The election of President Obama triggered an explosion in the number of hate groups in the US, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The rise in numbers is due to changing racial demographics, a bad economy, and a divisive political atmosphere.
Mark Potok, who wrote the report, is the Director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project.
As the webcam-spying trial of Rutgers student Dharun Ravi comes to an end, some people have questioned whether hate crime laws are necessary at all. On the one hand, they dole out harsher punishments for crimes motivated by discrimination and bigotry. On the other, is the same crime worse depending on the identity of the victim? In the Rutgers case, the jury must decide if Ravi's actions constituted a hate crime or just a tasteless prank.
James B. Jacobsis Warren E. Burger professor of law at New York University School of Law and a co-author of "Hate Crime: Criminal Law and Identity Politics." Hayley Gorenberg is the deputy legal director of Lambda Legal, a civil rights group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.
Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, discusses Wade Michael Page, the gunman who allegedly killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and had ties to hate groups. We take a look at white supremacy in the US.
A shooting rampage at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin this weekend has left six people dead and three wounded. Now that the confusion and conflicting reports during the shooting have settled, we're beginning to learn more about the alleged gunman who carried out the attack. His name was Wade Michael Page. His stepmother never expected that he'd be at the helm of a horrific shooting rampage, but his friends might have had another idea.
Page was a member of two racist skinhead bands, End Apathy and Define Hate. His tattoos espoused affiliation with a nationwide skinhead organization, and he was "a frustrated neo-Nazi," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Alabama-based nonprofit monitors the activities of hate groups throughout the United States, and they had been tracking Page for roughly a decade. Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, has followed the activities of hate groups for the organization.
"Basically, he was another one of many hundreds if not thousands of people who were involved in the hard core of the white supremacist music scene," Potok says. "We noticed him when he began to play in some of the better-known bands, bands like Intimidation One and Blue-Eyed Devils."
As Page was well within his First Amendment rights to be involved in these bands and groups of people, the SPLC had no reason to notify authorities. "There was nothing there that would have caused us to go to law enforcement," Potok says.
One of the prevalent theories regarding the gunman's motive was that he confused the temple-goers with Muslims. Male followers of Sikhism wear turbans and grow out their beards, two stereotypical characteristics often attributed to Muslims. Sikh communities in the United States have suffered violence and harassment in a post-9/11 landscape that has seen increased anti-Muslim sentiment.
If Page was purposefully targeting Sikhs, however, the rampage was inconsistent with the current rhetoric of white supremacist groups.
"I have never seen, in 14 or 15 years of monitoring the extreme right, anti-Sikh propaganda," Potok says. "That world, as well as the political mainstream, I'm sad to say, is thick with anti-Muslim propaganda."
"While I certainly cannot prove it, I would guess that almost certainly this man did think he was attacking Muslims."
Following the shooting at the offices of the Family Research Council, Ami Lynch, vice president of gender and special populations research at Social Solutions International and adjunct professor at The George Washington University, explains what constitutes a hate group.
The number of hate groups in America is on the decline—that's the silver lining in the annual report on violent domestic extremism released this week by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
While the number of hate groups is on the decline, incidents of violence and other threats made by domestic hate groups remains the same. And according to SPLC, extremists are leaving groups in favor of the anonymity of the internet and are increasingly acting as lone wolves.
"More than half of the decline in hate groups was of Ku Klux Klan chapters, and many of those have apparently gone underground, ending public communications, rather than disbanding," the report says.
However, the most terrifying aspect of the report is that there is a growing trend of extremist ideology making its way into mainstream politics.
Heidi Beirich is the head of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She explains the findings laid out in the group's latest report.
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JUDY WOODRUFF: The Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups have gained more attention in the news recently, but as special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault explains, the national undercurrent of racism may be even more pervasive.
It’s part of our yearlong exploration of solutions to the problems of race in America.
These are boots that are intended so that, when you stomp on someone, the swastika will be left.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Heidi Beirich is leader of The Intelligence Project here at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit anti-terror organization.
She shows us memorabilia revealing some Ku Klux Klan history, boots with swastikas and boots with red laces, indicating Klan members who’ve physically harmed someone, and other racist paraphernalia. In 2014, there were some 784 active hate groups. Beirich brings us up to date.
