,

As the coronavirus continues to spread, we are guided by our concern for the health and safety of our staff and the communities we serve, including you.

During this challenging time, we are committed more than ever to continuing our fight for justice and pushing back against those exploiting this pandemic to further their radical agenda.

As you already know, white nationalism and antisemitism are on the rise. We’ve just released our 2019 Year in Hate and Extremism report, which identifies active hate groups operating across the United States, further confirming this alarming trend. During the third year of the Donald Trump presidency, hate group numbers have remained at high levels — 940 in 2019.

Our investigators found that in 2019, the number of white nationalist hate groups rose for the second straight year — representing a 55 percent increase since 2017, the year Trump took office. We also found a 43 percent increase in the number of anti-LGBTQ hate groups — the fastest-growing sector of hate.

While the current health crisis is forcing us to change how we go about our work, we’re still ramping up our efforts to defund, delegitimize and dismantle hate groups by:

• Holding hate groups accountable in court, as we did in our successful case against neo-Nazi leader Andrew Anglin, whose followers terrorized a Jewish woman and her family.
• Working in coalition with organizations through Change the Terms to push internet companies like Facebook, PayPal, Twitter and others to protect members of targeted communities by preventing hate groups from using their digital platforms to raise money, recruit members and spread racist propaganda.
• Equipping educators with the tools and resources needed to help them counter white nationalist recruitment in middle and high schools across the country through our Teaching Tolerance project.

We hope you’ll take a few minutes to read our report and view our 2019 interactive hate map. Working together, we will turn back this rising tide of hate and extremism.

Sincerely,

Your friends at the SPLC