The revolution is bigger than Trump …

The American public is even angrier now than before.  

I’m not talking about the people who dominate the news – like the NFL players taking a knee, the Black Lives Matter activists, or the illegal immigrants demanding amnesty. For all their bluster and high media profile, they are a tiny, somewhat irrelevant part of the public. 

No, I’m talking about ordinary working-class Americans: those who have always worked for a living, tried to do the right thing, and taken care of themselves and their families.

You know, the middle-class folk politicians always promise they will help, but are conveniently ignored after every election. They have every right to be angry. And they are.     

They see the rich getting richer, the poor living a comfortable lifestyle with essentially free healthcare and food stamps, and the most vocal complainers being rewarded. At the same time, their own lives are getting harder: healthcare premiums are soaring, their deductibles are so high as to make insurance practically unusable, and the costs to feed their families are rising faster than their paychecks. If they complain about the fairness of this, they are labeled heartless bigots and racists. 

To add insult to injury, just about everything they’ve always believed in – family, faith, personal responsibility, love of country, honor, and respect for others – is routinely ridiculed.   

They blame both parties – the Democrats for continuing to focus on meaningless symbolism over substance; the Republicans for accomplishing absolutely nothing with their majorities in Congress and a sort-of Republican in the White House.  

All they see is non-stop bickering and name-calling from elected politicians on both sides of the aisle. They also sense a government bureaucracy increasingly out of control, playing favorites, leaking classified material to wound adversaries, and acting in its own self-interest. They don’t trust the media. They don’t trust our own intelligence agencies. They don’t trust our lower courts. 

Antifa activists are beating people with whom they disagree. Public universities are shutting down free speech. Cities are passing laws to make it illegal for their police to enforce Federal immigration laws.  It’s against the law now in many jurisdictions just to ask if someone is a citizen. Statues and monuments are being vandalized. Cities are removing other statues because someone might be offended. Public schools, roads, and parks are being renamed to spare the feelings of some groups aggrieved by the actions of somebody more than a century or more ago.

Movie actors, entertainers, and other celebrities are openly calling for the assassination of a sitting President, as are some elected officials, to cheers.  Professional athletes – and some team owners – are refusing to stand for our national anthem at games. And the media love all that.  

In the public’s mind, it’s a complete breakdown of order. It’s chaos.

And chaos inevitably leads to revolution. 

It’s been years in the making and it’s here. Now. 

That’s how Trump got elected, folks. That, and because Hillary represented everything the public hated about the political establishment and its mismanagement of the country. 

I can’t understand why so many people still don’t get it.  Particularly the Republican establishment.  You would think they would.  An unqualified outsider with no political experience beat not only the ultimate establishment Democrat, but every single other Republican primary candidate supported by the Republican establishment.  

If that didn’t send a message, I don’t know what will.     

Then there’s the election of Roy Moore over incumbent Luther Strange in the Alabama runoff. Bible-thumping, 10-Commandment-quoting, gun-toting Moore trounced Strange – the darling of the Republican establishment that spent $9 million supporting him. The Republican establishment even persuaded Trump to fly down and do a get-out-the-vote-for-Strange event. 

It didn’t make any difference.  Strange lost to Moore by 9-10 points.

That’s a message. When even Trump can’t stop the onslaught against a nominal incumbent, you have to realize the Republican primaries leading up to 2018 are going to be a bloodbath for establishment Republicans.  Frankly, I don’t think the Democrat incumbents are going to have it any easier, either – they have their own revolution underway from the far left of their party.

We’re already seeing some “moderate” Republicans in the Senate announce they’re retiring at the end of their terms. Expect more to do the same. They see the writing on the wall: they know they would face tough primaries from anti-establishment challengers and could very well lose. 

The sentiment of voters is decidedly against incumbents from either party.    

Most of this is because the American public now sees chaos in virtually every aspect of our society. Whether it’s attacks on fundamental rights such as free speech, attacks on religious liberty, physical attacks on police just trying to do their jobs, and attacks on American symbols such as the flag and our national anthem, it’s too much for many ordinary Americans.

It’s not that they want to return to the 1950s – Hell, most of them don’t even know what life was like in the 1950s. It’s simply that they want some sense of order and direction. 

They aren’t getting either from establishment politicians. 