The Ku Klux Klan has declined over the years, in part due to lawsuits that you people here at the Southern Poverty Law Center have filed. Briefly tell us about how that came about.
HEIDI BEIRICH, Southern Poverty Law Center: We started filing lawsuits against the Klan in 1981 over a lynching of a young black man in Mobile. That was our first anti-Klan law suit.
And we came up with this idea that we should sue these folks in civil court to bankrupt them. That was the plan. We have now had a series of Klan groups that we have sued, put them basically out of business, leading all the way up to very recently with the Imperial Klans of America. Our hope is that by taking their money away, they can’t function anymore.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And that was successful?
HEIDI BEIRICH: Yes. Every single one of them has been successful. Obviously, when these groups don’t have money, that means there’s less violence that they could perpetrate. The whole idea is to not allow them to function.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: But at the moment, there seems to be a resurgence and what appears to be a rise in hate groups. What explains that?
HEIDI BEIRICH: We have seen a sustained rise in hate groups since basically 2000. And the main thing driving this has been changing demographics in the United States.
2000 was an important year because it was the first time that the U.S. census said definitively, in our near future, 2042 at the time, whites will no longer be the majority. And obviously, if you are a member of a hate group, right, if you’re a white supremacist, the fact that whites will be less than 50 percent of the population is something to basically be a little freaked out about.
And so we started to see them organizing by hate groups and huge growth, spiked over 1,000 hate groups in a short period of time. Obama added to that, right? Obviously, the first black president was another reason for a backlash like that to develop.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And you’re getting that from former Klans-people and former white supremacists who are telling you that?
HEIDI BEIRICH: You always hear exactly the same thing, whether people are in the movement or out of the movement.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Is it mostly hatred of African-Americans or is there more to it?
HEIDI BEIRICH: Hatred of black people is the driving force for America’s hate movement.
But, over the years, as you have seen a change in sort of the population of people of color here, you can add to that mix dislike of Latinos and immigrants, dislike of gay people and, very recently, we have seen a huge outburst by every kind of hate group against the Muslim community.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: You have also described in some of your writings about a new phenomenon called the lone wolf, which is different from organized groups. How significant and worrisome is that?
HEIDI BEIRICH: Well, you’re pointing out one of the biggest trends in terms of racist killings that we’re seeing lately.
We have people like Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in Charleston. Our understanding of Dylann Roof, from his own manifesto, is he never met a person in another hate group in his life. He was completely radicalized online.
That’s exactly the same phenomenon that we see, for example, for people who are inspired by ISIS. They go onto Web sites where there’s propaganda that’s widely available. It enrages them for some reason. That kind of lone wolf terrorism is a big problem, and there’s more of it today than it was 10 years ago, and we don’t expect that to change.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Can you use any of the tactics that you used to decimate the Klan in this new era?
HEIDI BEIRICH: These people live on the Web, like many people do for all kinds of reasons. The only way for law enforcement to really find them and track them is to follow them onto the hate Web sites. And it’s not easy. How did Dylann Roof indicate that he was going to go on a mass shooting spree? He didn’t.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: So, are there any solutions, though, for people who — around the country who are concerned about these issues?
HEIDI BEIRICH: The Department of Justice has reconstituted a domestic terrorism task force that had been defunct since 9/11 to start collecting intelligence aggressively against white supremacists and extreme anti-government types. That’s a very important thing to do.
What we try to do here is publish information about these people, where they are, what groups they’re involved in, what they’re publishing, so that at least law enforcement, which is the big readership for our products, knows where they are, what they believe, what they think, so they have a chance to maybe catch someone before they escalate.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: How much does education add to a solution?
HEIDI BEIRICH: It’s probably the biggest solution. And we know from talking to people who are racist today that it has a lot to do with what you learn in the home.
If it’s not counteracted in some way, right, deep racial hatred, you just — you don’t learn any differently. We have a lot of people who come to us after stints, for example, in prison for crimes committed with white supremacy in some way who meet people of other races. That’s a place where you could intervene with younger people too and bring them out of movement.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And you have seen that happen?
HEIDI BEIRICH: Many, many times.
