justice Department’s legal claim that Texas enacted its voter ID law with discriminatory intent. He dropped a lawsuit against North Carolina over its bathroom law targeting transgender people. Sessions and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos also rescinded federal guidelines protecting transgender students from discrimination. In addition, Trump rescinded President Obama’s Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces order requiring federal contractors to demonstrate compliance with federal law prohibiting discrimination against LGBT people.

The extremist style

Trump’s appeal to white nationalists can hardly be separated from his willingness to traffic in the most outrageous conspiracy theories and fabrications of the radical right. He forged his political identity, in fact, by leading the birther movement that questioned the heritage of the nation’s first African-American president.

Trump has long been a fan of Alex Jones, a professional conspiracy theorist who once claimed that Hillary Clinton “has personally murdered and chopped up and raped children.” In 2015, he appeared on Jones’ radio show InfoWars and declared Jones’ reputation “amazing.” Trump also for many years has maintained a close association with the far-right provocateur Roger Stone.

As president, Trump has continued the same pattern.

He has routinely attacked the mainstream media, calling it “the enemy of the people.” He has repeatedly cried “fake news” when media reports cast him in a negative light.

He has spun wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories – claiming that the news media routinely covers up terrorist attacks; that 3 to 5 million people cast illegal ballots for Hillary Clinton, costing him the popular vote; and that Obama conspired with British intelligence officers to tap his phones during the campaign.

He has also cavorted with extremists. The Muslim-bashing Brigitte Gabriel reportedly visited the White House and later was dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago as U.S. warplanes bombed a Syrian air base. The overtly racist rocker Ted Nugent – who once called Obama a “subhuman mongrel” and suggested he might kill him – visited the White House with Sarah Palin.

Despite the alt-right’s windfall, as the end of the first 100 days approached, many white nationalists were growing restive. They feared Trump was straying from his “America First” doctrine after becoming increasingly engaged internationally – bombing Syria, flip-flopping on his rhetoric about China’s currency manipulation and praising NATO, for example.

Taking the long view, though, was FAIR President Dan Stein, whose nativist friends were now, as The New York Times put it, “in positions to carry out their agenda on a national scale.”

“We’ve worked closely with lots of people, who are now very well placed in his administration, for a long time,” Stein said.

100 Days Report Profiles

By David Neiwert

Stephen K. Bannon

Stephen K. Bannon, 63, is a onetime Naval officer and Goldman-Sachs investment banker who rose to prominence in the conservative movement by producing such right-wing agitprop documentaries as In the Face of Evil, a 2004 encomium to Ronald Reagan; a 2010 Tea Party promotional titled Battle for America; a 2010 film blaming the recession on minority-lending programs, titled Generation Zero; and a laudatory, 2011 portrait of Sarah Palin, titled The Undefeated. Bannon also was one of the founding board members of Breitbart News in 2007. After the sudden death of Andrew Breitbart, the site’s founder, in 2012, Bannon took control of its operation as executive chairman. Under his direction, the site became, as he told a reporter in 2016, “the platform of the alt-right”: a home for a variety of baseless smears and conspiracy theories, as well as comment forums rife with racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and anti-LGBT hatred. Bannon reportedly resigned from the company when he joined Trump’s campaign in August 2016. As chief strategist in the White House, Bannon has been largely credited with promoting policy, including the “Muslim ban,” based on the conspiracist view that Islam is not a religion but a political faction espousing ideas akin to Nazism, fascism and communism.

In his own words:

“It’s a very unpleasant topic. But we are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, is, I think metastasizing, almost far quicker than governments can handle it. … We have Boko Haram and other groups that will eventually partner with Isis in this global war. And it is unfortunately something that we’re going to have to face, and we’re going to have to face very quickly.”

“I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian west, is in a crisis, and it’s really the organizing principle of how we built Breitbart News to really be a platform to bring news and information to people throughout the world, principally in the west but we’re expanding internationally, to let people understand the depths of this crisis. And it is a crisis both of capitalism but really of the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian west and our beliefs.”

Michael Flynn Sr.

Well before his short-lived stint as Trump’s national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn Sr., 58, had developed a long track record of associations with anti-Muslim extremists, particularly ACT! for America, Brigitte Gabriel’s Islamophobic hate group. Flynn also had a record of saying and tweeting incendiary things about Muslims, including: “Fear of Muslims is rational,” and daring “Arab and Persian world ‘leaders’ to step up to the plate and declare their Islamic ideology sick and must B healed.” Flynn also helped peddle anti-Hillary Clinton conspiracy theories. Prior to his retirement, Flynn enjoyed a decorated military career, including a stint as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. His career came to an abrupt end shortly after reports revealed that he was under investigation by U.S. counterintelligence agencies over his contacts with Russian officials. Trump fired him, ostensibly for lying to Vice President Mike Pence during an earlier meeting about the contacts.

In his own words:

“I don't see Islam as a religion. I see it as a political ideology that … will mask itself as a religion globally, and especially in the West, especially in the United States, because it can hide behind and protect itself by what we call freedom of religion.”

“We are facing another 'ism,' just like we faced Nazism, and fascism, and imperialism and communism. This is Islamism, it is a vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people on this planet and it has to be excised.”

“Radical Islam is metastasizing throughout the world. What keeps me up at night is the sobering realization that evil exists. The radicalization of Islam and its barbaric cause that uses modernity to influence potentially millions around the world to join their cause should keep us all up at night.”

Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller, 32, was a key staffer for former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who is now attorney general, and is closely associated with Stephen Bannon’s faction in the White House. Miller grew up in Los Angeles and spent his teen years harassing Latinos, African Americans and Asians; while a college student at Duke, he wrote columns so racist his colleagues in Sessions’ Senate office were stunned. Miller had a long association with white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, beginning with their shared college years, though Miller insists he does not share Spencer’s hopes for a white ethno-state. Miller also has a record of indulging anti-Muslim rhetoric. “Wherever Muslims are found, which is in almost every country on the planet, there are adherents of the ideology of jihad,” he wrote. Miller, largely seen by white nationalists as an ally, is credited with helping write (with Bannon) Trump’s October speech that featured shopworn anti-Semitic tropes suggesting that Hillary Clinton was part of a nefarious global conspiracy. Miller also reportedly helped Bannon write the blocked Muslim ban and then denounced the courts on news talk shows for issuing their rulings, insisting: “The president’s powers here are beyond question. We don’t have judicial supremacy in this country. We have three co-equal branches of government.”

In his own words:

“Gripped by complacency and the omnipresent force of political correctness, our nation has failed to educate our youth about the holy war being waged against us and what needs to be done to defeat the Jihadists that are waging this war. American kids attend school in an educational system corrupted by the hard left. In this upside-down world, America is the villain and Jihadists the victims of our foreign policy. Instead of opening eyes, we are fastening blindfolds.”

“In this bizarre era it is acceptable to depict virtually any group as the enemy but the actual enemy we are fighting. And if someone does, they are accused of fomenting Islamophobia, an intimidation tactic which has been all too successful. The actual fear that seems to grip America is violating the P.C. orthodoxy. And if this absurd fear means keeping our eyes shut about the Islamist threat, and in turn putting up a weak defense, then we will soon find ourselves face to face with something very real to fear.”

Sebastian Gorka

Sebastian Gorka, 47, Trump’s deputy assistant and a key adviser on foreign policy, was born in London to Hungarian parents and lived in Hungary from 1992 to 2008, then immigrated to the United States, where he embarked on a career largely associated with fringe anti-Muslim groups, many of whom indulge in Islamophobic conspiracy theories. The scrutiny of Gorka became intense due to revelations in the Jewish magazine Forward that he and his family had longstanding ties to a Hungarian nationalist society, Vitézi Rend, that was allied with Nazi forces during World War II and had a history of anti-Semitic activity. It also emerged that, during his years as a political activist in Hungary from 2002 to 2008, Gorka failed the national security test and eventually became associated with a number of far-right groups. Gorka has adamantly denied any past associations with far-right groups. In the meantime, he has been closely associated with the White House’s conspiracy-driven, anti-Muslim policy faction.

In his own words:

“We must jettison political correctness. … Now profiling has a dirty connotation. That’s a dirty word. It’s pejorative. But profiling is actually a synonym for common sense. … If 98 percent of terrorists come from a certain faith community, have a certain ethnic background, have a certain travel pattern, and visit the same sites on the Internet, why are we patting down, you know, 82-year-old Episcopalian grandmothers?”

