The Hate Heard Round The World: After the mass shootings in New Zealand, carried out by a professed white supremacist who hates immigrants, President Trump was asked at the White House whether white nationalists were a growing threat around the world. Trump replied: “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very very serious problems.” Experts who study extremism and monitor hate groups beg to differ. They point to hard numbers that show a sharp rise in violent white extremism around the globe, and especially in the US.
Kathleen Blee is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research on white extremism shows that mainstream middle-class and even upper-middle-class men are increasingly being drawn into this movement, which is mostly online and worldwide. “A lot of them are very casual viewers initially, and they get pulled into these very extreme ideas,” Blee says. “They operate in an ideological world of people that reinforce each other’s ideas but may never actually meet each other in person.” Usually these men are already spending huge amounts of time online, and discover or are recruited into racist communities, then become radicalized. “It’s more that this world can create people who are aimless, marginalized, isolated and quite extreme in their thinking,” Blee says.
In the US, white supremacist-motivated violence and murders have spiked. The Anti-Defamation League reports that ideologically-motivated extremists killed at least 50 people in the US last year. All but one of those murders had at least some links to right-wing extremism; only one was blamed on Islamist extremism. The director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism says therein lies another widespread and dangerous misconception. In truth, “This threat of homegrown, far-right-wing white nationalism, terrorism and extremism is the most prominent threat,” he said. The rhetoric leaders spout matters. As another expert noted, whether intentional or not, Trump speaks the language of white supremacists when he promotes a travel ban against majority-Muslim countries, and when he repeatedly talks about an “invasion” of immigrants at the southern border.
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