It hasn’t even been a week since Donald Trump won the presidential election, but reports of hate incidents are already “off the charts.”
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a non-profit organization that tracks hate groups and hate crimes, more than 300 incidents of “hateful harassment and intimidation” have been reported since Election Day. That is reportedly roughly the amount they usually see in a five to six-month period.
“Since Donald Trump won the election we’ve seen an alarming number of hate-based incidents occur throughout the nation, some of which are no doubt stemming from Trump’s hate-filled campaign,” read a statement from the SPLC sent to ThinkProgress. “We’ve collected more than 315 such incidents since the election — truly a frightening number.”
“We’ve collected more than 315 such incidents since the election — truly a frightening number.”
The 2016 election season had already seen unprecedented spikes in Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant fervor, but now experts say the period following the election amounts to the worst surge of hateful violence since the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, when Muslim communities across the country were subject to record levels of assault, intimidation, and harassment.
The surge was corroborated by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which told USA Today that they have been inundated with reports of anti-Muslim vitriol.
“We already had been worse based on the fact that Donald Trump had mainstreamed Islamophobia … and this was just taking it off the charts,” Ibrahim Hooper, a CAIR spokesman, told USA Today.
According to SPLC data, the vast majority of the claims — roughly 100 — were classified as “anti-black” or “anti-immigrant.” The next highest percentage belonged to “anti-Muslim” incidents, of which more than 20 were reported since last Tuesday.
The stories behind the numbers tell an even darker story. Since Tuesday, several Muslim women have reported having their hijabs manhandled or even forcibly removed by people who made comments about Donald Trump. In Redding, California, a student recorded himself handing out fake deportation letters to students of color, and a sign promoting a Spanish-language mass at a Episcopal church was vandalized with the slogan “Trump Nation Whites Only.” An LGBT-affirming church in Blossom, Indiana was defaced with swastikas and slogans such as “Heil Trump” and “Fag church.”