“We help people when we can help them. But that is not a contract for national suicide. That doesn’t mean, as Hillary Clinton said in her private speech to the bankers, ‘We don’t need any borders, pull down the borders, the whole Western Hemisphere is one big happy party!’ It doesn’t mean that you quintuple the number of refugees. If she had won, what Nigel is talking about, Europe, is what America would have been like in five years’ time, if Hillary had become the President.”

Michael Anton

Michael Anton, 47, is a senior national security official for the White House with a relatively obscure background. A former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani and the National Security Council, he became famous in conservative circles by penning, under the pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus” (a Roman consul who sacrificed his life for the success of his troops), a September 2016 essay, “The Flight 93 Election.” The essay largely made the alt-right case for electing Trump, condemning “Conservatism, Inc.,” saying it “reeks of failure.” He attacked immigrants as well: “The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle,” the essay asserted, describing the children of immigrants as “ringers to form a permanent electoral majority.” Exposed by journalist Jonathan Chait, who described Anton’s essay as “a classic justification for authoritarianism,” Anton has remained largely unapologetic but low-profile. His presence in the White House was questioned by many critics, including conservative pundit William Kristol, who compared Anton to an infamous Nazi philosopher.

In his own words:

“[M]ost important, the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”

“This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.”

“Trump’s two slogans – ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Take Our Country Back’– point to the heart of Trumpism: ‘America First.’ Some will no doubt flinch at being reminded of an alleged stain on America’s past. This is not the place to explain or defend 1940-41’s (unfairly maligned) America First Committee. It’s just that those two words capture the essence and appeal of Trumpism as no others do or could.”

Julie Kirchner

Julie Kirchner, named chief of staff at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), spent nearly 10 years as the executive director of an anti-immigrant hate group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, before leaving in 2015 to become an immigration adviser to the Trump campaign. Kirchner began her tenure at FAIR as its director of government relations in 2005, then was named the organization’s executive director in 2007, the year it was designated a hate group. Among the initiatives launched by FAIR during her tenure was a campaign to erase the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to everyone born in the United States.

In her own words:

“Before President Obama's failed presidency comes to an end, he is trying to force Americans to accept 30 percent more refugees – providing ISIS a path for their terrorists to enter the country. … In recent years, hundreds of foreign-born terrorists have been apprehended in the United States alone.”

Kellyanne Conway

A longtime presence on cable-TV talk shows as a conservative pundit, Kellyanne Conway, 50, rose to prominence as Trump’s campaign manager during the 2016 election and as a regular spokesperson for Trump both before and after the election; she currently is the chief counselor to the president. Conway built her political career primarily as a pollster for Republican campaigns and appeared on nearly every cable TV channel, particularly Fox News, as a spokesperson for conservative causes. She also developed a lengthy track record of working with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim extremists, as well as parroting their far-right views. Conway’s polling firm conducted polls for anti-Muslim extremist Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, using dubious data-collection techniques to spread Islamophobic smears. Her company also conducted polling for the anti-immigrant hate groups Federation for American Immigration Reform and Center for Immigration Studies, and for the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA. Conway and Bannon are both believed to be members of the secretive far-right organizing group, the Council for National Policy.

In her own words:

“And I think this is important because the answer from lots of folks always is, 'Look, don't cast a wide net and call all Muslims nonpeaceful and violent and adhering to jihad and Shariah and bloodthirsty.' Fine. However, look at the data. The Muslims living in the U.S. themselves – 27 percent of them, anyway – say that this is what the purpose of jihad is, to either punish nonbelievers (16 percent) or, the other 11 percent, to undermine non-Muslim states.”

“You're saying it's a falsehood. And they're giving – Sean Spicer, our press secretary – gave alternative facts. … Think about what you just said to your viewers. That's why we feel compelled to go out and clear the air and put alternative facts out there.”

Julia Hahn

Julia Hahn, the chief immigration correspondent for Breitbart.com, was named to Stephen Bannon’s staff as a special assistant to the president. After beginning her career as a producer for right-wing pundit Laura Ingraham and spokesperson for Rep. Dave Brat, Hahn joined Breitbart in July 2015, and specialized in fear-mongering, anti-immigration pieces attacking both Latinos and Muslims. She also was fond of piecescriticizing House Speaker Paul Ryan for being insufficiently conservative; specifically, Ryan was seen as “soft” on immigration, and Hahn wrote several pieces attacking him for supposedly allowing immigrant criminals into the country. She also penned hysterical pieces claiming that under Hillary Clinton, the Muslim population in the U.S. would explode. In the White House, she is widely perceived as being a key player in the anti-Muslim faction led by Bannon.

In her own words:

“There is no public record that House Speaker Paul Ryan has ever spoken out about Pharis’ sexual assault. … Ryan has remained passive and quiet as criminal aliens have assaulted tens of thousands of American women, but when an 11-year-old audio tape emerged of Donald Trump caught on a hot mic discussing women in crass terms, Ryan declared himself ‘sickened’ and spoke out.”

“If the U.S. had an immigration policy that resembled the admission policy of Speaker Ryan’s school – i.e. it recruited migrants from churches and synagogues overseas and offered discounted migration to people who attended churches and synagogues – although a Muslim migrant could theoretically get in, the effect would be to substantially reduce Muslim migration and increase Christian and Jewish migration relative to it – a policy which Ryan finds reprehensible for the country, but ideal for his kids’ school.”

“While Ryan chooses to insulate his children in an academic environment that considers religion in its admissions process, he has been adamant that the American people are not entitled to be similarly selective about who comes into their country to live as their neighbors, receive their tax dollars, fill public university slots, demand affirmative action, or potentially radicalize against their own country.”

The Conspiracy Theorist-in-Chief: Trump and the Mainstreaming of the Radical Right

“It is surreal to talk about issues here on air, and then word-for-word hear Trump say it two days later.”

- Alex Jones, August 2016

The president has a problem with “fake news.” He sees it everywhere – CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post.

He claims to be the victim of a plot by malicious forces in the media – the “enemy of the people,” as he calls them. “[T]hey have no sources. They just make it up,” he said in a Feb. 24 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

The reality is something far different.

President Trump is not the victim of fake news. Rather, he is the purveyor. He is also the beneficiary.

The undeniable truth is that Trump – first as a candidate and now, in his first 100 days as president – has given a giant megaphone to the baseless conspiracy theories and fabrications of the radical right, many of them freighted with racial and anti-Semitic undertones.

His election, in fact, represented a triumph for the true manufacturers of fake news. Arguably, his presence in the White House is the end result of a decades-long project by conservative politicians and media figures to delegitimize mainstream journalism and to herd a highly conservative segment of voters into a hermetically sealed echo chamber of rightwing media.

Trump’s brand won the day in a political and media culture in which actual facts are less persuasive or relevant to many partisans on the right than the paranoid, fact-challenged delusions of people like the far-right extremist Alex Jones, America’s most prolific conspiracy theorist.

Trump, in fact, won despite a series of lies and tall tales that in the past surely would have doomed a candidate for president of the United States.

He has continued the pattern in his first 100 days in office – spinning conspiracy theories about millions of illegal ballots that cost him the popular vote, about a news media that covers up terrorist attacks around the globe and about an illegal plot by President Obama to wiretap him.

How did this happen? Why are so many conservative Americans willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to politics?

Though only recently has the internet provided a platform to disseminate disinformation to virtually every person in the country, American politics has for centuries been fertile ground for “conspiratorial fantasy” – an “arena for angry minds,” as the historian Richard Hofstadter put it in his famous 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

Hofstadter’s still-relevant piece provides important insights that help explain what is happening today and how it relates to Trump’s appeal to white people who feel left behind in an increasingly diverse country experiencing dislocations related to technology and globalization.

What Hofstadter could not have envisioned is the role of the internet and the related diminution of the power of journalistic gatekeepers to act as a sort of firewall to block unsubstantiated, fringe propaganda from mainstream audiences.

But he did note a fundamental shift in the nature of conspiracy theories. For much of the nation’s history, they involved perceived enemies who threatened to rain down economic ruin or undermine the American way of life – secret cabals involving the Pope and the Catholics, the Masons, the Jews, the Illuminati, global bankers, gold traders or others.

