Commentary by Ryan Thompson<\/strong><\/p>\n There is a strange thing about the hate business.<\/p>\n If hate goes away, the business has a problem.<\/p>\n That is the ugly question sitting behind the SPLC indictment. For years, Americans were told that organized white hate was always about to take over the country again. The Klan was coming back. Nazis were rising. White nationalist groups were hiding behind every corner.<\/p>\n But the real story was never that simple.<\/p>\n Racism still exists. Extremist violence still exists. Sick ideas still exist. Nobody serious should deny that. But organized white hate, as a mass public movement, has been weak for decades.<\/p>\n The old Klan groups were not rising. They were fading. The Anti-Defamation League said in 2016 that organized Klan groups were in a long-term decline. It said the Klan was mostly made up of small, unstable groups with just over thirty active groups nationwide, and about 3,000 members. That is not a national army. That is a broken fringe.<\/p>\n So why did the anti-hate industry keep getting richer?<\/p>\n