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Friend,
Five years have passed since white supremacists from across the country converged in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the city’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
The vision of an estimated 1,000 white nationalists marching at night with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us!” is seared into our memories from the first day. On the second day, the “Unite the Right” rally turned violent and deadly, as extremists fought in the streets with counterprotesters. A car driven by a neo-Nazi sympathizer plowed into a group of peaceful counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more.
Now – five years after Charlottesville, 19 months after the deadly Jan. 6 insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol and three months before pivotal 2022 midterm elections – the danger posed by the mainstreaming of extremist beliefs and the threat of political violence is clear and present. It is a good time to chart the progress that’s been made, as well as the setbacks.
Setbacks since Charlottesville
- Far-right extremism has been mainstreamed
The attempt to bring white nationalist ideas into the mainstream that manifested in Charlottesville has continued unabated – and has perhaps accelerated. An alarming number of leading elected officials now embrace the movement’s false conspiracy theories and promote former President Donald Trump’s lie that he lost the 2020 election only because of massive voter fraud engineered by Democrats.
Though the mainstreaming of far-right extremism certainly did not begin with Trump’s presidency, there is no doubt that his racist, antisemitic and xenophobic words and actions helped create a permissive climate for hate. For example, we saw a dramatic spike in violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community following Trump’s vilifying language at rallies and at news conferences about the spread of COVID-19, calling it “Wuhan flu” and “Chinese virus.” Earlier, soon after the 2016 election, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented what we called the “Trump Effect” across the country – a surge of incidents involving racial slurs and symbols, bigotry and the harassment of Black and Brown children in the nation’s schools during and after Trump’s campaign.
- Increased threat of political violence
The SPLC’s annual Year in Hate and Extremism report, released in March, documented a third straight year of declines in the number of hate and antigovernment extremist groups operating across the U.S. We concluded, however, that the threat from these groups was not actually diminishing; rather, extremist ideas were now embraced more openly in the mainstream, increasing the threat of politically motivated violence.
We saw this play out starkly on Jan. 6, 2021. Dozens of members of hate groups have been arrested in association with the Capitol attack. The vast majority of people who took part in the insurrectionist violence, however, were not associated with a specific extremist group, demonstrating just how deeply hate and antigovernment narratives have penetrated the political right.
A recent poll jointly conducted by the SPLC and Tulchin Research provided more evidence. We found that the white nationalist “great replacement” narrative, which apparently motivated the alleged white supremacist who murdered 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York – as well as numerous other domestic terrorists – has become thoroughly absorbed into mainstream politics. In fact, two-thirds of Republican respondents in our survey agreed with the statement that the country’s demographic changes are being orchestrated by “liberal leaders actively trying to leverage political power by replacing more conservative white voters.”
In addition, more than a third of respondents said the country’s changing demographics are a threat to white Americans and their culture and values. Twenty percent think threatening a politician is acceptable, and nearly a quarter of respondents approve of assassinating “a politician who is harming our country or democracy.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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