During the 20^th century, new conspiracy theories provided a general framework – and a set of enemies, even if illusory – for the dispossessed on the right who believed that they were losing control of their country. Now, the villains were leftist conspirators working from within: “The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power.”

What Hofstadter describes is largely the lore promoted by the likes of the John Birch Society (JBS), whose founder, Robert Welch, famously called Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” It’s what we saw during the McCarthy era – and it’s what we see today.

These ideas underpin today’s so-called Patriot movement, a collection of far-right militias and groups like the JBS who believe that powerful, secretive elites are plotting to institute a “New World Order” – a socialistic, totalitarian government that will destroy American democracy and enslave its people.

Clearly, most conservatives don’t believe the grander elements of these theories. But there are infinite mini-theories and ways that left-leaning figures and their agendas can be neatly folded into this generalized worldview. The Clintons, of course, are central players, as is George Soros – as is any politician who wants to enact, say, gun regulations, land-use protections or single-payer health care.

Because of people like Alex Jones and the platform provided by the internet, extremist conspiracy theories related to these notions now reach millions of people daily. They gain currency in the mainstream through the agency of rightwing politicians and commentators who fulminate on media venues such as Fox News and Breitbart, the website that presidential strategist Stephen K. Bannon bragged became “the platform for the alt-right” when he ran it.

Into this environment stepped Trump, the popular star of a reality television show.

Barack Obama, he said, was really a Muslim named Barry Soetoro who was born in Kenya and never really went to Columbia University. Hillary Clinton was “crooked Hillary,” the pawn of nefarious globalists, a woman who was seriously ill during the campaign and may have been on drugs during a debate. And, Justice Antonin Scalia was likely murdered. Then there’s Trump’s Republican primary rival Ted Cruz – “Lyin’ Ted,” whose father was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The list of falsehoods goes on and on.

In the case of Rafael Cruz and the JFK assassination, Trump said he got the information from a supermarket tabloid. Many of his lies, however, have come directly or indirectly from InfoWars, the website and weekly radio show operated by Alex Jones. It’s important to remember that Jones earns a lucrative living by making the most scurrilous of unsubstantiated claims. He has asserted, for example, that the Sandy Hook massacre of schoolchildren was a government act, that Obama is a “hardcore Wahhabist; he is al-Qaeda,” and that Hillary Clinton“has personally murdered and chopped up and raped children.”

Trump is a big fan. He appeared on InfoWars in December 2015 and declared Jones’ reputation “amazing.” He told the internet fabulist, “I will not let you down. You will be very impressed, I hope, and I think we’ll be speaking a lot.” Jones has said that he spoke with Trump after the election. He also said in January that InfoWars has been offered White House press credentials.

It’s also important to remember Trump’s long personal association with two other men who plowed in the field of conspiracy theories for many years: Roy Cohn and Roger Stone. (Not to mention Michael Flynn, the anti-Muslim activist who was fired as national security adviser.)

Cohn was the chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy who played a key role in the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, which relied on unfounded accusations that communist agents had infiltrated the highest levels of the government. In a June 20, 2016, article about his relationship with Trump, The New York Times described Cohn as “Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red-baiting consigliere.” Later, he worked as Trump’s lawyer and became somewhat of a mentor to the young man who would be president. The two men, the Times wrote, were “so inseparable that those who could not track down Mr. Cohn knew whom to call.”

It was Cohn who introduced Trump to Stone, the former Nixon man and smear artist who became a longtime Trump political adviser and confidant. Stone, also a former lobbying partner of fired Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, claimed in one of his books that the Clintons were responsible for the murders of as many as 83 people. In another, he claimed that President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the Kennedy assassination. Not surprisingly, Stone appears regularly on Alex Jones’ show. In his book The Making of the President 2016, Stone writes that Jones and his media network “turned out to be Trump’s secret weapon.”

New York magazine recently reported that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and closest adviser, reassured acquaintances during the campaign that Trump did not actually believe many of the outlandish things he was saying.

If he did believe them, it would demonstrate a dangerous degree of gullibility and ignorance. It would mean the president of the United States is incapable of critically assessing information and distinguishing between demonstrable fact and blatant falsehood.

On the other hand, if what Kushner said is true, it means Trump is deliberately lying – day after day – to the American public, a conclusion that many have already reached.

In any event, in his first 100 days in office, Trump has remained true to form, continuing to push conspiracy theories without providing any evidence to support them.

Below are the most prominent ones of his first three months in office.

Millions of illegal aliens voted – for Hillary

Days after the inauguration, Trump told congressional leaders at a White House reception that 3 to 5 million “illegals” had cast ballots in November, causing him to lose the popular vote. Trump called for a “major investigation into VOTER FRAUD” in a tweet later that week.

Trump then told ABC News’ David Muir that every one of the votes in the massive fraud operation went to Hillary Clinton. “They all voted for Hillary,” Trump said. “They didn't vote for me. I don’t believe I got one. Okay, these are people that voted for Hillary Clinton.”

Earlier, in late November, he had tweeted that he would have won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Trump’s claim was traced to rightwing activist Gregg Phillips, who has been involved with rightwing groups promoting myths about voter fraud. On Nov. 11, Phillips tweeted: “Completed analysis of database of 180 million voter registrations. Number of non-citizen votes exceeds 3 million. Consulting legal team.” Three days later, the InfoWars website ran a story reporting Phillips’ “findings,” with a headline that read: “Trump may have won popular vote.” A number of other rightwing media outlets also ran with the story.

Trump said in the same post-inauguration meeting with congressional leaders that he would have won New Hampshire if not for “thousands” of people bused in from Massachusetts. Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to the president, vaguely addressed the issue on ABC’s “This Week”: “I can tell you that this issue of busing voters in to New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics. It’s very real, it’s very serious. This morning on this show is not the venue for me to lay out all the evidence.”

That’s because there is no evidence. Experts have roundly dismissed Trump’s voter fraud claims. To this date, no one – including Phillips – has provided any evidence whatsoever to support the claims. The reality, experts say, is that voter fraud is exceedingly rare.

Journalists collectively ignore terrorist attacks

On Feb. 6, Trump claimed in a speech to the U.S. Central Command that the American media was intentionally failing to report terrorist attacks.

“You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening,” he stated. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

Trump offered no evidence, but the administration later gave reporters a list of 78 terrorist attacks “executed and inspired by ISIS.” A White House official said that the attacks, which occurred from September 2014 to December 2016, “did not receive adequate attention from Western media sources.”

The list appeared to be hastily assembled and contained a number of typos. Media outlets responded defensively by republishing their reporting on each attack. Many of the attacks had, indeed, received exhaustive coverage, including the nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida, and shooting in San Bernardino, California.

Trump’s false claims about the media cover-up appear to have stemmed from stories published on InfoWars. For months, the website had been claiming that the mainstream media whitewashes stories of terror attacks to further a political agenda. One typical headline: “SCANDAL: MASS MEDIA COVERS UP TERRORISM TO PROTECT ISLAM.”

Terrorists strike in Sweden – and no one but Trump notices

At a rally in Florida on Feb. 18, Trump mentioned a terrorist attack in Sweden. “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden! Sweden! Who would believe this, Sweden!” he told the crowd.

“They took in large numbers [of refugees and immigrants]. They’re having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris.”

In fact, nothing had happened in Sweden.

Trump’s claims came from a Fox News segment that aired the night before with filmmaker Ami Horowitz, whose new documentary links immigration with areas of high crime in Sweden. As Horowitz described rampant violent crime, including rape, in “no-go zones” – areas “cops won’t even enter because it’s too dangerous for them” – images of a dark-skinned man attacking a police officer and a burning car repeatedly flashed across the screen.

In a clip from the documentary, two Swedish officers appear to confirm the filmmaker’s contention that immigrants were responsible for a surge of crime in their country.

After the controversy erupted, however, the two officers said they had been taken out of context, that immigration was never mentioned in the interview. “We don’t stand behind it,” one of the officers said. “It shocked us. He has edited the answers. We were answering completely different questions in the interview.”

A riot did occur in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood of Stockholm days afterTrump’s comments. The incident was an isolated one, and an analysis by a Swedish newspaper showed that between October 2015 and January 2016 refugees were responsible for only 1 percent of the country’s criminal incidents.

Obama – and the Brits – tapped his phone

One of the more bizarre episodes of Trump’s first 100 days began on March 4. At 5:35 a.m., Trump tweeted: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

In three tweets that followed over the next half hour, he compared the episode to Watergate and called Obama a “bad (or sick) guy.”

