Shocking new data shows we can’t stop fighting hate

If you ever needed a reminder that we can’t turn a blind eye to hate, new data from the Anti-Defamation League should more than do the trick.

White supremacist propaganda hit an all-time high across the country in 2022, even as antisemitic propaganda more than doubled from the year before.

The civil rights group tallied 6,751 incidents in 2022, up from the 4,876 incidents nationwide in 2021. That’s a 38% year-over-year increase nationwide, according to the ADL.

So you’d think that there’d be pretty widespread agreement that this kind of stuff is repugnant and has no place in a civil society, right? Tell that to those who think the Black Lives Matter movement is racist and a hate group.

In reality, the decade-old movement has been spectacularly successful, as the Brookings Institution notes, at reframing out national conversation around matters of racial equity and justice. And, as you might imagine, that makes it an easy target for those with a vested interest in preserving the status quo.

Like who, you might ask?

Well, in this case, the fish rots from the head.

In July 2020, former President Donald Trump called the movement “a symbol of hate,” according to CNN, even as he opposed the renaming of military installations that bore the names of Confederate soldiers (which actually were monuments to racism), and slammed a plan at the time to paint the words "Black Lives Matter" in front of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. By then, the movement’s name had already been painted on a street near the White House.

“Maybe our GREAT Police, who have been neutralized and scorned by a mayor who hates & disrespects them, won’t let this symbol of hate be affixed to New York’s greatest street. Spend this money fighting crime instead!” raged Trump, who had notably referred to white nationalists as “very fine people.”

The anti-BLM cudgel was picked up by the Trump-friendly right-wing media, as The Guardian’s Nesrine Malik wrote in 2020, taking a movement that “depicted solidarity with the victims of racial injustice,” and cementing it into a “threat.”

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