One of my favorite examples is a woman named Angela King. who went to prison in Florida for involvement with a white supremacist skinhead crew. They committed some robberies. She met a Jamaican woman who was involved — who was imprisoned with her, but was involved in some community activities in the prison there.
They became friends. That’s how Angie got out of the movement, was through that relationship. For the first time in her life, she had an honest friendship, right, with a person of a different color. Now Angela King runs something called Life After Hate, which works with people who wants to get out of white supremacist movements.
And what we try to do is bust up the groups. We try to sow discord among the organizations, show that the people who lead these organizations are hypocrites and so on, to give people a chance to look at what they have gotten involved in and maybe reconsider it.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And you have seen that work?
HEIDI BEIRICH: It absolutely works.
The number one thing, I would say, that drives people out of hate groups is seeing their leadership corrupt.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Looking to the future and the things that you do, are you at all optimistic that your organization and America in general can get its arms around hate and racism?
HEIDI BEIRICH: I’m optimistic in the long run, and I’m extremely pessimistic in the short run.
Some of the racial strife that we have been experiencing over the last year are all related to our inability to digest the fact that this country is changing and white people are not going to be the majority here. Right?
I think, in the long term, everything in the United States may be amazing. Right? We might be the first truly multicultural, multiethnic democracy that embraces tolerance everywhere. We would be the first if we sustain this transition in the 2050s without having things descend into chaos.
But we’re going to have to get through a rough patch. We really have to work on this issue. It’s fundamental to our democracy working.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Heidi Beirich, thank you so much for joining us.
HEIDI BEIRICH: It was a pleasure.
The post As racial hate groups rise, strategies to shut them down appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
Journalists Sarah Posner and David Neiwert join us to talk about their article for Mother Jones: “How Trump Took Hate Groups Mainstream,” reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute They conducted a three-month investigation, interviewed white nationalist leaders and analyzed social-media networks, nearly 100 hours of fringe talk radio, and dozens of posts on influential hate sites, to chart Trump's connection with the alt-right, and discuss how he's legitimized hate groups in the past several months.
Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this interview.
The number of hate groups in the U.S. rose for a second year in a row in 2016 as the radical right was energized by the candidacy of Donald Trump, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In the aftermath of the white supremacist "Unite the Right" rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend, many are wondering what drives people to join racist hate groups.
For a firsthand account of what it's like to take part in the white supremacist movement, The Takeaway turns to Timothy Zaal, a former skinhead and current speaker at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
"Wake up. You're a pawn. You're being used," he says.
Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear the full conversation with Timothy Zaal.
This segment is hosted by Todd Zwillich.
Coming up on today's show:
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been documenting hate groups in the U.S. for decades. From 2015 to 2016, the organization saw a rise in the number of those groups operating in the U.S. Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which tracks far right groups in the U.S., joins The Takeaway to break down the state of white supremacist groups in America, and The Takeaway also hears from to Timothy Zaal, a former skinhead and current speaker at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
This episode is hosted by Todd Zwillich.
Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this interview.
The white supremacist "Unite the Right" rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend has been roundly condemned by American politicians and public figures from across the ideological spectrum, but many of its participants didn’t view it as a defeat.
On Saturday, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer posted a video online in which he expressed plans to return to the city and told followers, "Our movement is about our identity and our future, and we are not gonna give up."
Spencer is just one movement leader among many. Extremist groups including neo-Nazis, identitarians and the Klu Klux Klan were just some of those present at Saturday’s rally.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been documenting hate groups in the U.S. for decades. From 2015 to 2016 they saw a rise in the number of those groups operating in the U.S. And while current totals are not the largest they’ve ever seen, the group has called them “high by historic standards.”
Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which tracks far right groups in the U.S., joins The Takeaway to break down the state of white supremacist groups in America.
This segment is hosted by Todd Zwillich.
As President Trump faces renewed criticism for his handling of the recent violent white supremacist march in Charlottesville, one thing is becoming very clear: Language matters.
The President first faced heat for not being quick to condemn the hate groups, instead blaming “many sides”. Then on Monday, he delivered a statement with what many considered the "right language," however late, but followed it Tuesday by again placing blame on "both sides."