They see elected politicians continue to skirt the issues the public actually cares about, like putting an end to the chaos, in favor of grandstanding over meaningless crap, day after day. The public increasingly realizes that our government no longer works for the people as a whole, but instead for special-interest groups, big-money donors, and itself above all. The public also has determined that our mainstream media no longer objectively report actual news, but only what – true or not – will thrill their most polarized viewers; it’s become yellow journalism at its worst. 

Against this backdrop, ordinary working-class Americans are genuinely confused, and angry. And they are taking out their frustrations on politicians and the media alike.  

The pendulum started to swing some time ago; it's about to swing even further in 2018.

And when it does, it will swing very hard. 

I expect a lot of new faces in Congress after that.  That’s okay. 

More change is needed, and those in Congress and the government now are clearly unwilling to execute any changes.  So it's long past time for them to go. 

Please, just go away …

I concede I’ve never liked Hillary Clinton. 

I didn’t like her when she was First Lady, and Bill Clinton said we’d gotten “two for the price of one.” I didn’t like the idea of electing our own version of Juan and Eva Perón. 

Soon after, she lived down to my expectations.  It started with her secret meetings – against government rules – to plot her version of healthcare reform. It was as if she fully expected to continue the legacy of Clinton corruption and secret deals in Arkansas to Washington.  Like when, in 1978 as a novice investor with $1,000, she was able to amass $100,000 in about a year. 

She morphed into a full-blown weasel everyone could see when the Whitewater scandal broke. She hid or destroyed billing documents from her Rose Law Firm days during the Whitewater investigation.  The originals were never found.  Then a version of those miraculously reappeared in the White House, “discovered” by an aide in a storage area. Potential witnesses against her and Bill related to Whitewater disappeared, mysteriously died, or chose prison over testifying.

When a long line of women came forward to say Bill Clinton had sexually assaulted them, including one who claimed he brutally raped her, she dismissed them as bimbos, sluts and whores, saying “these women are trash, who will believe them.” She followed that by claiming reports of Bill’s well-documented history as a sexual predator and rapist – stretching back to his days as governor of Arkansas – were merely the result of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

She took a personal role in trying to destroy Bill’s victims, calling Gennifer Flowers, Bill’s one-time mistress, “trailer trash.” Even after Bill had to pay $850,000 to settle a suit against him from one of his victims, Paula Jones, she never let up.

She also took a personal role in firing the White House travel staff so she could give the business to a friend.  She helped her brother’s “pardon for money” scheme in the waning days of the Bill Clinton presidency that resulted in the pardon of known swindler Marc Rich. 

After leaving the White House, she said that she and Bill left “dead broke” because of all the legal expenses incurred during the investigation of Bill’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. She described Lewinsky as a “looney-tune narcissist.” Curiously, despite being “dead broke,” she and Bill soon bought a multimillion-dollar house in Chappaqua, NY.   

But she wasn’t done.  Not by a long shot. 

She sought and won a U.S. Senate seat in New York.  In the Senate, she accomplished absolutely nothing. However, she was able to start gathering more political allies. 

Meanwhile, the William J. Clinton Foundation – started by Bill in 2001 – began raking in money by the millions.  Which, apparently, the Clintons needed being so “dead broke.” It was also a great place to park the Clintons’ political cronies, pay them well, and keep them nearby. 

And also, of course, to fund Hillary’s next escapade – running for President. 

You’ll remember, she lost the nomination to Barack Obama.

That should have been the end, but nooooo … 

Obama appointed her Secretary of State. That was the golden ticket for Hillary.  She and Bill now had the means to rake in millions more by trading her approval of questionable deals for contributions to the Foundation. Contributions, I might add, from some of the most repressive regimes in the world.  She even approved the sale of a big chunk of our own uranium reserves to the Russians in exchange for a big contribution to the Foundation.   

Hillary turned the State Department into the same pay-to-play circus she and Bill had enjoyed in their halcyon days running Arkansas like an ATM. The money kept rolling in. Not just from foreign governments seeking influence – in violation of U.S. laws – but also from corporations who knew Hillary’s next move was to run for President. 

In fact, it’s been estimated that since the Foundation started, the Clintons raised more than $2 billion – that’s right, billion with a “b” – from corporations, largely as a combination of lavish (think $250,000 and up per event) speaker fees and direct contributions.

