How the Trump and Right-Wing Media Hate Virus Spreads

The politics of hate are cheap, easy, and effective, but
generally modern American politicians haven’t employed them because history has
shown how societally destructive they can be. Until, that is, Trump
explicitly embraced white supremacy and white “Christian” nationalism, and the
entire GOP chose to repeat the horrors that corresponded with the resurgent
rise of the Klan in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Hate crimes in America had been on a steady decline starting in
the 1990s, when the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program began collecting data on
them, with the exception of bumps in anti-Muslim hate after the 1995 Oklahoma
City bombing (initially misattributed to Muslim terrorists) and 9/11.

That continuous (with the exception of those two transient
bumps) 25-year decline in hate crimes came to a screeching halt in 2015, when
Donald Trump began his
campaign of hatred, demonizing immigrants, Muslims, and Black
people.