Kevin M. Kruse, Princeton historian and the author of White Flight, spoke to WNYC's Richard Hake about how this sort of false equivalency has an important historical precedent.
During the 1950s, segregationist politicians often condemned the "extremists on both sides."
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 15, 2017
By that, they meant the Klan & the NAACP.
In 1958, Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas, the chief architect of the Central High crisis, did the exact same thing. pic.twitter.com/HVcu34Cvaf
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 16, 2017
The false equivalence was so widespread it became the standard for both national parties' leaders -- Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. pic.twitter.com/yfhBfwPMZk
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 16, 2017
Should Confederate monuments come down?
Peter Cytanovic, right, along with neo-Nazis, “alt-right” and white supremacists encircle and chant at counter-protesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11, 2017. Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Nearly a century ago, the governor of Louisiana proposed doxing the Ku Klux Klan.
Gov. John Parker was in New York City for a speech in April 1923, just a few months after the Klan’s killing of two white men in Mer Rouge, Louisiana, had drawn national attention to the white supremacist group’s doings in the state. He suspected that local leaders and townspeople knew full well who had perpetrated the attack but kept quiet — maybe because they, too, were in the Klan, operating under the cover of white hoods and robes.
His solution: “Turn the light of publicity on the Ku Klux Klan. Its members cannot stand it. Reputable businessmen, bankers, lawyers and others numbered among its members will not continue in its fold. They cannot afford it.”
This week, roughly 94 years later, internet hoards took up Parker’s call. They voraciously posted photos of people who attended a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and sought to use the online crowdsourcing to identify them.
Doxing, or publishing someone’s personal information without their consent, existed long before the internet. But this week brought an unparalleled flood, showing us what happens when an internet movement that thrived on anonymity comes head-to-head with a rapidly expanding group of online vigilantes.
On the evening of Friday, Aug. 11, modern-day Klan members, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, people on the “alt-right” and others marched through Charlottesville with torches, many chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi slogan. The following afternoon — after the planned white nationalist rally had collapsed into violence, killing attendee Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others — Peter Cytanovic and Andrew Dodson, who had come to Charlottesville for the rally, met up with some friends at a hotel in the city.
Cytanovic, a white nationalist and student at the University of Nevada, Reno, already knew the Guardian had published a photo of him shouting at the torch-lit march. But that afternoon, after someone published his name online, his phone began buzzing with notifications. Soon, he had hundreds of Facebook messages, including some death threats. Before long, people were calling his sister and grandparents. “It really got bad for me personally,” he told the NewsHour Weekend.
Dodson, who said he wants to protect white identity in the U.S., was with Cytanovic as he began to see the notifications. They were in part fueled by Twitter user @YesYoureRacist, who posted images of people on Twitter for others to identify. Within minutes, his friend said, “Hey, you’re on the news.” Before long, he too was receiving threatening messages.
“It’s a fascinating machine to see in progress,” Dodson told the NewsHour Weekend. “These are very hardworking people that are using these social media platforms to scrub the internet for all the data on someone. It’s like a giant artificial intelligence or something. This swarm of humans, Googling, in an attempt to destroy someone.”
As they identified Dodson, Cytanovic and others, internet commenters often expressed horror that white nationalists no longer felt the need to cover their faces.
But doing so would have been illegal in Virginia, where a law prohibits wearing masks or hoods to conceal one’s identity. The reason dates back to the Klan, and the frustration Gov. Parker and others felt at the group’s Teflon-like ability to avoid legal consequences for the murders and other violence they committed.
In the Klan’s early days in the late 1800s, members wore a variety of strange costumes invoking folk traditions, racist stereotypes or animals. They wore “gigantic animal horns, fake beards, coon-skin caps, or polka-dotted paper hats; they imitated French accents or barnyard animals … Many early Klansman also wore blackface, simultaneously scapegoating and mocking their victims,” author Alison Kinney wrote in her book “Hood (Object Lessons).”
In late 1926 Klan organizers entered Saskatchewan. – Close up of Canadian Klansman in full regalia, Kingston, Ontario, July 1, 1927. Note the maple leaf symbol on the left side of the Klansman’s chest. Photo from the John Boyd Collection from Miller Services via Wikimedia Commons
The Klan mostly dissolved toward the end of the 19th century after state governments and Congress began to crack down. But it was temporary — several decades later, after the 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” was released to wide popularity among white Americans, people began joining the Klan again, this time donning mass-produced white hoods and cloaks.