This fueled an amazing lifestyle for the once “dead broke” Clintons, and for their political allies, as well as financing Chelsea’s wedding to the son of a convicted felon.   

In Obama’s final term, Hillary predictably decided it was “her turn” to be President. She was “owed” it by Obama and the Democrat establishment, after all. She’d patiently waited her turn, was sitting on a huge pile of cash.  And she was a woman.   

She had her allies rig the rules to ensure she got the nomination, which she did. 

And then she proceeded to run perhaps the worst campaign in American history.  She had no plan. She had no policy. She had no message – except that her opponent was a sexist pig. 

And she was a woman. Standing up for women. And against sexism.  

The irony of that messaging was clearly lost on her. 

During her campaign, she also publicly dismissed roughly half the population – Trump supporters – as a “basket of deplorables.” “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that.” You could cut the arrogance with a knife. 

In the end, despite blowing off voters in the states she should have won, insulting traditional Democrat working-class voters, making light of the fact that she used an unsecured private server while she was Secretary of State – in violation of State Department policy, intentionally destroying thousands of subpoenaed e-mails, and wasting almost a billion dollars on ads that emphasized identity politics over substance, she was stunned she lost.

According to reports from those claiming to have been there on the night of the election, when she learned she lost she went to pieces, sobbing uncontrollably.  What is known for certain is that she didn’t even come out do a concession speech until the next day. 

In truth, she was such a flawed candidate – ethically and morally, and with such obvious disdain for most working-class Americans – almost anyone could have beaten her.

Even Trump with all HIS character flaws.  And he did. 

I thought, finally, that’s it.  No more Hillary. After such an embarrassing loss, she’s done.

Wrong again.   

Now she has a new book – “What happened?” The cover only has that title and her name. As one critic said, it’s the first book with both the question and answer on the cover. 

Of course, she’s blaming everyone but herself for the loss. That didn’t surprise me. 

Recently, in an NPR interview, she said she’d be open to a legal challenge to the results of the last election.  She knows, as a lawyer, there’s absolutely no way under our Constitution to overturn the results of a Presidential election. Still, she cited Kenya, where its supreme court just overturned the results of its most recent election, as precedent.

Kenya, really?  As a valid legal precedent for us to follow?  How nuts is she? 

More to the point, why am I not surprised? 

I never liked her. But I’ve now moved beyond pitying her as a pathetic, out-of-touch, entitled whiner and weasel who simply refuses to accept personal responsibility for anything.

She’s dangerously delusional.  I just wish she’d go away. 

Guilt by association …

Hitler liked Beethoven’s music.  

So do I.  Does that make me a Nazi? 

Of course not. 

Yet when David Duke – a well-known racist nutjob – said he liked Trump’s stance on illegal immigration, many on the left and the media quickly reported that as proof that Trump was a white supremacist. And a racist, too. 

When the Family Research Council – opposed to gay marriage – came out in support of Trump, the left and the media used that as proof that Trump was homophobic.  That was probably a great surprise to Trump since he publicly supported gay marriage long before Obama did.    

Last night on Tucker Carlson’s show, some flake implied the “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a symbol of racism. Why? Because this person found that Confederate sympathizers in 1931 pushed for it to become our national anthem.  Forget for a moment that it was written in 1814, and has no lyrics related to race or in support of slavery.

That’s how insane it’s become. 

Because you agree with someone on certain things does not mean you agree with them on everything. Nor does it mean they agree with you on everything, either. 

I have a friend from college who many years later fell on hard times and committed a felony – embezzlement – for which he was convicted and did time in prison.  Yet he’s still my friend, we stay in touch, and I would still do anything for him.

But that doesn’t mean I endorse what he did.  Nor does that mean I am okay with embezzlement. 

You see, having a convicted felon as a dear friend doesn’t make you one. 

Just as having a racist agree with you that puppies are cute makes you a racist. Or having a friend who thinks all gay marriage is wrong means you agree with them. Or having a business relationship with someone who is a socialist makes you one. 

Guilt by association is the last resort of those have no actual proof of your own wrongdoing. 

We’ve been down that road before with Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Committee hearings in the 1950s searching for Communists and Communist sympathizers.  Careers and reputations were destroyed in the process.  Most often with little or no proof, except by some specious association.    

It’s one of the most shameful episodes in our post-war history. 

