Donald Trumps Rise Has Coincided With an Explosion of Hate Groups [View all]

[applegrove]

https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trumps-rise-has-coincided-with-an-explosion-of-hate-groups/

 By Michelle Chen at the Nation

"SNIP..............


Trump’s rhetoric and the violence that follows in its wake didn’t come out of nowhere. The strain of hate that seems to have driven many of the recent attacks can be traced back to ultra-right movements that have been around since at least the 1980s. In particular, the anti-government, anti-immigrant rhetoric of today’s hate groups are firmly in the lineage of the “Patriot ” movements and other white- and Christian-supremacist extremist groups that flourished during the Clinton years.

When Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, he helped a renaissance in far-right, paramilitary-style movements. Viewing McVeigh as a kind of martyr, the groups espoused a variety of ideologies but generally shared a paranoia over gun-control legislation and a conviction that an armed uprising was needed to overturn the political order. Fueled by aspirations of creating a white-supremacist racial hierarchy, these militants received support not only from old-school hate groups like the Klan but also from seemingly mainstream institutions like the National Rifle Association and right-wing Christian organizations.

According to Indiana University sociologist Jeffrey Greunewald, whose research focuses on hate groups and extremist violence, contemporary far-right movements were able to take root in the 1990s in communities that were left out of that decade’s economic growth. They shrewdly exploited disillusionment stemming from “loss of blue-collar, manufacturing jobs viewed as a result of globalization,” and economic distress in farming communities. But this extremist wave peaked around 1996, with about 850 organizations, and eventually faded or were driven underground by federal law enforcement crackdowns.

Trump’s election has brought these older strains of America’s racist movements from the farthest fringes right into the mainstream of party politics.


..............SNIP"