But they were a largely ineffective disguise in many small towns, where Klan membership was no secret, according to Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University. “We think of the Klan running around in disguise and hoods. They did that, but everyone knew who they were,” Foner said. “People were proud to be in the Klan and they didn’t want to hide that fact.”
Still, the hoods were a form of plausible deniability, giving people the option not to cooperate with law enforcement, said Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT. “In some ways, having everyone meet under hoods gave everyone the ability to say, ‘I can’t tell you whether I was there.’”
As a result, a number of states outlawed wearing hoods or masks in public from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Decades later, white supremacists’ masks took a different form online as anonymity became a central feature of the internet. In early chat rooms and message boards, and among hackers, personal information became a kind of currency — and a show of power, Zuckerman said. Pranksters would sometimes obtain each other’s personal information for sport, other times for nefarious purposes.
Online forums for white nationalists thrived in the early days of the internet. On Stormfront, an online white nationalist forum created by former KKK member Don Black in the 1990s, “People would have consistent screen names. They would hold onto a kind of identity … but they would be very explicit not to share personal information because they knew that other people could see what they were saying,” said Joan Donovan, media manipulation research lead for the Data & Society Research Institute.
In the early 2000s, those forums spun off into 4chan and 8chan, where white supremacist groups flourished and everyone was automatically assigned the username “anonymous.” Meanwhile, online activists had already begun publishing the names of white nationalists, usually on their own websites as an attempt at vigilante justice.
Daryle Lamont Jenkins was one of them. In 2000, his website, One People’s Project, began publishing the names of accused neo-Nazis. “I just wanted to know, what ever happened to the Klan after the civil rights movement?” he said.
In turn, white supremacists also published the names of anti-racist people or others who they wanted to harm. Hal Turner, a white supremacist and public personality, was sentenced in 2010 to three years in prison after he posted the addresses of three federal judges online and threatened to kill them after they ruled in favor of a local handgun ban in Chicago.
In 2006, the YouTube channel Vigilantes, led by someone who went by “CircaRigel,” was created to publicize the personal information of racist YouTubers. Within a couple of years the Anonymous collective was doing the same thing — first with individual white supremacists, and in 2008, with the Scientology leadership, a move that brought them national attention.
Then, in 2011, Google announced the launch of reverse image search, making it possible to find a person’s social media accounts or other online presence by searching for an image of them.
By then, doxing had become more widespread, as Anonymous in conjunction with Occupy protesters began doxing policemen who were accused of being violent toward the Occupy encampments, Donovan said. Anonymous’ Tumblr posted the phone number for New York police officer, Anthony Bologna, who was captured on camera pepper-spraying an Occupy Wall Street protester.
And in 2015, an online harassment campaign known as Gamergate posted personal information for women involved in technology and gaming.
But this most recent episode of doxing, post-Charlottesville, “feels qualitatively different,” said Whitney Phillips, a professor at Mercer University who has studied online trolling. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
White nationalists carry torches on the grounds of the University of Virginia, on the eve of a planned Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S. August 11, 2017. Picture taken August 11, 2017. Photo by Alejandro Alvarez/News2Share via Reuters
What happened online after Charlottesville showed the collision of anonymous online space with the public face of white supremacy, Zuckerman said. “There’s a whole lot of conversations in that space where people don’t disclose their identity. They are their online persona. They are not necessarily taking off their mask and they are interacting primarily under that pseudonym. They realize that taking off that mask is a risk and a danger,” he said. “When you assume you’re going to a rally filled with people you know mostly under those pseudonyms, maybe [you think] those rules apply.”
Phillips said she often hears the misconception that anonymity online can encourage antisocial behavior such as racist and hateful speech. But she pointed to another idea expressed by Steve Reicher, a social psychologist and professor at the University of St. Andrews: that anonymity leads to a state in which people show a stronger adherence to group norms. As white nationalist groups siloed into their own online spaces, they may have exaggerated group members’ devotion to group ideas, she said.