The tweets set off a series of events that led House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to a secret rendezvous on White House grounds to review documents and then, on April 6, to Nunes’ decision to step aside from his committee’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election.

A spokesperson for Obama dismissed the “false” claims, saying that neither Obama nor any other White House official “ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.”

Speaking to reporters two days after the tweets, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer responded simply that Trump’s tweets “speak for themselves.” In an interview with New Jersey paper The Record, Kellyanne Conway listed household items that could be used for spying: “What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other. You can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets – any number of ways – and microwaves that turn into cameras, et cetera.”

By March 20, FBI Director James Comey weighed in, telling the House Intelligence Committee that he had “no information that supports those tweets.”

Trump’s claims appear to stem from a Breitbart article published the day before his tweet. Drawing on allegations made by radio host Mark Levin, Breitbart constructed a timeline that it said proved “the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign.”

Levin characterized the unsubstantiated events as a “silent coup.” Levin is no stranger to conspiracy theories. In 2013 he claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood had “infiltrated our government” and that Obama was a Muslin Brotherhood “sympathizer.”

Trump and administration officials at various times attributed the claims to news reports they had read or seen on TV. At one point, Trump and Spicer both said British intelligence agents had wiretapped Trump’s phone at Obama’s behest. On March 17, Trump said, “All we did was quote a very talented legal mind.”

The legal mind to which he referred belongs to Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey state judge and commentator on Fox News who has a long history of promoting conspiracy theories. Napolitano has appeared repeatedly on Alex Jones’ show, where he once cast doubt on the government’s account of the 9/11 attacks. Fox News quickly disavowed Napolitano’s reporting about the wiretapping, and Napolitano was temporarily taken off the air.

The administration has continued to stand by its claims, though no evidence has been produced to support them.

RELATED: 100 Days of Trump’s America - A Timeline

By Cassie Miller

January 20 – Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the 45^th president. His inauguration speech paints a bleak picture of an American landscape wracked by “carnage.” The school system, he claims, leaves children “deprived of all knowledge” despite being “flush with cash.” Middle-class wealth, he says, has been “ripped” away and “redistributed all across the world.” He promises to place “America first” – a slogan associated with the America First Committee, an anti-Semitic, isolationist group that emerged in 1940 to prevent American involvement in World War II.

January 20 – David Duke, the neo-Nazi and former Klan leader, tweets, “We did it! Congratulations to Donald J. Trump President of the United States of America!”

January 20 – Trump names John Gore as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights. Gore defended the University of North Carolina against an ACLU lawsuit challenging a state law banning transgender people from using bathrooms conforming to their gender identity. He has also defended controversial Republican redistricting plans enacted after the 2010 census in Florida, New York and South Carolina.

January 22 – The White House announces that two former Breitbart reporters will join the administration. Julia Hahn is appointed special assistant to the president, working under her former boss, Stephen K. Bannon. Sebastian Gorka, who served as Breitbart’s national security editor, is appointed deputy assistant to the president.

January 24 – During an interview on The David Pakman Show, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, who coined the phrase “alt-right,” argues that “Trump is a white nationalist, so to speak. He is alt-right whether he likes it or not.”

January 25 – Trump signs two executive orders pertaining to immigration and border security. One instructs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to hire 5,000 additional Border Patrol agents, build detention facilities near the Mexican border, and immediately take steps to construct a border wall. The second order notes that the administration will prioritize deportation of immigrants who “have been charged with any criminal offense” – but not necessarily convicted – or who “in the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.” It also targets so-called “sanctuary cities” by ensuring “that jurisdictions that fail to comply with applicable Federal law do not receive Federal funds.”

January 27 – Trump releases a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day that neglects to mention the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis. When pressed, the White House refuses to offer an apology or addendum, insisting that many groups suffered. “Holocaust denial is alive and well in the highest office of the White House,” responded Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt. White nationalist leader Richard Spencer called it the “de-Judaification” of the Holocaust.

January 27 – Trump signs an executive order barring citizens from the majority-Muslim countries of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the United States for 90 days. The order also indefinitely suspends the entry of Syrian refugees. Trump claims the order is “not a Muslim ban,” but during the campaign he had called for “a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” A federal court subsequently blocks the order, and the government’s request for its reinstatement is ultimately denied.

January 27 – Trump tweets that “at least” 3 million votes in the presidential election were cast illegally. The White House is unable to provide any evidence to back up the claim.

January 28 – In a White House directive, Trump gives chief strategist Bannon a seat on the National Security Council’s principals committee and demotes the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While previous political advisers to presidents had regularly observed NSC meetings, the decision to give Bannon a seat on the principals committee is unprecedented.

February 2 – Reutersreports that the Trump administration plans to rename the Countering Violent Extremist program “Countering Islamic Extremism” or “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism.” The program will focus solely on terrorism carried out by Muslims rather than include terrorism by domestic extremists associated with the radical right. “Yes, this is real life. Our memes are real life. Donald Trump is setting us free,” the white supremacist Andrew Anglin writes in response. “It just couldn’t get any better than this, I am telling myself. But I know that it is just going to keep getting better.”

February 2 – Kellyanne Conway defends Trump’s Muslim ban executive order by citing a “Bowling Green massacre” committed by two Iraqi refugees. The supposed “massacre” never occurred.

February 8 – The U.S. Senate confirms Jeff Sessions as attorney general. More than 1,000 legal scholars previously signed a letter expressing concern that Sessions’ views had not changed since 1986, when he was denied confirmation as a federal district judge in Alabama after accusations of having made racist remarks. Sessions also has strong ties to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim extremist groups.

February 13 – Lucian Wintrich, a writer for the Gateway Pundit who is well known for blatant misogyny, attends his first press briefing after being given White House press credentials. Wintrich’s inclusion in the White House press corps gives the alt-right outlet new access to the highest levels of government.

February 13 – National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn is fired. The administration says he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about discussing the Obama administration’s sanctions against Russia in a phone call with the Russian ambassador in late December. Flynn has long been associated with anti-Muslim extremist groups, particularly ACT! for America.

PHOTOGRAPH -- Former National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn

February 14 – Kellyanne Conway tweets “Love you back” in response to a white nationalist Twitter account that had praised her. The account had previously tweeted anti-Semitic and racist posts, frequently using the hashtags #WhiteIdentity and #WhiteGenocide.

February 17 – In a tweet, Trump refers to the news media as “the enemy of the American People!” He repeats the attack days later at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The phrase “enemy of the people” has troubling historical roots: Stalin used it to refer to his ideological enemies.

February 17 – The first DREAMer – an immigrant meant to be protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program – is deported to Mexico. Juan Manuel Montes, 23, had left his wallet and identification in his friend’s car when he was approached by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent. He was not allowed to retrieve his documents and, despite his active DACA status, was deported only hours later. Montes was brought to the United States at age 9.

February 18 – At a rally in Florida, Trump describes an imagined terrorist attack in Sweden. The night before, Fox News aired a segment dubiously linking violence in Sweden to recent Muslim immigration. Trump apparently misunderstood the report to mean a terrorist attack had occurred.

February 18 – Trump spends time at Mar-a-Lago with radio host Michael Savage. The conspiracy theorist has a long history of bigotry and has suggested that Muslim immigrants come to the United States “to stab people in the street, jump the curb with a car and run them over.” Savage has also claimed that Obama was using immigration “to destroy this country through genocide.” Trump appeared on Savage’s radio show throughout his presidential campaign.

February 22 – In a joint statement, the Departments of Justice and Education rescind protections for transgender students that had allowed them to use bathrooms and other public school facilities corresponding to their gender identity.

February 27 – The DOJ announces that it is withdrawing its claim that Texas enacted a 2011 voter ID law with racially discriminatory intent. The DOJ’s original objection to the law was filed by the Obama administration in 2013, and alleged that the law discriminated against minority voters who lacked the necessary ID.

February 28 – In his first address to Congress, Trump announces that he has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office (VOICE). The agency is tasked with producing monthly reports “studying the effects of the victimization by criminal aliens present in the United States,” an apparent effort to link immigration and criminality in the mind of the public. A robust body of research, however, shows that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native-born American citizens.

