Univision’s Jorge Ramos would have his viewers believe that the election of Donald Trump has brought with it an alarming rise in hate groups throughout the country, led by a menacing Ku Klux Klan.
That’s why more than six months after the 2016 presidential election, Ramos is still repeating on his Sunday show (Al Punto, May 7, 2017) a segment of his signature October 2016 get-out-the-vote documentary, Hate Rising, featuring his interview with a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Introducing his five-and-a-half-minute interview with the KKK leader to his viewers, Ramos ominously raises the specter of a rising tide of hate throughout the land.
JORGE RAMOS, HOST, AL PUNTO: The number of racist or hate groups in the country increased from 892 in 2015 to 917 in 2016. Last year, while filming a documentary on racism in this country, I interviewed a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas.
What Ramos doesn’t tell his viewers, however, is that the annual report of the highly controversial source he cites, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) - released more than two months ago - reveals that the number of Ku Klux Klan groups in the country experienced a devastating 32% decline last year, falling from 190 chapters in 2015 to 130 in 2016.
Ramos also neglected to point out that the number of SPLC-reported hate groups in the United States in 2016 was also down by nearly a hundred from its historic reported high of 1,018 in 2011.
And don’t even begin to carefully examine all the groups the SPLC now classifies as “hate groups” in the United States, as the whole house of cards propping up the ‘Hate Rising’ narrative really starts to crater. The SPLC itself admits that driving the nominal growth of 25 additional ‘hate groups’ in the U.S. between 2015 and 2016 were groups listed in the “anti-Muslim” category, which grew by 67 from 2015 to 2016.
Most of the “hate” groups in the U.S. classified by the SPLC as “anti-Muslim”, however, such as ACT for America, the Center for Security Policy and Jihad Watch, would counter that they are the ones actually fighting the single greatest menace of hate in our day – that of radical Islamic terrorism – which among other horrific acts throughout the world perpetrated the worst hate attack on American soil since 9/11, killing 49 people in a single attack in Orlando, Florida last June.
Equally galling to tens of millions of Americans is that the SPLC also classifies as ‘hate groups’ all kinds of other organizations that either simply uphold traditional Christian standards of sexual morality and the institution of marriage (such as the Ruth Institute, the American Family Association, the World Congress of Families and the Family Research Council), advocate on behalf of religious freedom (such as the Alliance Defending Freedom) or as much as simply favor the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws (Center for Immigration Studies, Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Immigration Reform Law Institute, among others).
As to the KKK, in a 2016 report titled "Tattered Robes: The State of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States” the much more credible Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that the nation’s premier historic hate group is currently only a small shadow of its former self, down to around 30 groups and 3,000 members nationwide.
"What remains of the Klan is a collection of mostly small and disjointed groups that have difficulty in recruiting members and even maintaining any semblance of long-term stability," said the ADL’s Allison Padilla-Goodman. "Few longstanding groups still exist. Even those aren't very healthy." And those are the people Jorge Ramos decided to seek out and hang around with last year, to advance his twisted agenda.
Below is the transcript of the referenced portion of the report, which aired during the May 7, 2017, edition of Al Punto.
JORGE RAMOS, HOST, AL PUNTO: The number of racist or hate groups in the country increased from 892 in 2015 to 917 in 2016. Last year, while filming a documentary on racism in this country, I interviewed a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas.
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It is part of the United States. The documentary is called "Sembrando Odio". You can also watch it in English. It is called "Hate Rising" on Fusion.