Several months ago, a pro-Trump Twitter user who is affiliated with the “alt-right” accused Zuckerman of working for George Soros, a prominent donor to liberal causes and a common target of “alt-right” groups. Zuckerman, who works at MIT, responded — and eventually they moved the conversation to Gmail, where Zuckerman’s signature shows his phone number and office address.
The Twitter user was shocked, Zuckerman said, taking it as a “highly trusting” move that Zuckerman would provide his personal details. In a show of good faith, he sent Zuckerman his details too, leveling the playing field. “It was almost like an Old West [movie], I came in and put my gun on the table, and his response was to put his down as well,” Zuckerman said.
Zuckerman said he doesn’t want to see anyone being harassed, but that doxing could be effective against people who are just beginning to explore white nationalist ideas. “I hope it will be a successful tactic in helping filter people out of this movement who are exploring the identity, but who may not understand just what a hateful and horrible thing they’re doing,” he said.
This past weekend, a sparsely attended “free speech” rally organized by right-wing groups was eclipsed by thousands of counter-protesters in Boston. Brianna Wu, who was herself targeted during Gamergate and is now a Democratic congressional candidate in Massachusetts, drew a direct line between doxing after Charlottesville and scarce attendance at that rally.
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On the flipside, publishing white nationalists’ names could also reassure them that they can voice their beliefs more now than ever. Having his name published, Cytanovic said, was “relieving to a degree, that I can’t hide my political beliefs anymore.”
As widespread and cross-political alarm grows over the influence of fascism and white supremacy in the U.S., Donovan said more people than ever are using the internet to administer their own version of justice.
“We as Americans know that this has the capacity to spread. And the way you stop it from spreading from town to town is that you band together and try to find the vectors that are doing this kind of organization,” she said. White nationalists in Charlottesville may have “felt really safe to come out without masks on, and I think they’re discovering the reason why the KKK put masks on in the first place.”
The post White supremacists once wore hoods. Now, an internet mob won’t let them stay anonymous appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
The Trump administration has announced the end of the DACA program. We examine the rhetoric used to justify the decision. Plus: the Southern Poverty Law Center faces questions from across the political spectrum about its messaging and fundraising; and the surprising history of FEMA's Cold War origins and what it means for emergency response today.
1. Mark Joseph Stern [@mjs_DC] of Slate dissects the rhetoric used by the Trump administration to justify ending the DACA program.
2. Peter Beinart [@PeterBeinart] of The Atlantic on how Democrats frame immigration and what gets ignored in the discussion.
3. The Southern Poverty Law Center has faced criticism from the left and the right. Ben Schreckinger [@SchreckReports] of Politico breaks down concerns surrounding the group's messaging and fundraising. Then, SPLC President Richard Cohen [@splcenter] responds to the criticism and rebuts recent, dubious accusations from right-leaning media outlets.
4. Garrett Graff [@vermontgmg] wrote about "The Secret History of FEMA" for Wired this week. He explains FEMA's origins as a Cold War civil defense agency and how its mission has evolved.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, seen in this file photo, is one of several lawmakers who introduced a resolution condemning white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups. Photo by REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein.
WASHINGTON — The Senate has approved a resolution condemning white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups following a white-nationalist rally in Virginia that descended into deadly violence.
Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia introduced the measure along with four colleagues from both parties. The resolution, approved unanimously Monday night, recognizes a woman who was killed Aug. 12 and 19 other people who were injured after a car allegedly driven by a neo-Nazi slammed into a crowd of demonstrators protesting the rally in Charlottesville.
The resolution describes Heather Heyer’s death as a “domestic terrorist attack” and acknowledges two Virginia state troopers who died in a helicopter crash while monitoring the protests.
MORE: Charlottesville violence prompts ACLU to change policy on hate
The resolution urges President Donald Trump and his administration to speak out against hate groups that espouse racism, extremism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and white supremacy. It also calls on the Justice Department and other federal agencies to “use all resources available” to improve data collection on hate crimes and “address the growing prevalence of those hate groups in the United States.”
The joint resolution now goes to the House, where identical language has been introduced by Virginia Reps. Tom Garrett and Gerry Connolly with support from the entire Virginia House delegation. If adopted by both chambers, the resolution would go to the president.
