It’s Hard Out There for a Hate Group

[DonViejo]

Keli Goff

Hate-group membership spiked when Obama first became president, but now it’s decreasing. Maybe things actually are getting a tad better.

While political watchers will spend decades debating whether or not President Obama’s election was good for America from a policy standpoint, one issue is not up for debate: The Obama presidency has been great for hate. According to experts, President Obama has been one of the greatest recruitment tools hate groups have seen in decades. But a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center indicates that the hate parade may be finally coming to an end.

Mark Potok, a Southern Poverty Law Center expert, previously reported that there was a 40 percent increase in the number of hate groups from 2000 to 2009. But to put into context just how much hate flourished in the Obama era: On the day after President Obama’s election, 2,000 new members made their way to Stormfront, a popular white supremacist message board.

In the last five years its membership base has increased 60 percent. Stormfront’s slogan is, “We are the voice of the new, embattled white minority!” Rants tend to focus on topics like the horrors of mixed-race families, and the particular dangers of a mixed-race president. There have been other high-profile incidents that seemed to indicate that the Obama era was not only not post-racial, but perhaps pretty racist. One of the most disturbing perhaps took place in Virginia, when Easter eggs filled with racist messages were left during a children’s Easter egg hunt last year.

But while racist rhetoric may be unnerving, there have been more troubling and direct racially charged threats. Shortly after Obama secured the Democratic nomination, a group of skinheads was arrested for plotting to assassinate him. In the midst of this hate-fueled cottage industry there were other incidents that seemed to highlight America’s racial divide in other equally unfortunate ways. There was the Trayvon Martin tragedy, the Michael Brown shooting and its aftermath, and most recently the racist lynching song courtesy of a few University of Oklahoma students. All of these stories considered collectively would seem to indicate that far from bringing us together, the Obama era has helped tear Americans further apart. And yet according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the numbers finally seem to indicate otherwise.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/26/it-s-hard-out-there-for-a-hate-group.html