March 1 – In an NPR interview, Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to Trump who has close ties to anti-Semitic groups in Hungary, refuses to say whether Trump believes that “Islam is a religion” as opposed to a purely political ideology. “This is not a theological seminary,” he tells the interviewer, “we’re talking about national security and the totalitarian ideologies that drive the groups that threaten America.”

March 4 – Trump tweets that former President Obama had his “wires tapped” before the election. The FBI disputes the claim, and no evidence emerges to support it.

March 6 – Trump introduces a new executive order blocking citizens from six majority-Muslim countries from entering the country for 90 days, exempting permanent residents and current visa holders. It removes Iraq from the list of countries in the original ban and replaces the original indefinite suspension of Syrian refugees with a 120-day freeze. U.S. District Judge Derrick K. Watson blocks the order before it can take effect, concluding that it “was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion.”

March 7 – Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Trump adviser associated with an anti-immigrant hate group, meets with Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, an anti-Muslim activist who was convicted of hate speech in her native Austria in 2011. At their meetings, Sabaditsch-Wolff repeats racist tropes, claiming that the refugee crisis in Europe has increased rates of crime and sexual assault and led to the establishment of lawless “no-go zones.”

PHOTOGRAPH -- President Trump with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach

March 13 – The U.S. State Department announces it has named Lisa Correnti as a delegate to the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women. Correnti is executive vice president of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM), which is listed by the SPLC as an anti-LGBT hate group. Austin Ruse, the group’s founder, has offered support for laws criminalizing LGBT people and said in 2014 that the “hard left, human-hating people that run modern universities … should all be taken out and shot.”

March 16 – Trump releases a partial 2018 budget proposal that marks a shift in DOJ priorities. The department plans to eliminate $700 million in spending for “outdated programs” while bulking up funding in areas that “target the worst of the worst criminal organizations and drug traffickers.” It also asks for $80 million to hire additional immigration judges to “bolster and more efficiently adjudicate removal proceedings.”

March 20 – Pursuant to an executive order, DHS releases the first installment of a weekly list of crimes perpetrated by immigrants. Andrea Pitzer, an expert on concentration camps, notes that the list is eerily reminiscent of lists of Jewish crimes published in the Nazi press.

March 21 – Brigitte Gabriel, the leader of the nation’s largest anti-Muslim hate group, ACT! for America, visits with White House legislative staff. Gabriel has spent her career condemning the “cancer” of Islam, which she once described as “a natural threat to the civilized people of the world.” She told Australian Jewish News in 2007, “Every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim.”

PHOTOGRAPH -- ACT For America's Brigitte Gabriel visits the White House

March 24 – Roger Severino, a staffer at the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, is appointed director of the Office of Civil Rights for the Department of Health and Human Services. When the office issued a rule banning discrimination against transgender patients last year, Severino co-authored a critique published by the Heritage Foundation that called the new regulation a threat to the religious liberty of health care professionals.

March 26 – Violence breaks out at pro-Trump rallies held over the weekend, echoing similar outbreaks at campaign rallies, including one during which Trump exhorted supporters to “beat the hell out of” protesters.

March 27 – Trump rescinds the Obama-era Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces order, which required companies contracting with the federal government to demonstrate compliance with federal laws, including those prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

April 1 – Former Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann characterizes the Trump presidency as a divine intervention that represents a “reprieve” from immorality. Her comment comes during an interview on the “Understanding the Times” radio program alongside Philip Haney, a former DHS officer whose recent book outlines the “government’s submission to Jihad” under Obama.

April 3 – Sessions orders the DOJ to review all of its reform agreements with local police departments. These include a consent decree with the Baltimore police and a decree still being pursued with Chicago. Both were intended to remedy systemic misconduct. Sessions previously said he had not read the Obama-era DOJ reports documenting racial disparities in policing practices in Chicago and Ferguson, Missouri. He has suggested that the DOJ would not open any new civil rights investigations of police departments under his watch.

April 4 – Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, says in a tweet that Mike Cernovich, a right-wing social media provocateur, deserves a Pulitzer Prize for a blog post reporting that Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, requested information on Trump associates who appeared in foreign surveillance intelligence reports. Cernovich gained an online following through advice aimed at teaching men to cultivate “dominance.” He has written that “date rape doesn’t exist” and that “women want to be tamed.” Cernovich promoted claims that Hillary Clinton suffered from a “grave neurological condition” as well as the “Pizza-gate” conspiracy theory that Democratic officials were running a child sex ring from a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

April 6 – The Daily Beast reports that Bannon called Trump’s son-in-law and trusted adviser, Jared Kushner, a “cuck” and a “globalist.” Both are terms popularized by the alt-right. The former refers to conservatives who have submitted to multiculturalism and liberalism. The latter is used to describe opponents of “nationalism” and contains anti-Semitic undertones. Kushner is Jewish.

April 6 – Anti-Muslim activist Brigitte Gabriel has dinner alongside the president at his Mar-a-Lago resort. While dining, Trump carries out at an air strike against Syria.

April 6 – After learning of the strike on Syria, Trump’s alt-right supporters turn on him. Breitbart News explodes in negative comments and rabid alt-right Trump supporters – including Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars, social media personality Mike Cernovich, and far-right political commentator Ann Coulter – quickly criticize Trump for betraying his pledge to put “America first.” I’m officially OFF the Trump train,” Watson tweets.

April 7 – Trump nominates Mark E. Green, a retired Army officer and member of the Tennessee Senate, as secretary of the Army. Green has criticized federal legislation that protects LGBT individuals against discrimination in workplaces and businesses, and once referred to being transgender as a “disease.”

April 7 – Vice President Mike Pence speaks to the Family Research Council – an anti-LGBT hate group – during a surprise visit to an event held for the group’s supporters in Washington, D.C.

April 8 – According to The Washington Post, Sessions has signaled that he will revive the war on drugs by appointing Steven H. Cook, a Knoxville-based federal prosecutor, to one of the top advisory positions in the DOJ. Cook has been a strong proponent of mandatory minimum sentencing, increasing drug prosecutions, and layering charges to increase the severity of sentences – all prosecutorial tools developed during the drug war that disproportionately harmed minorities. Though crime rates have trended downward over the last four decades, Sessions has argued that there are “clear warning signs – like the first gusts of wind before a summer storm – that this progress is now at risk,” thereby justifying his moves to halt criminal justice reform.

April 11 – Sessions releases a memo directing federal prosecutors to bring more felony charges against undocumented immigrants. They’re instructed to tag on charges for identity theft and document fraud whenever possible. The memo also states that the DOJ will hire 50 immigration judges this year and 75 next year to supplement the 275 immigration judges currently serving. “Be forewarned,” Sessions says during a speech in Nogales, Arizona, “This is a new era. This is the Trump era.”

April 13 – The New York Times reports that the Trump administration intends to pare regulations that protect immigrants detained in jails. Less-burdensome contracts are designed to encourage law enforcement officials to open beds in local facilities before new detention centers can be built to accommodate the administration’s intensified deportation efforts.

April 13 – After Sessions rescinds a 2016 DOJ memo that ended the use of private prisons within the federal system, the private prison corporation GEO Group announces it has signed a $110 million contract to build a 1,000-bed immigrant detention center in Conroe, Texas. Sessions argues that the Obama-era moratorium – enacted after a DOJ study found private prisons to be less safe than those operated by the Bureau of Prisons – “impaired the Bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.”

April 14 – The Trump administration announces it will keep White House visitor logs a secret. The records will not be available to the public until five years after Trump leaves office.

April 14 – Betsy DeVos picks Candice Jackson to serve as the deputy assistant secretary for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. As an undergraduate at Stanford, Jackson complained that she experienced discrimination because she was white. She also helped edit a book by an economist who criticized the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

April 14 – The DOJ drops a lawsuit against North Carolina over a bill that required transgender people to use public bathrooms that match the gender listed on their birth certificate. The DOJ claims to have dropped the suit because North Carolina repealed the original law, but its replacement kept many of its provisions in place. Municipalities are now prohibited from passing their own anti-discrimination ordinances.

April 14 – In response to a suit filed by three protesters he attacked at a 2016 Trump rally in Louisville, Alvin Bamberger, a 75-year-old veteran, files a countersuit alleging he attacked them at the “urging and inspiring” of the future president. Three days later, Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the white supremacist Traditionalist Youth Network, who is also being sued by the three plaintiffs for assault, files his own countersuit. Heimbach claims he “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President Inc. and any liability must be shifted to one or both of them.”

