White Lives Matter will be officially listed as a hate group

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) will be listing White Lives Matter as a hate group the next time they update their hate map, which tracks the activity of hate groups around the United States.

“I can’t speak to how many chapters will be listed, but it’s clear that the leadership of the group, the ends of the group ― it’s just a flat-out white supremacist group,” Heidi Beirich, director of the center’s Intelligence Report, told the media. “The ideology behind it, the racist leaders, everything about it is racist.”

White Lives Matter has been making headlines, with the group going so far as to send armed protesters to an NAACP office in Houston. Once they were there, they waved Confederate flags.

See Also: Philadelphia city councilman attends “White Lives Matter” rally

“Their organizations and their people are shooting people based on the color of their skin,” White Lives Matter member Ken Reed stated. “We’re not.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, the protest was organized by the Aryan Renais­sance Soci­ety, which is known to be a white supremacist organization.

“Dur­ing the August 21 protest, the ARS sym­bol, a light­ning bolt and a runic sym­bol, was vis­i­ble on the group’s ‘white lives mat­ter’ ban­ner and on white shirts worn by some of the dozen or so par­tic­i­pants. Their mes­sage also included a sign read­ing ‘14 words,’ a ref­er­ence to the most pop­u­lar white suprema­cist slo­gan in the world: ‘We must secure the exis­tence of our peo­ple and a future for white children.’

According to the SPLC, one of the leaders of White Lives Matter is Rebecca Barnette, a woman from Tennessee who also happens to be the vice president of the women’s division of the racist skinhead group Aryan Strikeforce. That is not the only racist movement she has been involved in; she was also part of the National Socialist Movement, the country’s biggest neo-Nazi group.

Now, White Lives Matter will join those groups on the SPLC hate map.

“We are listing them because they are clearly white supremacists,” Beirich said. “Their motto should be ‘only white lives matter.’”

White mayor refuses to remove ‘Black Lives Matter’ banner from City Hall, angers police union

There are some who have said that Black Lives Matter should also be on the hate map, but the SPLC disagrees.

“There’s no doubt that some protesters who claim the mantle of Black Lives Matter have said offensive things, like the chant ‘pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon’ that was heard at one rally. But before we condemn the entire movement for the words of a few, we should ask ourselves whether we would also condemn the entire Republican Party for the racist words of its presumptive nominee ― or for the racist rhetoric of many other politicians in the party over the course of years.”

The update to the hate map will be completed in February.