SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Hate groups have been front and center ever since that deadly weekend rally in Charlottesville.
With a rally scheduled for San Francisco in a little over a week, KRON4 wanted to know how things stack up in the Bay Area when it comes to hate groups.
“It does happen within our region, and they are active here, and they are looking to increase their ranks,” Anti-Defamation League Pacific Region Director Seth Brysk said.
Brysk says while overall membership in hate groups remains small, it continues to grow even in the Bay Area.
“White supremacists are feeling emboldened,” Brysk said. “They feel that their message is being heard. They seek the kind of confrontation that they were able to have in Charlottesville as a way to legitimize some of their claims.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists 79 hate groups in California and Brysk says one of them out of Sacramento not only took part in Charlottesville but has been active in the Bay Area
“We see it in flyering by the Traditional Worker’s Party, which is one of the groups that took part in Charlottesville,” Brysk said. “They flyered on the campus of San Francisco State just this last semester. All of these white supremacist groups have made an unprecedented effort to engage in recruitment on college campuses across the country.”
Brysk says the rally in Charlottesville not only shows the new look of the alt-right, dress shirts and khakis instead of skinheads and sheets, but it stands apart from rallies in the past because a dozen extremist groups set aside their differences and came together to create the largest gathering of white supremacists in over a decade.
“It is dangerous,” Brysk said. “It’s a great concern when you have these groups that are responsible for the overwhelming majority of murders that have occurred in the name of extremism and in the name of these extreme ideologies have come from this type of right-wing white supremacist, white nationalist ideology.”WHAT OTHERS ARE CLICKING ON:
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