Police in Madrid have released a woman who reportedly first insulted an actor as a “black piece of sh*t” before slamming him in the face with a beer bottle, reports El Pais. According to the report, the woman who was not identified other than being from El Salvador, reportedly became upset when African actor Marius Makon — who goes by the stage name of Elton Prince — walked up to the counter to order coffee, only to have the woman confront him and say, “I don’t want black people in this place or in front of me.”

Students viciously bully black teen as a ‘monkey’ in racist video — and school looks the other way

A family in Illinois is suing their local high school for allegedly doing nothing serious to discipline students who subjected their son to racist bullying. The Peoria Journal-Star reports that the Metamora Township High School is being sued by a black student’s family because it didn’t take sufficient action against four white students who sent the black student a racist video. According to the lawsuit, the white students in the video told the black student that they “used to own you back in the day,” while making it clear that they were talking about black people; held up a stuffed monkey toy and said that, “This is a black person, right here”; and told the black student to “go back where you came from.”

Kansas racist insults and spits on black preschooler at Hooters — and then tells cops ‘It’s OK, I’m a fireman’

Kansas firefighter reportedly spat on a black child and hurled racial slurs at a restaurant — and then tried to assure police he was on their side. The preschool-age boy wandered away from a family birthday party Monday evening at Hooters restaurant in Overland Park, and the man spit on the child and called him a racial slur after a family member came to get the boy, reported KCTV-TV. “He basically said get that little ‘blank’ up off the floor,” a witness told the TV station. “The N-word started to get thrown around.”

Massachusetts cop who opened fire on black ATV driver caught making shocking racist comments online

A Massachusetts State Police trooper who fired his weapon at an off-road vehicle driver during a wild confrontation has a history of posting racist content on an online forum for law enforcement officers. Trooper Matthew Sheehan fired his service rifle Saturday during an encounter on Interstate 93 between state police and up to three dozen motorcycle and ATV riders, reported the Boston Globe. ... The Globe reported that Sheehan posted messages of support and racist commentary under the name “Big Irish” on the website MassCops. “Note to f*cking scumbags!” Sheehan posted in July 2012 after a state trooper shot and killed a man who allegedly drove toward him. “‘You try and run us over and you will die!!!! Good shoot ALL DAY LONG!!!!!!!”

And it’s not just about black people. For instance:

Neo-Nazi ‘Atomwaffen’ group celebrates member for allegedly murdering gay student

Late last month, ProPublica reported that the California man accused of killing a gay and Jewish University of Pennsylvania student was an avowed neo-Nazi and a member of Atomwaffen Division, one of the country’s most notorious extremist groups. The news about the murder suspect, Samuel Woodward, spread quickly throughout the U.S., and abroad. Woodward was accused of fatally stabbing 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein and burying his body in an Orange County park.

Fox News executive suggests ‘darker, gayer’ Olympians will be bad at sports

Fox News occasionally tries to play down its innate racism and homophobia. This week, Fox News executive editor and executive vice president John Moody took the gloves off. Even though the U.S. Olympic team remains overwhelmingly white and straight, Moody attacked the team and said this year's group of "'darker, gayer, different" athletes will let the country down. "Unless it's changed overnight, the motto of the Olympics, since 1894, has been 'Faster, Higher, Stronger,'" he wrote. "It appears the U.S. Olympic Committee would like to change that to 'Darker, Gayer, Different.' If your goal is to win medals, that won't work."

He’s been a gay Republican for 22 years — but the Alabama GOP barred him from running for sheriff

Jason White is a decorated former police detective who served on the Athens, Alabama force for 22 years. He’s also been a Republican for 22 years, since he was 18. White now wants to run for Sheriff of Limestone County, as a Republican – which he did once before – but this time the local GOP won’t let him run as a Republican. White is gay, and thinks that’s the reason he’s being barred. The Limestone County Republican Party had him fill out a questionnaire which asked if he believed in “traditional marriage.” He says local Republican officials met for two hours to debate his application, then called him to tell him he could not run as a Republican.

Now some may argue these are all isolated incidents, and nothing more than should be expected. They might argue it’s unfair to take a bunch of events over a long period of time and put them together to make things look like this type of thing is becoming fairly common whether it’s in Florida, Kansas, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Utah, Oregon, Indiana, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Alabama, California, on Fox News, in Spain, or in Canada.

Except that the majority of this selection of events all took place in the last few weeks. The oldest event listed here happened in November 2017.

Going beyond the gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, or appearances by Richard Spencer or Milo Yiannopoulos at college campuses across the country, what used to be something that was just too outrageous for someone to say out loud, what used to be too disgusting for them to do to other people whether they are black, or gay, or transgender, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Mexican: those things are becoming accepted.

People are flaunting their bigotry. They’re proud of it. Basking in it. And they have been for a while now.

The number of hate crimes in 2016 was 6,121 - about a 5% jump from 2015. About half of those incidents were motivated by race, the agency says. The latest statistics are based on voluntary reporting from nearly 16,000 US law enforcement agencies. The FBI did not give a reason for a rise in reported hate crimes. "No person should have to fear being violently attacked because of who they are, what they believe, of how they worship," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement on Monday. Mr Sessions added that he would await a Department of Justice Crime Reduction and Public Safety task force report to determine what actions should be taken to address the increase.

And naturally, this trend has been noted by the SPLC.

As we feared, the FBI’s hate crime report for 2016 shows a second straight year of increases – the first time that’s happened in a decade. It means that in the last two years, the number of reported hate crimes has risen by nearly 12 percent. Government studies show that the actual number of hate crimes may be as high as 250,000 – more than 40 times the 6,121 incidents that the FBI reports for 2016. But the FBI figures do serve as a rough barometer for what’s occurring in our country. The significant increase over the last two years coincides with Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic campaign and its immediate aftermath. We reported a surge in hate crimes and other bias-related incidents – many of them carried out in Trump’s name – in the days after the election. The new FBI report confirms our findings, showing a 25 percent rise during the final three months of 2016. The FBI report also shows that hate crimes targeting Muslims have doubled in the past two years. This is a group, of course, that was repeatedly demonized by Trump, who during the campaign promised a “complete and total shutdown” of Muslims entering the country.

It should be pointed out that the FBI reports are based on voluntary reporting by various police departments around the country, and they are notoriously lax in sharing all the information they have. Thousands of local police departments report literally nothing at all.

Hillsboro is one of nearly 2,800 city police and county sheriff's departments across the country that did not submit a single hate crime report for the FBI's annual crime tally during the past six years, an investigation by The Associated Press found. That's about 17 percent of all city and county law enforcement agencies nationwide. Advocates worry that the lack of a comprehensive, annual accounting disguises the extent of bias crimes at a time of heightened racial, religious and ethnic tensions. The nation was stunned last June when nine black parishioners were shot dead at a Charleston, South Carolina, church, in an attack labeled a hate crime, and community groups have reported a notable increase in violence against Muslims and mosques in the wake of last year's terror acts in Paris and San Bernardino, California. Gay and transgender people also are regular targets.

So when the SPLC says that instead of 6,000 incidents per year we may really be dealing with 250,000, they may have a good point. Also, the departments that aren’t reporting these incidents may be exactly the places where police are less likely to address the situation, and hence those acting out in this way may tend to feel empowered by the lack of police response, creating a cycle of permissiveness and escalation.

Now can we attribute all of this to Trump and his own behavior?

Perhaps.

But people didn’t just suddenly wake up on January 20, 2017 and have these feelings and attitudes. Maybe they’v had them all their lives, or maybe some of this is just backlash against Obama.