Trump has been criticized for his response following the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville over the city’s planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Trump asserted there were good people on “both sides” of the Charlottesville rally and bemoaned rising efforts to remove Confederate monuments as an attack on America’s “history and culture.”
The joint resolution is supported by a range of civil rights groups, including the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The post Senate approves resolution condemning white nationalists appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
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White nationalists from across the country converged on the town of Shelbyville, Tennessee over the weekend. They were rallying for “White Lives Matter” and protesting the refugee population in the area after a deadly shooting by a Somali refugee. Their protests were met by a large police presence and shouting from counter protesters, who outnumbered them by at least two to one.
A second rally, planned for nearby Murfreesboro, Tennessee about 20 miles north, was canceled after up to 1,000 counter-protesters had gathered to confront the group.
Natalie Allison, breaking news reporter for The Tennessean, has the details.
This segment is hosted by Todd Zwillich.
Every year The Southern Poverty Law Center issues a report which tracks hate groups in America. The most recent report identifies 954 hate groups – an increase of 4 percent from their 2016 findings.
Richard Cohen president of the Southern Poverty Law Center talks about what groups made the list, criteria, and takes calls.
Wes Enzinna and Shane Johnson discuss Enzinna’s recent piece for Mother Jones, “Inside the Radical, Uncomfortable Movement to Reform White Supremacists,” for which Johnson is the subject. Enzinna dives deep into the deradicalization movement that is chipping away at homegrown hate groups. Shane tells his story of leaving a white supremacist group and paints a broader picture of how fighting violent white supremacy can be a lot like fighting addiction.
This segment is guest hosted by Matt Katz.
On this episode of Reveal, three stories of men are at the center of controversy.
He’s been punched on the streets of Washington, D.C., and kicked out of a major conservative political gathering, and yet white nationalist Richard Spencer has left Montana to set up shop in the nation’s capital. What does he have to show for it?
A Marine veteran breaks the news of hundreds – possibly thousands – of naked photographs of female service members being shared online. We hear his story.
Nearly 30 years ago, six firefighters in Kansas City, Missouri, died in an arson explosion that shook the city. Reveal follows a man in the case who was sent to prison for life as he’s released and reunited with his family.
Head over to revealnews.org for more of our reporting.
Follow us on Facebook at fb.com/ThisIsReveal and on Twitter @reveal.
And to see some of what you’re hearing, we’re also on Instagram @revealnews.
Reveal has had a busy year – our team has chased stories from Oklahoma to Bermuda. We exposed a rehab program that provides labor at a chicken processing plant that’s been called a slave camp and followed the money trail of the Paradise Papers, leaked documents that revealed international tax shelters for some of America’s biggest companies. We reported on the rise of hate crimes and investigated hate groups.
In this episode, we look at some of our best reporting from 2017 and how Reveal has made an impact in our world.
Head over to revealnews.org for more of our reporting.
Follow us on Facebook at fb.com/ThisIsReveal and on Twitter @reveal.
And to see some of what you’re hearing, we’re also on Instagram @revealnews.
Since George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis last summer, the role of racism and bias in policing has been front and center for many Americans. This week, reporting in The New York Times found that lawmakers in a handful of states are trying to propose legislation that would make it easier to identify and remove officers affiliated with extremism and hate groups. But, critics of the legislation have questioned whether or not these laws would encroach on the individual rights of officers.
Professor Phil Stinson, former police officer and criminologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and Councilmember Janeese Lewis George from Ward 4 in Washington D.C., joined The Takeaway to discuss what these laws would mean in practice.
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After a year with so much hate-motivated politics and violence, we take a step back with three perspectives on bigotry and hate movements, and on responding with love.
On Today's Show:
Sharon Kleinbaum, senior rabbi and spiritual leader of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York City, Jay Caspian Kang, staff writer for The New Yorker, documentary film director, and the author of The Loneliest Americans (Crown, 2021), Eddie Glaude, Jr., chair of Princeton's African-American studies department and the author of Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (Crown, 2020), on the verbal and physical expressions of hate in 2022, and how to combat it.