And here we are again.  The use of guilt by association is now a common tool of the left and the media to try to destroy anyone with whom they disagree. Specifically Trump. 

When Obama was long-time pals with Bill Ayers – a cofounder of the violent Weather Underground that bombed government buildings in the 1960s – no one on the left or the media thought that meant Obama supported blowing up government facilities. When Obama followed a racist Jeremiah Wright, there was no tagging Obama as a racist because of that. 

But let some crackpot bigot say he or she thinks Trump is doing a good job, and suddenly Trump must share their looney-tune beliefs in toto. 

It’s dishonest.  And our media that report this nonsense should be ashamed.   

Waiting for the hurricane …

It’s a lot different than waiting for a snowstorm. 

With snowstorms, you can expect to be shut in for a while. Your power might go off for a bit, but you can always bundle up until power comes back on, which usually is fairly soon. 

Snowstorms are mostly predictable, too. 

Forecasters can pretty much predict with fair accuracy where and how soon snow will start falling. They’re less certain about expected snow totals at times, but when you see the snowstorm pattern on the news, you can be somewhat certain it’s coming, and possibly coming your way.

So you stock up. If you have a fireplace you bring in some wood.  And, of course, you make a run to the store for bread, milk, eggs and toilet paper. 

Now, big snowstorms can be scary.  With enough snow, roofs can collapse.  Even with a little snow, driving can be dangerous, as too many people with a 4-wheel-drive SUVs think somehow they are suddenly professional stunt drivers in a Jeep commercial. 

In contrast, hurricanes, even smaller ones, can be downright terrifying. For good reason. 

Hurricanes are wildly unpredictable. A hurricane can start as a tropical storm somewhere off Africa, gather some energy over warm water, and jump overnight from a Cat 1 to a Cat 3, 4 or 5. Depending on fronts and the jet stream a hurricane can turn and move just about anywhere, and lose or gain speed and strength. At times it can make landfall in one place, lose some energy as it moves somewhere else, cross warmer water again and regain its energy, make a giant loop and pound the first landfall all over again. 

Most of the deaths during snowstorms come from heart attacks. Most deaths from hurricanes come from drowning.  A roof can collapse during a very heavy snow. Hurricanes rip roofs off, blow buildings apart, cause windows to pop out, and turn lawn ornaments into high-velocity projectiles capable of piercing concrete blocks. 

An exceptional blizzard may have snow driven by 50-60mph winds.  The lowest level of hurricane – a Cat 1 – has winds averaging at least 75mph.

Oh, and tornados often accompany hurricanes. 

But the biggest danger from a hurricane is from flooding, especially along the coasts. Hurricanes can easily drop a foot or more of rain everywhere along their path. The circular motion of a hurricane can also pile up water offshore and then push it forward resulting in a deadly storm surge at some point.  Imagine for a moment a wall of water perhaps 10-12 feet tall, or more, suddenly headed for a coastline that’s only a few feet above sea level. That would reach the second floor of most buildings, and the roofs of one-story houses. 

It took a storm surge of 4-5 feet to cause all the damage at the Jersey shore during “superstorm” Sandy. Now mentally double that, and think of the force, and weight, of all that water. And make no mistake, water is heavy – a cubic foot of water weighs more than 62 pounds. The force of a storm surge coming in and then going out is beyond comprehension.   

Everyone who lives where there are hurricanes knows all this. Certainly, some people will die here in a hurricane because of other reasons.  But the real reason so many people in this country die during hurricanes is typically because of their own arrogance and stupidity.

There will always be those who plan to hunker down and ignore evacuation orders. They refuse to go to emergency shelters, they think because they’ve survived other hurricanes they’ll do it again, or they want to prove how tough they are. 

But there are always fewer of them after each hurricane.  Because they are dead.   

The uncertainty over a hurricane makes waiting for one – especially here in Florida – way different than waiting for a snowstorm when we lived in Pennsylvania. Snowstorms are rarely life-threatening; hurricanes are always potentially deadly. With a hurricane, you really don’t have any idea what might happen. Nor when it will arrive. Nor how powerful it will be when it gets to you. Or even if it will get anywhere near you at all. 

