The SPLC has asked the federal government to release records that could show whether anti-LGBT extremists are influencing the Trump administration's policy decisions, including a yet-to-be signed executive order that threatens widespread discrimination against LGBT people under the guise of religious freedom.
The election of Donald Trump, his subsequent appointments of hardline nativists and his xenophobic executive orders have buoyed anti-immigrant groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
“Breitbart is a company staffed almost entirely by Jews,” said Milo Yiannopolous last November when asked about accusations of anti-Semitism made against his former boss, Stephen Bannon. “I am a gay Jew, and he made me into a star.”
Much has been made of the rise in racist and xenophobic rhetoric, anti-Muslim attacks, and anti-Semitic trolling in the wake of Donald Trump’s ascent, and rightly so. But just as Trump’s promises to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, block Muslim immigration, and restore “law and order” have emboldened nativists and racists, so has his history of casual misogyny and alleged sexual assault (“grab them by the pussy”) energized an explicitly sexist element within the noxious “Alt-Right” movement.
Last December, an armed, 28-year-old North Carolina man stormed into a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor called Comet Ping-Pong, bent on investigating the stories he’d heard about it being part of a child sex-slavery ring closely tied to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. Before it was over, Edgar Welch had fired a shot that harmed no one, but terrified restaurant customers and staff alike.
The radical right was more successful in entering the political mainstream last year than in half a century. How did it happen?
The number of hate groups in the United States 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’s (SPLC) annual census of hate groups and other extremist organizations, released today.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on Liberty Island, he had no doubt about the perniciousness of the law that it was replacing. The 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed a racist quota system favoring Northern European whites, was a "cruel and enduring wrong," a "harsh injustice" and "un-American in the highest sense," he said at the signing ceremony.
The chief strategist in the White House, a man who rallied a growing white nationalist movement behind Donald Trump, is now telling the news media to “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”
President Trump’s executive orders on immigration, announced by the administration on Wednesday, include a plan to publicize purported crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in so-called “sanctuary cities.”
