WASHINGTON (CN) - Taking a closer look at former Breitbart CEO Stephen Bannon’s future as a senior counselor in the incoming Donald Trump administration, experts in extremism are voicing concern about how hate crimes have risen along with the surge of the so-called alt-right.
The Southern Poverty Law Center just reported Tuesday that it has documented 400 incidents of intimidation and harassment in the week since Trump’s election.
But a study out of California State University, San Bernardino, noted in September that hate crimes were already on the rise – spiking 5 percent overall in 2015 and surging against Muslims 78 percent.
The FBI's annual crime report largely validated those numbers Monday, finding a 6.8 percent increase in hate crimes and a 67 percent spike in crimes against Muslims.
Meanwhile, a January 2016 Pew survey included in the Cal State’s study found that nearly half of Americans think at least some Muslims in the U.S. are anti-American.
Bucking years of steady decline, anti-Semitic hate crimes also rose 9 percent rise, according to the September report, out of the Bernardino campus’s nonpartisan Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism.
One of that report’s co-authors, Brian Levin, noted in an interview that that political rhetoric seems to have an impact.
Levin acknowledged that his data is not as sufficiently predictive or diagnostic but noted some significant trends.
When former President George W. Bush spoke about tolerance in a visit to a mosque six days after 9/11, for example, hate crimes dropped 66 percent.
By contrast, Levin said, there was an 87 percent increase in hate crimes in the five days after Trump tweeted out his proposal to temporarily ban Muslims.
"For the public at large, I think what it indicates is that words matter," said Levin, a Stanford-educated criminologist attorney who serves as the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism’s director.
"While correlation isn't necessarily causation,” Levin added, “we can't simply dismiss the fact that this kind of political rhetoric may very well have a defining impact, not only on intergroup relations, but on hate crimes as well.”
Levin is among those voicing alarm at Trump’s decision this week to make Breitbart’s Bannon his chief White House strategist.
"The one thing that we always prided ourselves with regard to white supremacists or Euro-nationalists, is that there would always be some kind of institutional and ethical barrier that would prevent the hardest edges of their messages from getting traction in the mainstream," said Levin.
"That is out the window," the criminal justice professor added. "Those of us who track this are extraordinarily concerned."
Bannon is a former U.S. Navy man who worked for Goldman Sachs and later became a Hollywood investor. But CNN reported that his appointment Sunday was cheered by the American Nazi Party and various white-nationalist groups, including David Duke, the former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.