Editor’s Note: The Southern Poverty Law Center is today releasing its annual count of groups on the American radical right and analysis. What follows is the main essay from the new issue of the Intelligence Report, the SPLC’s investigative magazine. In the story, you’ll find links to our new hate group map and additional lists of antigovernment “Patriot” groups and nativist vigilante organizations. The issue also contains my editorial and stories on Cliff Kincaid, a homophobic propagandist at the far-right Accuracy in Media group; the adoption of an Oklahoma law forbidding the use of Shariah law; a racist group’s funding of two Mississippi private academies; a white supremacist’s new novel targeting the SPLC; the National Center for Constitutional Studies and its extremist version of American history; candidates with extreme-right ideas who ran in last year’s elections; an interview with a former “esoteric Nazi,” and more. The new issue’s table of contents is here.

For the second year in a row, the radical right in America expanded explosively in 2010, driven by resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government’s handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities. For many on the radical right, anger is focusing on President Obama, who is seen as embodying everything that’s wrong with the country.

Hate groups topped 1,000 for the first time since the Southern Poverty Law Center began counting such groups in the 1980s. Anti-immigrant vigilante groups, despite having some of the political wind taken out of their sails by the adoption of hard-line anti-immigration laws around the country, continued to rise slowly. But by far the most dramatic growth came in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement ­— conspiracy-minded organizations that see the federal government as their primary enemy — which gained more than 300 new groups, a jump of over 60%.

Taken together, these three strands of the radical right — the hatemongers, the nativists and the antigovernment zealots — increased from 1,753 groups in 2009 to 2,145 in 2010, a 22% rise. That followed a 2008-2009 increase of 40%. ( continue to full post… )