In this week’s roundup: The Hate Report isn’t going to be weekly anymore, so we can focus even more on original reporting.
After nearly two years of delivering The Hate Report to your inbox every Friday, we’ve decided to change things up.
We’ll be moving away from the weekly format of some curation from other sources and some original reporting. Instead, we’re going to spend more time researching our own original stories and send out The Hate Report periodically when those stories are ready.
We launched The Hate Report as America was waking up to a new era of hate. There were increasing hate attacks, and we were just beginning to understand the alt-right. We wanted to get ourselves and our readers up to speed on an urgent story.
Now, two years later, hate certainly isn’t going away. Neither is our investigative reporting on it. But we’ve all begun to understand the contours of the story better. There are scores of reporters on the story. And we think our energy is best spent focusing on new, original investigations.
One of the things we’re most proud of is the formation of the Hate Sleuths, a crack team of newsletter subscribers who volunteer their time to help us research. We’ll still keep that team going and already have them tracking down potential stories.
We’re going to dig into data sets, rake through the internet’s darkest corners and file Freedom of Information Act requests to discover the hidden truths about the hate movement, before they explode out into the open in the form of violence harassment or discrimination. In short, we’ll be aiming to do the sort of impactful journalism Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting does best.
So you’ll have to wait for your dose of The Hate Report, but our hope is that when we bring you something to read, it will be a breaking news story or a more in-depth investigation that will shed light on new issues or controversies.
It’s worth remembering what the world was like when we launched in 2017.
The country had a new president who brought with him a cadre of advisers with deep connections with the world of white nationalism, from alt-right architect Steve Bannon to infamous Islamophobe and anti-Semite-supporter Sebastian Gorka. Reports of hate crimes were spiking across the country, while President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant vitriol and tough-guy nationalism was emboldening a new generation of hate.
It was in this atmosphere, in which hate seemed to be both growing in scale and moving closer to the center of American discourse, that we decided to start The Hate Report to chronicle this tumultuous period in the country’s history. We wanted to both catalogue and understand the movements driving hate-fueled attacks, covering a beat that, at the time, was sparsely written about.
We began by collecting and documenting hate crimes from around the country and looking at how that violence connected to the organized hate movement. A few months after our launch, Charlottesville happened. Seemingly overnight, America began to fully wake up to the threat posed by hate-filled young men loosely affiliated with the alt-right movement.
In the 18 months since then, the alt-right has shaken and sputtered. Figureheads of the movement have found themselves ostracized by the same big tech companies that helped them blossom. Lawsuits and prosecutions have bitten deep into the movement.
Over the same period, coverage and investigation of America’s extremists has flourished. News organizations from The Washington Post to NBC News have devoted increasing time and resources to understanding the underbelly of hate in America.
And we’ve done our part, too, from detailing Trump’s role as instigator-in-chief of hate attacks to hounding neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin and building a team of volunteer Hate Sleuths who already have helped us break two stories.
We’ll need your help. We’re still looking for more volunteers to join our team of Hate Sleuths, and this work will become more important than ever. Want to see your hard work or smart sleuthing turn into a major news story? Sign up here.
Still need a weekly/daily/hourly dose of hate reporting? Follow these folks
The past two years have seen an explosion in great reporting about hate in America.
Reporters have taken up coverage of white supremacy as their dedicated beat, and hate researchers have gained new insight into the toxic political environment fueling hate.
And if you’re looking for people to follow online to get a sense of the daily ebbs and flows of the white supremacist ecosystem, here are some of the people we’ve been reading and following each week to bring you The Hate Report:
- HuffPost reporter Andy Campbell
- One People’s Project Executive Director Daryle Lamont Jenkins
- George Washington University Program on Extremism fellow J.J. MacNab
- HuffPost reporter Chris Mathias
- Southern Poverty Law Center correspondent David Neiwert
- Free Radical Project founder Christian Picciolini
- Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism senior researcher Mark Pitcavage
- VICE News Tonight correspondent Elle Reeve
- New York Times and Rolling Stone contributor Janet Reitman
- ProPublica reporter Ken Schwencke
- “American Hate” author Arjun Sethi
- Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer
- ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson
- Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill
Give them a follow! And we’ll be back soon with the next new-and-improved Hate Report.
Sign up to get The Hate Report by email.
Have a hate incident to report? Tell us about it here, or contact The Hate Report team: Aaron Sankin can be reached at asankin@revealnews.org, and Will Carless can be reached at wcarless@revealnews.org. Follow them on Twitter: @asankin and @willcarless.