The evidence suggests that, denial by Trump and his fans notwithstanding, the answer is yes. In the first five days after last Tuesday’s election, the Southern Poverty Law Center received reports of 437 hate crimes across the country. Two hundred and fifty of those were reported in the first two days alone, which is more than the SPLC sees in an average six-month span.

In addition, the FBI announced Monday that it recorded 5,818 hate crimes in 2015, a six percent increase over the previous year. And this at a time when the overall crime rate in the country, despite what a majority of people might think, has actually decreased.

Given the angry tone and tenor of the election and the fact that the winning candidate did most of his campaigning by putting on rallies that even Leni Riefenstahl might have thought were a tad much, it seems a good bet that much of the inspiration for this wave of hate crimes can be laid at the feet of our new, orange obergruppenfuhrer, Donald Trump.

The evidence is pretty solid. Over the course of his 17-month campaign, Trump disparaged and threatened minorities, blaming Muslims and Hispanics in particular for a host of our country’s ills. He portrayed this blame game as some sort of national emergency, telling his followers that “we don’t have time to be politically correct.” He gleefully cheered when protestors, who were often black or Hispanic, were manhandled and occasionally beaten while the police were removing them from his rallies.

In short, he gave already angry people permission to give in to their worst instincts and behave hatefully.

Then the day after he shocked everyone, including himself, by winning the election, minorities found themselves being told by white people everywhere to stop wearing their hijabs or threatened with deportation. Spray-painted swastikas showed up on the walls of synagogues and mosques. African-American students at an Ivy League school — Trump’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, in fact — woke up one morning to find their names added to a list calling for them all to be lynched.

What is the reaction of Trump and his supporters? Essentially the equivalent of putting their hands over their ears and shouting, “LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

You can see this all over social media and comments sections, where alleged Trump supporters are quick to claim stories of hate crimes are made up. You can see this with figures like former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who shared on Facebook and Twitter a story about two college students in Chicago who had spray-painted swastikas and other hateful garbage all over a campus chapel. The story’s original sources claimed the students were Jewish leftists trying to frame Trump supporters.