So all you can do is prepare for the worst. Instead of stocking up on bread, milk, eggs, and toilet paper, here you stock up on water, canned goods, paper towels and batteries and make certain your car has a full tank of gas. You fill your bathtub with water as a backup to fill your toilet tanks if the power goes out.  You move all your lawn furniture inside, along with your grill, as well as anything that could be picked up and weaponized by the wind. 

You worry whether you’ve done enough to prepare, and worry what kind of damage your home might sustain, and how long your power might be out.  That’s a lot different than wondering if your office will be open tomorrow, or whether your kid’s school will be closed.     

Most of us here have been glued to our TVs for days on end watching the path of our most recent hurricane – Irma. You’ve probably watched the lines of traffic from South Florida heading north to escape Irma. Millions have already left South Florida.

When Irma was projected to go up the east coast, people there fled further inland and some went over to the west coast. Then the projections changed, and now the storm is projected to go up the west coast. I don’t know what those people will do.  I don’t know what the people who drove up to Georgia and Alabama will do, either, since both those areas are now in Irma’s path.   

That’s the nature of hurricanes. It’s the uncertainty.   

No matter how long you’ve lived here, or how many hurricanes you’ve survived in the past, it’s important to have a healthy respect for any hurricane – present or future.

People who don’t have a lower probability of survival. 

The myth of the extreme-right threat …

I heard an assertion the other day that stunned me.

Some talking head said that far-right extremist groups – such as the KKK, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis – experience their greatest growth when Republicans are in power.  They added that their numbers appear to decline when Democrats hold the reins of power.

Huh?

Now mind you, this was said with complete sincerity. The point they were trying to make was that far-right extremists feel more emboldened under Republicans.

So since we now have a Republican President, a Republican majority in Congress, and Republican domination of state governorships and legislatures, that’s supposed to explain why we’re seeing more violence from the extreme far right, more public displays of right-wing hatred and bigotry, and an increase in reported hate crimes against minorities.     

I have a different take. 

I think the perceived difference in the numbers of far-right extremist groups – and how their activities are described – under Republicans versus Democrats is largely the result of what our media choose to cover.  I also believe, and the numbers will likely bear me out, that there are not significantly more Klan members, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists in America now than ever before; if anything, there’s likely fewer. But they get more media coverage.

The question is why?       

When Democrats are in power, the media tend to dismiss the extreme right-wingers as tiny clusters of stupid, ill-informed clowns so far out of the mainstream they are a joke – which they are and have been for years. The media prefer pushing a narrative, bordering on propaganda, that the liberal progressive agenda supported by Democrats is wildly popular, here and abroad.

That narrative of how popular the progressive agenda is here and abroad is questioned if significant numbers of people show up to oppose it, as the Tea Party did and the Brexit movement in the UK did. When that happens, the media downplay the numbers of people involved and portray any opposition as from a miniscule number of angry, ill-informed, anti-progress nutjobs, as they did with the Tea Party and Brexit supporters.

Opposition becomes invisible by design.  In short, nothing to see here.       

Yet sometimes the media do too good a job of hiding the opposition. They start to believe their own propaganda that there’s really no substantial opposition to their beloved agenda. Their polls bear them out; mainly because people who distrust the media won’t answer truthfully if at all, which means others eager to be polled aren’t always representative of the whole.

Consequently, the pollsters get skewed data. And the media report that bad data as fact because it supports what they already want to believe. 

That’s a key reason why the media and Democrats were so stunned when Trump was elected over Hillary.  How could so many otherwise normal Americans – including traditional working-class Democrats – turn their backs on a clearly smarter and more enlightened Democrat?

Especially to elect an inarticulate, intellectually inferior buffoon such as Trump? 

There must have been something else, some evil force, at play. It’s not the first time they tried to find a culprit other than their own candidate’s failings. 

When G.W. Bush beat Al Gore and then John Kerry, Democrats blamed social conservatives, mainly rabid white evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.  Democrats and progressives never trust devout white Christians of any stripe, who they see as ignorant backwoods Bible thumpers opposed to “progress.” These white Christians, to Democrats and liberals, are small-minded and judgmental; they cling to such outdated concepts as “good and evil” and “right and wrong.” 

And “traditional values.” What a laugh. 

In the case of Trump, Democrats and the media believe that, in addition to the Russians – another unproven boogie man, it must have been angry, racist white men still incensed that we had elected a black President not once, but twice.