April 15 – Far-right extremists hold a pro-Trump rally in Berkeley, California, where they clash with anti-fascist counter-protestors. Eleven people are injured and six hospitalized. Nathan Domingo, founder of a student-oriented white-nationalist group, Identity Evropa, is filmed punching a young woman in the face. Afterward, a member of the alt-right group Proud Boys, the organizers of the rally, call it an “enormous victory!”

April 18 – In a speech at George Washington University, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly tells lawmakers critical of his department’s heavy-handed approach to immigration and drug enforcement to either find “the courage and skills to change the laws” or “shut up.” He repeatedly chides detractors for underestimating ever-present dangers. “While you’re binge-watching Mad Men on Netflix, TSA is stopping an actual mad man with a loaded gun from boarding a flight to Disney World,” he said. “We are under attack from criminals who think their greed justifies raping young girls at knifepoint, dealing poison to our youth, or killing just for fun. The threats are relentless.”

April 18 – After news emerges that the first DREAMer has been deported by federal agents, U.S. Rep. Steve King of Iowa tweets a photo of a beer with the caption “Border Patrol, this one’s for you.” King previously made statements criticizing immigrants, tweeting “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

April 19 – Trump hosts former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and musicians Kid Rock and Ted Nugent at the White House. In 2012, Nugent described Obama as a “gangster” and “subhuman mongrel.” The same year, he attracted the Secret Service’s attention when he said, “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” In 2016, he called for Obama and Hillary Clinton to be “tried for treason and hung.”

April 21 – The DOJ sends letters to officials in Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, New York City, Miami-Dade County, Milwaukee County, Cook County, and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations to warn that their federal justice program funding may be in jeopardy if they fail to prove they’re complying with immigration enforcement. “Many of these jurisdictions are also crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime,” an accompanying press release states. It cites “gang murder after gang murder” in New York City as the “predictable consequence of the city’s ‘soft on crime’ stance,” though a reduction in gang-related shootings helped drive the city’s murder rate to historic lows in the last several years.

April 21 – During an interview with The Associated Press, Trump calls Marine Le Pen, the French National Front presidential candidate who ran a campaign attacking immigrants and Muslims, the “strongest” election contender. Trump also said a recent Paris terrorist attack that targeted police and resulted in one officer’s death will “probably help” the far-right Le Pen’s election bid.

April 23 – During a speech to the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump recounts that the Holocaust – “the darkest chapter of human history” – resulted in the death of 6 million Jews at the hands of Nazis. For white supremacists, Trump’s remarks signal that he has abandoned their cause. “You remember when he gave the Holocaust Day message that didn’t include the Jews?” neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin writes the next day on the Daily Stormer, before claiming that the president has become “a hostage of the Jews, and he is doing their bidding.”

April 23 – While discussing possible funding sources for Trump’s border wall on ABC’s “This Week,” Sessions suggests the structure could be paid for by reducing tax credits that go to “mostly Mexicans.” The 2011 report Sessions appears to reference a study showing that $4.2 billion in tax credits went to people who were not authorized to work in the United States but had children who were U.S. citizens, and made no reference to the nationality of the tax credit’s recipients.

April 24 – Trump hosts a White House reception for far-right members of the media, whom Press Secretary Sean Spicer suggests were “neglected” by the previous administration. Attendees include reporters from Breitbart News, One America News Network, Daily Caller, The Washington Free Beacon, and Christian Broadcasting Network. According to Charlie Spiering, the Breitbart White House correspondent, Trump answered the reporters’ policy questions for more than half an hour.

April 24 – The Anti-Defamation League reports that anti-Semitic incidents rose 86% during the first quarter of 2017 as compared to the same period the previous year. The increase is part of a longer trend that gained steam after the November election. Many of the perpetrators invoked the name of the president.

April 25 – A federal judge in San Francisco temporarily blocks Trump’s executive order that aimed to withhold federal funding to sanctuary cities, marking the third time a judge has blocked one of Trump’s executive orders.

April 25 – The Council on American-Islamic Relations reports that the number of anti-Muslim profiling incidents carried out by U.S. Customs and Border Protection have increased 1,035% thus far in 2017 as compared to the same period in 2016. The 193 incidents recorded this year exceed all incidents in the past three years combined.

April 26 – Trump signs the “Education Federalism Executive Order” directing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to examine whether federal regulations interfere with state and local control of the nation’s schools.

Image Credit: AP Images

How You Can Participate in Our Democracy

Many of you have been asking us what actions you can take to defend our democratic values. Here are several suggested actions — and we’re working on more. Whatever you end up doing, it is vital that you maintain your activism. Whatever way you choose to fight back, do not stop. Never get discouraged.

ATTEND TOWN HALLS HOSTED BY YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS.

One of the best ways to hold your elected representatives accountable is going to public forums and asking tough questions that will be answered on the record. This is especially important with lower-level officials who rarely face questions from the press.

HERE’S WHAT YOU DO:

1. Sign up for all of your elected officials’ email lists and follow them on social media so that you know when they’re hosting a town hall. Don’t just focus on Congress. Follow your state, county and city representatives. A lot of bad laws get passed at the state and local levels.

2. Prepare your question ahead of time and phrase it so that it cannot be answered with a “yes” or “no” (instead of asking “Do you support…” ask “Why are you supporting…” or “How will you solve…”). Cite studies and articles to bolster any claims made in your question.

3. Bring a friend who can broadcast you asking the question on Facebook Live so those who could not attend can still participate.

4. Be polite. Your representative could give a terrible answer, but being respectful will highlight the answer.

2. STOP “ALTERNATIVE FACTS” FROM BEING SPREAD.

We know you’re on top of this, but many are not. Many Americans buy into fabrications they see in the media because it is so hard to believe that prominent political figures would knowingly make false claims. Social media is where many of us get a portion of our news — specifically, the news stories we see in our feeds. You can play an important role in influencing the news that your friends and family read by simply posting articles express­ing your views on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.

HERE’S WHAT YOU DO:

Every day post at least one important news story from a respected news outlet on Facebook. Make sure your post includes what you believe are the most important two or three sentences from the story. Realistically, most people are not going to click on the link and read the whole story, but they will read the headline and those few sentences you excerpt.

This may all seem too simple to have any real impact, but it’s how information is spread.

3. GET INVOLVED WITH LOCAL CIVIC GROUPS.

Just as important as fighting a regressive agenda is helping the people it is harming. Make a regular commitment to volunteer with a local group that is dedicated to serving vulnerable communities. Make it a group activity that you do with friends and/or family members. Also consider volunteering for a museum and similar organizations that engage in public education. Helping to spread information is vital, and these institutions need your help.

4. #REPORTHATE.

The SPLC is committed to tracking and reporting the rise in bias incidents around the country. If you or someone you know is targeted, or if you come across hateful vandalism in your community, please report it to us after reporting to the proper authorities.

www.splcenter.org/reporthate

Please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.

SPLC is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization (EIN: 63-0598743)

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THE CIVIL RIGHTS MEMORIAL CENTER

IS ANTIFA CLASSIFIED AS A HATE GROUP?

https://www.splcenter.org/20171004/frequently-asked-questions-about-hate-groups

Frequently asked questions about hate groups

October 04, 2017

Why doesn't the SPLC list antifa as a hate group?

Does the SPLC list any far-left hate groups?

What is the difference between a hate group and an antigovernment "Patriot" group?

What are the Extremist Files?

What is a hate group?

The Southern Poverty Law Center defines a hate group as an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. We do not list individuals as hate groups, only organizations.

The organizations on our hate group list vilify others because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity – prejudices that strike at the heart of our democratic values and fracture society along its most fragile fault lines.

The FBI uses similar criteria in its definition of a hate crime:

[A] criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.

We define a “group” as an entity that has a process through which followers identify themselves as being part of the group. This may involve donating, paying membership dues or participating in activities such as meetings and rallies. Individual chapters of a larger organization are each counted separately, because the number indicates reach and organizing activity.

What is the SPLC's hate map?

Each year since 1990, the SPLC has published an annual census of hate groups operating within the United States. The number is a barometer, albeit only one, of the level of hate activity in the country. Other indicators of hateful ideas include the reach of hate websites, for example. The hate map, which depicts the groups’ approximate locations, is the result of a year of monitoring by analysts and researchers and is typically published every February. It represents activity by hate groups during the previous year.

