Though 2021 started with a deadly siege on the United States Capitol by hundreds of far-right rioters trying to overturn the presidential election results, the number of hate and anti-government groups in the U.S. declined last year for the third year in a row, according to a report released this week by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.

The SPLC counted a total of 733 hate groups last year, significantly lower than the 2018 peak of 1,021. It found that the number of anti-government groups also fell, from 566 in 2020 to 488 in 2021.

But SPLC says that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s less hate out there.

“Rather than demonstrating a decline in the power of the far right, the dropping numbers of organized hate and anti-government groups suggest that the extremist ideas that mobilize them now operate more openly in the political mainstream…

The post Why Falling Hate Group Numbers Don’t Necessarily Mean Less Hate appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.