These angry white men also punished Democrats for nominating a woman – a woman, for God’s sake! – for President after Obama.  These narrow-minded white men already hated Obama’s decisions to allow in a flood of refugees from the Middle East, protect illegal immigrants already here, his push for gay marriage and gays in the military, his support for Planned Parenthood, and fostering his Justice Department’s obsession with siding with criminals over police.     

It was obvious to Democrats and their pals in the media that white male homophobic, xenophobic, sexist, racist, bigots put Trump in office. That’s the only way it could have happened.

Since Trump won, there must be a lot of them out there.  But where? And how could they be stopped before they influenced any more Americans?

They looked no further than the far right extremists.  The Klan. The neo-Nazis. The white “nationalists” and white supremacists. These are the hate-mongering enemies of progress.   

Suddenly, these extremists were everywhere.  Or so it seemed. 

But they really weren’t.

Nobody, save perhaps the Southern Poverty Law Center extortionists who make millions by manufacturing fake hate-group threats, honestly believes groups like the Klan, the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are growing in numbers.

You wouldn’t know that watching our media, however. When Trump was campaigning, the media breathlessly reported how hateful and racist his supporters were. Except they weren’t. The alleged hateful, racist signs held by Trump supporters turned out to be few and far between, and often plants by Democrat operatives. There was almost no violence at Trump rallies or assaults on minorities there either, unless you count the rare times when paid provocateurs from the left assaulted otherwise peaceful Trump supporters – and don’t be misled, that’s about the only time you saw Trump supporters fight back.

The same thing happened with the “surge” in “reported” hate crimes and racist vandalism once Trump was elected. The media were quick to blame far-right hate groups – who they claimed were Trump supporters – for the “dramatic increase” in assaults on minorities, defacing of mosques and synagogues, and other acts of bigotry and prejudice.

The media were less inclined to report the eventual truth: almost all of the reported “hate crimes” and vandalism that gained national notoriety proved bogus – done by Democrat and leftist operatives to make it appear that Trump’s words fostered attacks on minorities. The widely reported “attacks” and verbal assaults on hajib-wearing women on subways and college campuses, and on other Muslims, supposedly in the name of Trump, also were largely later debunked – most if not all never happened, but came from people seeking media attention.    

Charlottesville is the latest cause célèbre for the media and the left. There a protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee spun out of control when neo-Nazis and white supremacists affiliated with the Klan clashed with counter protesters. Based on media coverage and selective video editing, one would think there were hundreds of right-wing extremists there.

The reality is that there were about 30 members of the Klan protesting, as reported by the New York Times, and perhaps a couple of dozen other right-wing extremists.  

The fighting didn’t start until the protesters against the removal of the statue peacefully concluded their rally and started to leave. That’s when the counter protesters – who did number in the hundreds, and by all accounts vastly outnumbered the motley crew of wannabe neo-Nazis, Klan folk, and white supremacists – started physically engaging with them. Violence broke out and culminated in one right-wing lunatic driving his car into a crowd, killing one of the counter protesters and injuring many others. 

That is actually what happened.  There weren’t hundreds of right-wing extremists there. It wasn’t an epic moment that showed the power and strength of the far-right extremists.   

If anything, it demonstrated once again how lame these right-wing extremists are, and how they can’t whip up more than a few dozen supporters for anything. They’re just a small number of small people who like to dress up and shout stupid things to piss off the rest of us. 

I’ve dealt with worse from the homeless beggars while going to work in Philly.    

So forget about the growing threat from right-wing extremists. It’s a media-manufactured myth. And don’t believe that “hate groups” are soaring to new highs under Trump.  They aren’t. 

Unless you want to believe the Southern Poverty Law Center – which now includes “patriot” groups opposed to illegal immigration, those who lobby for tighter border security, those in favor of maintaining the death penalty for certain crimes, and those who oppose abortion – as equivalent in hate-group status as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis.

That’s right, according to the SPLC, if you are opposed to illegal immigration, want tighter border security, believe in capital punishment for some crimes, or are pro-life, you, too, are a hate group. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Neither did the churches that made their list because they supported traditional marriage. 

When you include all of the above as "hate-groups" the numbers are bound to go up. But again, even with that data legerdemain, there still aren't more actual "hate groups" today.

It's a myth to scare you. And it's pure crapola.