Anti-Government Groups Show Surge, Watchdog Warns
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LOS ANGELES (March 2) — The number
of American anti-government militia and
“patriot” groups, largely dormant since
their heyday in the mid-1990s, mushroomed
at an “astonishing” rate last year,
raising “grave concern” about the potential
for future domestic terrorism, according to
a new report by the Southern Poverty Law
Center.
The nonprofit civil rights organization,
which tracks the hate movement and antigovernment
groups, counted 512 militias
and related groups in 2009, up from 149
groups the year before. And, it said, the
movement has added a layer of racism
largely absent a decade ago.
At the same time, the organization has
observed
a spike in what it calls “nativist extremist
groups,” defined as those that “confront or
harass suspected immigrants,” to 309
groups last year, up from 173 the year before.
David McNew, Getty Images
Members of the National Socialist Movement,
a white supremacist group, march at a rally
against illegal immigration on Oct. 24 in
Riverside, Calif. The number of groups that
“confront or harass suspected immigrants”
has surged from 173 in 2008 to 309 last
year, the Southern Poverty Law Center
said.
Hate groups also grew slightly, from 926
to 932, continuing what the SPLC said was
a trend that began around 2000, and rising
54 percent in the decade. The growth was
“driven largely by an angry backlash
against nonwhite immigration and, starting
in the last year of that period, the economic
meltdown and the climb to power of
an African-American president.”
Fear and frustration were the fuel, the report
said.
“The anger seething across the American
political landscape ... goes beyond the radical
right,” the report said, adding that the
rage was fed by “racial changes in the population,
soaring public debt and the terrible
economy, the bailouts of bankers and other
elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively
liberal Obama administration that
are seen as ‘socialist’ or even ‘fascist.’”
“The ‘tea parties’ and similar groups that
have sprung up in recent months cannot
fairly be considered extremist groups,” the
report said, “but they are shot through with
rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories
and racism.”
And some of the underlying beliefs of the
militia movement have found their way
into the mainstream, according to the report,
“Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate
and Extremism,” which was written by
Mark Potok, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence
Report.
“While in the 1990s, the movement got
good reviews from a few lawmakers and
talk-radio hosts, some of its central ideas
today are being plugged by people with far
larger audiences, like Fox News’ Glenn
Beck and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann,”
Potok wrote. “Beck, for instance, re-popularized
a key Patriot conspiracy theory —
the charge that FEMA is secretly running
concentration camps — before finally ‘debunking’
it.”
HO / AFP / Getty Images
Daniel Cowart, here in an undated photo,
is one of two men accused of plotting to kill
more than 100 people, including Barack
Obama, in 2008. He is awaiting trial. The
SPLC said resentment of Obama is one factor
fueling anti-government sentiment.
The report adds to a similar finding by
the federal Department of Homeland Security
nearly a year ago, which warned that
the crumbling economy “and the election of
the first African-American president
present unique drivers for right-wing radicalization
and recruitment.” That report
was criticized by conservatives and veterans’
groups, drawing an apology from DHS
Secretary Janet Napolitano.
The SPLC last year reported on the
resurging militia movement, which it said
was propelled by conspiracy theories about
pending martial law and a move by Mexico
to reclaim portions of the American Southwest.
With the election of Barack Obama as
president, that report said, the new wave of
militia activity had taken on a much more
racist cast than the movement that gave
rise to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the
Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma
City on April 19, 1995.
The SPLC’s new assessment comes less
than two weeks after Joseph Stack became
a hero to some anti-government crusaders
when he crashed a small airplane into an
Internal Revenue Service office in Austin,
Texas, killing himself and an IRS employee.
Stack had posted an online “manifesto” detailing
his financial problems and frustration
with the federal government, and said
he intended to give the IRS “my pound of
flesh.”
Experts are already concerned that
Stack’s suicidal plane crash could make
him a martyr to anti-government zealots,
and, like the deadly federal raid on David
Koresh’s Branch Davidian Ranch in Waco,
Texas, and the violent siege of Randy
Weaver’s cabin in remote Ruby Ridge, Idaho,
could spawn a fresh wave of right-wing
violence.
The SPLC said it already has noticed
“signs of similar violence,” including the
killings of six law enforcement officers, arrests
of extremists in alleged assassination
plots against Obama, a shooting rampage
by a white supremacist in Brockton, Mass.,
and the arrests of “individuals with antigovernment,
survivalist or racist views ... in
a series of bomb cases.”
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