Tracking hate group activity and membership is extremely difficult. Some groups do everything they can to obscure their activities, while others grossly over-represent their operations. The SPLC uses a variety of methodologies to determine the activities of groups and individuals. These include reviewing hate group publications and reports by citizens, law enforcement, field sources and the news media, and conducting our own investigations.

https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map

IN 2018, WE TRACKED 1,020 HATE GROUPS ACROSS THE U.S.

Why does the SPLC compile a list of hate groups?

Hate groups tear at the fabric of our society and instill fear in entire communities. American history is rife with prejudice against groups and individuals becuase [sic] of their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or other characteristics. As a nation, we've made a lot of progress, but our history of white supremacy lingers in institutional racism, stereotyping and unequal treatment of people of color and others. Hate also plays a particular role in crime and thus the existence and location of hate groups is important to law enforcement. The U.S. Department of Justice warns that hate crimes, more than any other crime, can trigger community conflict, civil disturbances, and even riots. For all their "patriotic" rhetoric, hate groups and their imitators are really trying to divide us; their views are fundamentally anti-democratic and need to be exposed and countered. 

How does the SPLC's Hatewatch blog differ from the hate map?

The SPLC's Hatewatch blog provides investigative reporting and breaking news analysis on the radical right. Like the extremist files, individuals discussed on Hatewatch are not part of our hate group list, as we do not list individuals as hate groups. Blog mentions also do not necessarily imply that the individuals or the groups discussed are members or leaders of hate or antigovernment groups. 

How does the SPLC categorize hate groups?

The SPLC lists hate groups under the following categories: Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazi, White Nationalist, Racist Skinhead, Christian Identity, Neo-Confederate, Black Nationalist, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-LGBT and Anti-Muslim. A General Hate category consists of Hate Music, Holocaust Denial and Radical Traditional Catholicism, among others. An Other category includes groups espousing a variety of hateful ideologies. Some groups do not fall neatly into one sector, and many embrace racism and antisemitism as core components.

Does violence play a role in designating hate group?

Vilifying or demonizing groups of people on the basis of their immutable characteristics, such as race or ethnicity, often inspires or is a precursor to violence. But violence itself is not a requirement for being listed as a hate group. Because a group's ideology can inspire hate violence even when the group itself does not engage in violent activity, we concentrate our analysis on ideology. An example is Dylann Roof's racist Charleston massacre at Mother Emmanuel church in 2015. Roof was not a member of any hate group, but his act was inspired by the ideology of the white nationalist group Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), among other hate group websites. The CCC has no track record of leaders or members engaging inviolence, but its ideas can clearly prompt hate violence. 

Conversely, there are some violent groups that are not hate groups. For example, we do not list racist prison gangs as hate groups, because their goals are primarily criminal, not ideological.

Can organizations operating in the mainstream be hate groups?

Yes. In fact, it’s even more important to call out groups that demonize others while having a foothold in the mainstream. It’s easy to recognize the hater in a white sheet for what he or she is. It’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing that’s harder to identify.

Why is there no specific category for antisemitism?

Antisemitism is a central tenet of belief for most white hate groups, though other people are also anathema to these organizations. Many of the groups we list are antisemitic, including neo-Nazis, Racist Skinheads, Christian Identity adherents, Klangroups, many white nationalist groups, and others, such as Radical Traditional Catholics. Black nationalist hate groups are also often antisemitic. 

What does the SPLC consider an anti-immigrant hate group?

Anti-immigrant hate groups are the most extreme of the hundreds of nativist groups that have proliferated since the late 1990s, when anti-immigration xenophobia began to rise to levels not seen in the United States since the 1920s. Most white hate groups are also anti-immigrant, but anti-immigrant hate groups target only that populatoin usually arguing that immigrants are unable to assimilate, have a lower intellectual capacity than white people, bring disease or are inherently more criminal. Although many groups legitimately criticize American immigration policies, anti-immigrant hate groups go much further by pushing racist propaganda and ideas about non-white immigrants.  

What does the SPLC consider an anti-LGBT hate group?

The SPLC lists organizations such as the Family Research Council as anti-LGBT hate groups because they use dehumanizing language and pseudoscientific falsehoods to portray LGBT people as, for example, sick, evil, perverted, and a danger to children and society – or to suggest that LGBT people are more likely to be pedophiles and sexual predators. Some anti-LGBT hate groups support the criminalization of homosexuality in the United States and abroad, often marshaling the same debunked myths and demonizing claims in their efforts.

A major misconception – one that is deliberately promoted by anti-LGBT hate groups in order to accuse the SPLC of being “anti-Christian” – is that the SPLC considers opposition to same-sex marriage or the belief that homosexuality is a sin as the sole basis for the hate group label. This is false. There are many organizations, such as Focus on the Family, and hundreds of churches and other religious establishments that oppose same-sex marriage or oppose homosexuality on strictly Biblical grounds that the SPLC does not list as hate groups.

Does the SPLC list any anti-white hate groups?

The SPLC listed black nationalist groups since the late 1990s. Most prominent are the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panther Party, which has no relationship to the Black Panther Party of the 1960s and 1970s. The organizations hold beliefs whose tenets include racially-based hatred of white people. Other black nationalist groups believe black people are the true Israelites and many espouse virulently antisemitic and anti-LGBT beliefs.

What is a black nationalist hate group?

Black nationalist groups have always been a reaction to white racism. These groups are typified by their antisemitic, anti-LGBT, anti-white rhetoric and conspiracy theories. They should not be confused with mainstream black activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and others that work to eliminate systemic racism in American society and its institutions.

Why doesn't the SPLC list Black Lives Matter?

We’ve written about this issue before. While its critics claim that Black Lives Matter’s very name is anti-white, this criticism misses the point. Black lives matter because black lives have been marginalized for far too long. As BLM puts it, the movement stands for “the simple proposition that ‘black lives also matter.’”

We have heard nothing from the founders and leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement that is in any way comparable to the racism espoused by, for example, the leaders of the New Black Panther Party – and nothing at all to suggest that the bulk of the demonstrators hold supremacist or black nationalist views. Indeed, people of all races have marched in solidarity with African Americans during BLM marches.

Why doesn't the SPLC list Islamist terrorist groups like ISIS?

The SPLC lists only domestic hate groups – those based in and focused on organizing in the United States. We do, however, list several U.S.-based groups that are ideologically similar to groups like ISIS. They are usually listed as hate groups because of their vilification of Jews and LGBT people.

Why doesn't the SPLC list antifa as a hate group?

The SPLC condemns violence in all its forms, including the violent acts of far-left street movements like antifa (short for anti-fascist). But the propensity for violence, though present in many hate groups, is not among the criteria for listing. Also, antifa groups do not promote hatred based on race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity (see criteria above).

Does the SPLC list any far-left hate groups?

Our goal is to identify all U.S.-based groups that meet our definition of a hate group regardless of whether one would think of the group as being on the left or the right. One can always debate whether a group should be considered “left” or “right.” The Nation of Islam, which we list for its anti-Semitism and vilification of white people, is a case in point. Another example is Jamaat al-Muslimeen – a Muslim group we list because of its vilification of Jews and the LGBT community. But, as a general matter, prejudice on the basis of factors such as race is more prevalent on the far right than it is on the far left.

This does not mean that extremism and violence on the far left are not concerns. But groups that engage in anti-fascist violence such as Antifa, for example, differ from hate groups in that they are not typically organized around bigotry against people based on the characteristics listed above.

What is the difference between a hate group and a "Patriot" group?

In addition to hate groups, the SPLC monitors a sector of the radical right known as the “Patriot” or antigovernment extremist movement. This movement sees the federal government as an enemy of the people and promotes baseless conspiracy theories generally involving a secret cabal of elites seeking to institute a global, totalitarian government – a “New World Order.” It includes the militia movement, which comprises groups such as the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, who actively engage in paramilitary activities. The movement also includes so-called “sovereign citizens” who reject the authority of the government, as well as self-described “constitutional sheriffs” who believe sheriffs are the highest form of law enforcement in the country and can disobey federal laws deemed “unconstitutional,” and members of the tax protest movement, who believe they have the legal ability to avoid paying income taxes, which they perceive to be illegitimate.

