The number of hate groups in America grew by 4 percent last year, a bump that’s a result of racially-charged political rhetoric and organized reaction to that rhetoric from African Americans and others, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Wednesday.

In its annual Hate and Extremism Report, the Alabama-based nonprofit counted 954 groups nationally — including 75 in California — that it said spout racism, bigotry and other forms of speech that demonizes everybody from Muslims and Jews to women, gays and immigrants. More than half of the hate groups in California, 38, are in the Southern California area, the organization said.

RAM members and Trump supporters face off with protesters at a “Patriots Day” free speech rally on April 15, 2017 in Berkeley, California. More than a dozen people were arrested after fistfights broke out at a park where supporters and opponents of President Trump had gathered. (Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)

Rise Above members have boasted publicly of their violence during protests in Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley. Many of the altercations have been captured on video, and its members are not hard to spot. Above, a Trump supporter attacks a counter protestor in Huntington Beach on Saturday, March 25, 2017. Rise Above has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which released its 2017 Hate Map Wednesday, Feb. 21. been (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

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A makeshift memorial of flowers and a photo of victim, Heather Heyer, sits in Charlottesville, Va., Sunday, Aug. 13, 2017. Heyer died when a car rammed into a group of people who were protesting the presence of white supremacists who had gathered in the city for a rally. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which came out with its annual report on hate groups Wednesday, Feb. 21, said the number of neo-Nazi groups nationwide increased from 99 in 2016 to 121 in 2017. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)



Nationally, the rise in the number of hate groups was driven in part by a backlash from the Nation of Islam and other fringe black nationalist groups that have popped up in reaction to President Trump and his rhetoric, said Heidi Beirich, who oversaw the report and helps write the Southern Poverty Law Center’s blog “Hatewatch.”

But Beirich warned against conflating black nationalist groups listed as hate groups by the organization with other activist groups, such as Black Lives Matter, whose goals she described as the promotion of civil rights and the elimination of systemic racism.

Beirich suggested the Trump Administration in general, and the president’s statements in particular, have encouraged the rise of white supremacist groups.

President Trump, she said, often echoes many white supremacist goals: “A country where racism is sanctioned by the highest office, immigrants are given the boot, and Muslims are banned.”

Though the Southern Poverty Law Center and others have said similar things about Trump since he began his presidential campaign in 2016, Beirich said Wednesday that Trump continues to signal support of white supremacist ideals.

“When you consider that only days into 2018, Trump called African countries ‘shitholes,’ it’s clear he is not changing his tune,” Beirich said.

“That kind of language is music to the ears of white supremacists. It warms their cockles.”

That’s also starting to spur a counter trend.

Beirich said black nationalist groups have been able to manipulate Trump’s rhetoric, and the current polarized political environment, to spread their own reactionary ideology. Black nationalist hate groups have expanded to 223 chapters in 2017, up from 193 a year earlier. The center’s hate map puts five of these groups in Los Angeles County and one in the San Bernardino County community of Rialto.

A key difference between white supremacists and black hate groups is power. White groups, Beirch said, are gaining power; African American groups are not.

“Black nationalist groups have no supporters or influence in mainstream politics,” she said. “So while they’ve grown (in numbers) they haven’t had any influence politically.”

Within the white supremacist movement, neo-Nazi groups saw the biggest growth — from 99 groups to 121 from ’16 to ’17, while anti-Muslim groups rose from 101 to 114 during the same period.

Southern California has about a dozen of these anti-Muslim groups, led by various chapters of Act for America, a Washington D.C.-based group that characterizes Islam as a violent religion. In June, the group sponsored a March Against Sharia event in San Bernardino at the site of the 2015 terrorist attack in which a married couple who espoused Muslim extremist views killed 14 people and wounded 22 others.

A separate Southern Poverty Law Center investigation, released earlier this month, found that 43 people were killed and 67 wounded by young men associated with the alt-right over the past four years. Seventeen of the deaths came in 2017.

