The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) annual Year in Hate report detailed the rise in white nationalist and neo-Nazi media outlets and figures in 2016 during now-President Donald Trump’s campaign. The report noted that Trump’s run “electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country.”

Since the inauguration, white nationalist and neo-Nazi media outlets and figures have openly celebrated Trump and many of his appointments and policies, just as they did during the 2016 campaign. Rather than renounce their support, Trump and his team have had repeated, disturbing interactions with white nationalists, such as engaging with them on Twitter and giving them press credentials.

The SPLC’s 2016 Year in Hate report detailed how “Trump’s run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country.” One faction of that group, according to the report, is the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, which became the “top hate site in America.” During the campaign, Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin said that “Jews, Blacks and lesbians will be leaving America if Trump gets elected … This alone is enough reason to put your entire heart and soul into supporting this man.” In April, Anglin said the “hoax” Holocaust memorial in Berlin should be replaced “with a statue of Hitler 1,000 feet tall”:

The reaction to Trump’s victory by the radical right was ecstatic. “Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor,” wrote Andrew Anglin, who runs the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. “Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were not for us, it wouldn’t have been possible.” Jared Taylor, a white nationalist who edits a racist journal, said that “overwhelmingly white Americans” had shown they were not “obedient zombies” by choosing to vote “for America as a distinct nation with a distinct people who deserve a government devoted to that people.”

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Several new and energetic groups appeared last year that were almost entirely focused on Trump and seemed to live off his candidacy. They included Identity Evropa, a campus-oriented group based in California; The Right Stuff, based in New York; and American Vanguard, a group with 12 chapters. And The Daily Stormer, the website whose chief came up with the term “Our Glorious Leader” for Trump, expanded into real-world activism by starting 31 “clubs.” In July, it became the most visited hate site on the Internet, surpassing longtime hate leader Stormfront.

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Aside from the rise of Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer site and its real-world “clubs” — new chapters that profited directly from the Trump phenomenon — the year on the neo-Nazi scene was marked by a number of attempts to build new coalitions among groups. Several of them, like the Coalition of Aryan Organizations and the United Aryan Front, collapsed almost as quickly as they appeared.

The report also addressed Trump’s mainstreaming of racist and far-right media, including credentialing white nationalist figures for his events and hiring former Breitbart head Stephen Bannon as White House chief strategist. SPLC labeled Breitbart as a “far-right media outlet known for promoting the so-called ‘alternative right,’” which it noted was a “recent rebranding of white supremacy for public relations purposes”:

[Trump] kicked off the campaign with a speech vilifying Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He retweeted white supremacist messages, including one that falsely claimed that black people were responsible for 80% of the murders of whites. He credentialed racist media personalities even while barring a serious outlet like The Washington Post, went on a radio show hosted by a rabid conspiracy theorist named Alex Jones, and said that Muslims should be banned from entering the country. He seemed to encourage violence against black protesters at his rallies, suggesting that he would pay the legal fees of anyone charged as a result.

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Most remarkable of all was his choice as chief strategic adviser of Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, a far-right media outlet known for promoting the so-called “alternative right” — fundamentally, a recent rebranding of white supremacy for public relations purposes, albeit one that de-emphasizes Klan robes and Nazi symbols in favor of a more “intellectual” approach. With Bannon’s appointment, white nationalists felt they had a man inside the White House.

According to the report, Ku Klux Klan groups “received a great deal of media attention" during the campaign, "due largely to the fact that many of their leaders backed Donald Trump’s candidacy.” The report continued that the increased media attention emboldened “America’s best known (former) Klan leader” David Duke to “launch his latest bid for political office”:

Klan groups last year received a great deal of media attention, due largely to the fact that many of their leaders backed Donald Trump’s candidacy. David Duke, easily America’s best known (former) Klan leader, spoke repeatedly of his support for Trump, saying at one point, “I’m overjoyed to see Donald Trump and most Americans embrace most of the issues that I’ve championed for years.”



Trump at first declined to denounce or disavow Duke, saying, falsely, that he did not know anything about him. (In fact, Trump had written in a 2000 New York Times op-ed that he abandoned his exploration of a presidential bid with the Reform Party that year because of Duke and two fellow extremists who were involved with the party.) But in the end, pressed by the media, he weakly disavowed Duke.



Nevertheless, Duke took advantage of the media attention he received to launch his latest bid for political office. Last July, he announced his run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.). But he lost badly in the open November primary, coming in seventh with 3% of the vote, or 58,581 votes.