Hate Groups

Ideologies

Within the United States, hate organizations have based their philosophical or moral views on the following topics:

• 1.
  Nonexistence of the Holocaust and revisionist History that claims or minimizes the eradication of more than 6 million Jews and other ethnicities.
• 2.
  White superiority with the position that people of color are inferior.
• 3.
  Fundamentalist Christianity.
• 4.
  Not giving equal rights to lesbians, gays, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex, or asexual individuals (LGBTQIAA).
• 5.
  Immigration policies in the United States, with groups asserting vigilante roles in monitoring U.S. borders, restricting access for immigrants to enter the country through illegal means.
• 6.
  Ending the spread of Islam in the United States.
• 7.
  Not paying taxes nor adhering to U.S. laws or policies.
• 8.
  Opposition to racial integration.

Hate Map

The Internet has helped cultivate hate group movements in the United States by using online access as a vehicle for communicating ideologies, recruiting potential members, and invoking hate against targeted groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a prominent U.S.-based organization, has consistently monitored activities of hate groups and movements, and has published a hate map and intelligence reports on their activities. SPLC began monitoring hate group activities in the 1980s and [Page 611]has asserted that, since 2000, hate groups have increased by more than 65 percent, with an alarming rate of 1,018 groups in 2012. The SPLC hate map shows the top four states, with reported activities of more than 50 hate groups based on evidence of numerous activities, as California (82), Texas (62), Florida (59), and Georgia (53). The SPLC asserts that these movements are spurred due to Many factors, including the increase of people of color as immigrants, the decline of whites in U.S. census figures, and the symbolic election of the first African American and person of color as president of the United States. Racially motivated incidents have accounted for more than 50 percent of hate crimes reported in the United States.

Westboro Baptist Church pickets a Jewish community center Hate groups are organized bodies that target and denigrate specific individuals and groups.

Major Hate Groups

Ku Klux Klan. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is a historical organization founded in 1956 in Louisiana. It advocates white supremacy and dominance, racial hatred, prejudice, and segregation. Historically targeting African Americans, the KKK has expanded its hate propaganda against immigrants, Jewish people, some Christian groups, and the LGBTQIAA community. The KKK boasts of owning the largest number of organized hate groups in the United States. It has also collaborated with other hate groups—skinheads, Neo-Nazis, and White Nationalist movements—in purporting white supremacist propaganda and actions in Many U.S. states. These actions include symbolic efforts such as committing hate crimes, encouraging members to distribute flyers in communities and on college campuses, and producing online video games with images of swastikas advocating for white dominance and hatred.

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