The SPLC produces an annual list of antigovernment groups. The vast majority are not hate groups, so they are not listed on the hate map. Although many elements of the movement were originally rooted in white supremacy and antisemitism, the movement has largely attempted to distance itself from these ties since the mid-1990s, following the Oklahoma City bombing. In recent years, however, anti-Muslim sentiments have permeated the movement’s conspiracy theories about “New World Order” plots to destroy Western civilization.

What are the Extremist Files?

The Extremist Files feature on our website contains in-depth profiles of individuals who are key figures on the radical right. Most are associated in some way with either hate groups or antigovernment “Patriot” groups. These profiles, however, should not be confused with the hate group list; we do not list individuals as hate groups, and not all of the profiled individuals are members or leaders of hate groups.

We also offer profiles of a number of radical-right organizations – most of which are designated as either hate groups or antigovernment groups – along with explanations of the ideologies that motivate them.

ABOUT US – OUR HISTORY

https://www.splcenter.org/about-us/our-history

OUR HISTORY

A history of protecting society’s most vulnerable.

The SPLC was founded in 1971 to ensure that the promise of the civil rights movement became a reality for all.

By the late 1960s, the civil rights movement had ushered in the promise of racial equality as new federal laws and decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court ended Jim Crow segregation. But resistance was strong, and these laws had not yet brought the fundamental changes needed in the South.

African Americans were still excluded from good jobs, decent housing, public office, a quality education and a range of other opportunities. There were few places for the disenfranchised and the poor to turn for justice. Enthusiasm for the civil rights movement had waned, and few lawyers in the South were willing to take controversial cases to test new civil rights laws.

Alabama lawyer and businessman Morris Dees sympathized with the plight of the poor and the powerless. The son of an Alabama farmer, he had witnessed firsthand the devastating consequences of bigotry and racial injustice. Dees decided to sell his successful book publishing business to start a civil rights law practice that would provide a voice for the disenfranchised.

“I had made up my mind,” Dees wrote in his autobiography, A Season for Justice. “I would sell the company as soon as possible and specialize in civil rights law. All the things in my life that had brought me to this point, all the pulls and tugs of my conscience, found a singular peace. It did not matter what my neighbors would think, or the judges, the bankers, or even my relatives.”

His decision led to the founding of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Dees joined forces with another young Montgomery lawyer, Joe Levin. They took pro bono cases few others were willing to pursue – the outcome of which had far-reaching effects. Some of their early lawsuits resulted in the desegregation of recreational facilities, the reapportionment of the Alabama Legislature, the integration of the Alabama state trooper force and reforms in the state prison system.

The lawyers formally incorporated the SPLC in 1971, and civil rights activist Julian Bond was named the first president. Dees and Levin began seeking nationwide support for their work. People from across the country responded with generosity, establishing a sound financial base for the new organization.

In the decades since its founding, the SPLC shut down some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist groups by winning crushing, multimillion-dollar jury verdicts on behalf of their victims. It dismantled vestiges of Jim Crow, reformed juvenile justice practices, shattered barriers to equality for women, children, the LGBT community and the disabled, protected low-wage immigrant workers from exploitation, and more.

In the 1980s, the SPLC began monitoring white supremacist activity amid a resurgence of the Klan and today its Intelligence Project is internationally known for tracking and exposing a wide variety of hate and extremist organizations throughout the United States.  

In the early 1990s, the SPLC launched its pioneering Teaching Tolerance program to provide educators with free, anti-bias classroom resources such as classroom documentaries and lesson plans. Today, it reaches millions of schoolchildren with award-winning materials that teach them to respect others and help educators create inclusive, equitable school environments.  

As the country has grown increasingly diverse, our work has only become more vital. And our history is evidence of an unwavering resolve to promote and protect our nation’s most cherished ideals by standing up for those who have no other champions.

FOR SPECIFIC SPLC LEGAL CASES, A VERY IMPORTANT SECTION OF THE WEBSITE, BRING UP EACH DECADE MENTIONED OF SPLC ACTIVITY AND HISTORY. TO SAY THAT IT IS AN EYE-OPENER IS A VAST UNDERSTATEMENT, CONSIDERING THAT THE SPLC IS RARELY MENTIONED IN THE NEWS, WHEN THEY ARE CLEARLY IMPORTANT IN MANY CASES. THE FIRST TIME I READ ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION, THOUGH, WAS IN A CASE OF MISTAKEN IMPRISONMENT FOR RAPE. THE SPLC’S MORRIS DEES AND ANOTHER FROM THE GROUP WERE FEATURED FOR USING DNA EVIDENCE TO SHOW THAT THE PRISONER COULDN’T POSSIBLY BE THE RAPIST.

PROOFS LIKE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS ARE NOTORIOUSLY PRONE TO ERROR, ESPECIALLY IN CASES OF HIGH EMOTIONAL STRESS. THAT IS THE GREATEST ARGUMENT IN MY VIEW FOR ELIMINATING THE DEATH PENALTY ALTOGETHER. I WOULD SUGGEST THAT ALL CITIZENS GENERALLY, AND HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LEVEL STUDENTS IN PARTICULAR, LOOK AT THESE LISTS BELOW OF EVENTS AND LEGAL CASES, AS WELL AS EXAMINING THE MAP OF HATE GROUPS LOCATED IN ALL USA STATES FOR POTENTIAL RESEARCH PAPERS AND FOR THEIR OWN AWARENESS OF OUR NATIONAL SITUATION.

HATE MAP: https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map

JUDGING FROM THE MAP, FLORIDA, CALIFORNIA AND TEXAS ARE PROBABLY THE WORST IN NUMBER OF HATE GROUPS, BUT THEY ALSO HAVE A HIGH POPULATION AND LOTS OF RURAL AREAS. ANOTHER INTERESTING THING TO DO IS TO EXAMINE THE NUMBER OF GROUPS MAPPED ON A PER CAPITA BASIS, TO SEE HOW DEEPLY RACIST AND HATE MONGERING CERTAIN POPULATION GROUPS MAY BE.

AMONG THE MOST DEEPLY CORRODED WITH HATE WOULD SEEM TO BE THE NORTH WEST AND MID-WEST, THE DEEP SOUTH AND TENNESSEE. THE STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE IS ALSO VERY DARK IN COLOR; WHILE CALIFORNIA, FLORIDA, TEXAS AND, SURPRISINGLY, SOUTH CAROLINA ARE THE CLEANEST PER CAPITA. MY HOME STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA IS IN BETWEEN. IT LOOKS TO BE THE CASE THAT THE LEVELS OF RACISM IN THE POPULATIONS ARE PROBABLY DUE TO THE AMOUNT OF RURAL LAND. RELATIVE ISOLATION BREEDS SUSPICION AS A BASIC TURN OF MIND. CITIES NOT ONLY BRING IN A MUCH LARGER MIX OF ALL SORTS OF MINORITY PEOPLE, BUT A USUALLY HIGHER STANDARD OF LIVING AND MORE MIND-EXPANDING WORLDLY GOODS SUCH AS A COMPUTER IN A HIGHER PERCENTAGE OF HOMES, TRANSPORTATION ACCESS TO A LARGER TOWN OR CITY, THEATERS, MUSEUMS, LARGE GROCERY STORES WITH EXOTIC FOODS, GENERAL SHOPPING OUTLETS OTHER THAN JUST WALMART, PLENTY OF LIBRARIES AND SO ON.

THAT STATEMENT IS NOT BACKED UP BY EXTRA STATISTICS, BECAUSE I HAVEN’T DONE ANY IN DEPTH RESEARCH, BUT BY THE HELPFUL COLOR CODING OF EACH STATE ON THE MAP, WHICH IS BASED ON THE PER CAPITA FIGURES, WITH THE WORST STATES IN TERMS OF HATE BEING THE DARKEST IN COLOR. WHAT I WANT TO KNOW IS HOW RACIST THE MAJORITY OF THE PEOPLE ARE IN AN AREA WHERE I MIGHT WANT TO LIVE. FOR INSTANCE, I COULDN’T HELP NOTICING THE CONCENTRATIONS PARANOIA UP THERE IN THOSE PRAIRIE STATES. EVEN THESE DAYS, THE WILD WEST IS NOT A MISNOMER PERHAPS, AND THE NOTORIOUS BUNDY FAMILY ARE NOT ENOUGH OF AN ODDITY FOR MY TASTES. GO TO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff AND

https://www.redding.com/story/news/2019/01/15/final-defendant-sentenced-bundy-ranch-standoff-nevada/2588664002/.