Rage on the Right--New Report

The Southern Poverty Law Center has inherited a boom industry in analyzing right-wing hate groups. The SPLC reports that hate groups stayed at record levels--almost 1,000--despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Anti-immigration bigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And the so-called "Patriot " groups, who believe there is a federal government plot to impose "one-world government" on freedom-loving Americans, came back from the dead after years lingering in the shadows.

The Southern Poverty Law Center doesn't consider 'tea parties" and other groups as extremist but point to the fact they are shot through with "rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism". The report quotes Chip Berlet, an analyst of the American radical right, who wrote,"We are in the midst of one of the most significant right-wing populist rebellions in United States history. We see around us a series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people angry, resentful and full of anxiety. They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including health care, reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion and gay marrriage."

The report says that signs of radicalization are everywhere. They note that CPAC invited back into the fold the John Birch Society, which believes (still does) Eisenhower was a Communist agent, and the Oath Keepers, a group of military and police officers who believe the government has secret plans to declare martial law and intern patriotic Americans in concentration camps. It also notes that 37 states are pandering to this crowd by introducing Tenth Amendment Resolutions". At the website " A well Regulated Militia" website, there is talk now of building clandestine safe houses and warnings how Tim McVeigh and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph were betrayed as such safe houses.

The report was issued less than two weeks after Joseph Stack became a hero to the anti-government crowd by crashing a small plane into the IRS office. The SPLC report goes into the spate of violence by these characters ,including several assassination plots against President Obama.

Now are these groups part of the "civil society". Maybe they should get a NED grant. The neo-Nazi group disbanded because the leaders began killing each other.