The report also noted an apparent shift in the nature of white supremacism — Ku Klux Klan groups fell from 130 to 72 over the past year.

The decline in KKK chapters is an indication, Beirich said, that white supremacists are rejecting the Klan’s hoods and robes “for a much hipper image of the alt right movement.”

Huntington Beach-based Rise Above Movement, or RAM as group members call themselves, listed by the center as Southern California’s newest hate group, is an example of the alt right’s re-branding effort, said Peter Simi, associate professor of sociology at Chapman University whose has extensively researched white supremacist groups.

“They’re kind of a hybrid group whose members are able to blend in easily,” he said.

The group’s YouTube videos show members sweating to CrossFit style workouts, fight-training with skull masks, and engaging in activism by carrying anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist banners at rallies. One member is shown wearing a t-shirt that says: “Kill a commie for mommy.”

Simi says the videos are propaganda tools for groups like Rise Above, meant to entice young people who are looking for excitement and purpose.

The center’s report also looks into how the tech industry cracked down on hate groups last year after the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, in August. In that event, a counter protester was run over and killed, and a self-proclaimed white supremacist has been charged in that death.

Since then, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have banned accounts of prominent white supremacists and removed website domains of hate groups, canceling services such as PayPal that help hate groups raise money, Beirich said.

Despite its prolific work on hate groups and hate speech, the center has been criticized for blackballing groups such as those that are anti-immigrant or anti-LGBT. Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson is one of those vocal critics who believes the center does its labeling of both individuals and groups with a heavy hand and in a partisan manner.

“Unfortunately, very often, who gets placed on a (Southern Poverty Law Center’s) hate list is very subjective and done from the perspective of (the center’s) liberal and Democratic leanings,” Jacobson said, adding that noted conservatives and presidential candidates such as Ben Carson and Rand Paul have been featured on the center’s list of extremists.

He also questions why the center puts groups that haven’t been violent on the list.

“For groups that do not threaten violence, the use of ‘hate group’ or ‘extremist’ designations frequently are exploited as an excuse to silence speech and speakers,” he said. “It taints not only the group or person, but others who associate with them.”

Beirich maintains that the methodology the center uses to produce the Hate Map is sound and that the focus isn’t just on violent acts or crimes, but also the dissemination of hate speech. To this end, the center’s research team mines online resources, subscribes to newsletters and magazines published by these groups and looks at police reports, criminal complaints and lawsuits, she said.

Beirich said the center is fair in its labeling and has never targeted any group for being “anti-gay marriage.”

“But, we do list them for lying about gay men being pedophiles and molesting children,” she said. “We list them if they criminalize and demonize the LGBT community.”

Beirich says labeling an organization as a “hate group” is not a responsibility she takes lightly.

“There’s a lot of vetting that goes on,” she said. “Each year, a third of the groups disappear because we find they’ve folded or they’re not just active.”

Just as groups come off the list, new ones get on it. For the first, time, the center also added two male supremacy groups to the hate group list — Houston-based A Voice for Men and Return of Kings in Washington D.C.

“These groups systematically demonize women using derogatory words like ‘whores’ and ‘bitches’ to describe women,” she said. “That makes them no different than other groups that demean entire populations, such as Jews or Muslims, based on their inherent characteristics.”

Beirich said while California’s numbers are high, it is by no means “the most hateful state.”

“The reason California has the highest number of hate groups in the nation is simply because of its population,” she said. “Per capita, California is among the lowest in terms of hate activity. The region is incredibly diverse and that’s probably why you don’t find many more hate groups in the region.”

But what keeps Beirich up at night are groups like Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group, which is believed to have under 100 members nationwide, but has been linked to five murders, possibly including that of 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein of Lake Forest who was stabbed to death Jan. 3.

ProPublica reported that his accused killer, 20-year-old Samuel Woodward, trained with Atomwaffen Division in Texas. Beirich said what makes these types of groups dangerous is the violence they perpetrate and the fact that they are difficult to track.

“They scare the bejesus out of me,” she said.