How Trump is Radicalizing the Far-Right in America

By Maria Behan — SPOTLIGHT

For more than 100 years, the Anti-Defamation League has been tracking attacks on Jewish people, both in word and deed. At the end of 2017 — Donald Trump’s first year in office — the ADL reported the biggest spike in anti-Semitic harassment and violence it had ever seen: a 57 percent surge. Last Saturday, that rising hatred erupted in the single deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history. Eleven people were gunned down in a Pittsburgh synagogue, including a 97-year-old woman and a couple in their 80s.

Jews were not the only targets of hate crime in America last week. Another armed man tried to shoot up a black church, and when he couldn’t get in, he shot and killed two black people in a grocery store. Confronted afterward by an armed bystander in the parking lot, the murderer called out: “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.”

Prominent blacks and Jews were also among the targets of the would-be pipe bomber arrested last week, Cesar Sayoc. But the racial and religious identities of Maxine Waters, Barack Obama, and George Soros’s were probably less important than the fact that Sayoc viewed them as enemies of his hero, Donald Trump.

The three white men who perpetrated last week’s most horrifying hate crimes (and yes, there were plenty…