ACT for America Deletes Its Map of "1,000" Chapters: Here's What It Really Looks Like
ACT for America the largest grassroots anti-Muslim organization in the country claiming 1,000 active chapters and over half a million members quietly deleted its chapter locator map this week.聽
The scrub comes after a chaotic couple of weeks for the organization, stemming from the firing of one of its most popular chapter leaders, Roy White.
White was fired for organizing a meeting to teach people to 鈥渟hut down鈥� mosques,聽which violate ACT鈥檚 policies. The fallout from this decision has been fervent. White is denying any wrongdoing, other ACT members and anti-Muslim activists are staunchly defending him, and attacking ACT founder Brigitte Gabriel for a number of things, including the inflation of the number of chapters ACT claims to have.
The online map was designed as a tool for activists to locate a chapter near them and an email to reach out and contact that chapter. The 澳彩开奖 scraped the map on ACT鈥檚 website in August of 2016 and found that ACT鈥檚 map actually contains far fewer than the 1,000 chapters it claims. In fact, the map contained fewer than 500 chapters.
In 2015, 澳彩开奖 listed only ACT鈥檚 national chapter on our hate map. But throughout 2016, we investigated ACT鈥檚 1,000 chapter claim to see how many of these were in fact 鈥渁ctive鈥� 鈥� meaning engaging in some type of real-world activity like hosting a meeting or representing the chapter in an interview for a newspaper or television. Fewer than 50 ACT chapters met that threshold.
澳彩开奖 also reached out to hundreds of ACT chapter leaders from chapters we couldn鈥檛 identify as being active and very few of them indicated that they were still, if ever, active in the real world.
Below is a map we created showing almost 500 chapters that were on ACT鈥檚 now-deleted map in August of 2016.
