The new issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, released today, contains an in-depth look at the decades-long war between white supremacists and “anti-fascists” – highlighted by the bloody battle that erupted last  year at suburban Chicago restaurant.

The May 19, 2012, incident in Tinley Park, Ill., involved as many as 18 anti-racists in a fast and furious attack that resulted in five men pleading guilty to armed violence and receiving prison sentences as long as six years. The long history of violence between white supremacists and self-described “anti-fascists” also includes the 1998 murder of two anti-racist skinheads in a neo-Nazi plot. The latest incident has some anti-racists asking how things could have been different. It also underscores the challenge law enforcement faces in preventing such violence.

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The number of antigovernment “Patriot” groups on the American radical right hit an all-time high in 2012, the fourth straight year of explosive growth, according to a report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). As the new year began, serious talk of gun control, prompted by a Connecticut school massacre in December, fueled even more rage on the right, and the threat of violence loomed .

The new report, contained in the latest issue of the quarterly investigative journal Intelligence Report, found that the conspiracy-minded Patriot groups, which numbered only 149 in 2008, soared over the first four years of Barack Obama’s presidency to 1,360 in 2012 — an astounding 813% increase. At the same time, it found that hate groups remained at near-record levels of over 1,000 (see interactive map and state-by-state lists of 2012 hate groups here).

The resurgence of militias and other Patriot groups and an uptick over recent years in non-Islamic domestic terrorism caused SPLC President Richard Cohen today to write (letter pdf) U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to request the creation of a new interagency task force to assess the adequacy of federal resources devoted to the threat. “As in the period before the [1995] Oklahoma City bombing,” Cohen wrote, “we are now seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns.” ( continue to full post… )

When Wade Michael Page strode into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and began to kill, it was the culmination of more than a decade in the neo-Nazi movement. The best evidence suggests that Page came to his racist beliefs while serving at a North Carolina Army base that was then a hotbed of white supremacist activity — beliefs that were further honed by years on the white power music scene.

The Southern Poverty Law Center today released the latest issue of its investigative magazine Intelligence Report, and its cover story analyzes the background and ideological development of Page, who murdered six people and wounded four others last August before putting a bullet in his own head. An accompanying sidebar details the modern history of right-wing extremism in the American military, and a related editorial traces the growth of political violence aimed at Muslims.

“Wade saw the military as a transformational time in his life,” one expert who was also a personal acquaintance of Wade told the Intelligence Report. “He always said, ‘If you don’t go in the military a racist, you’re sure to leave as one.’”

Other stories in the newly released Report: ( continue to full post… )

Steve Klein, the leader of a California hate group, says that Islam is a “penis-driven religion” whose followers have “no choice but to hunt Jews and Christians down, torture us and murder us.”

Klein of Hemet, Calif., who has a long history of ties to militant Christian organizations, has been identified as one of the brains behind the anti-Muslim film that triggered violence in northern Africa, including a rocket attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and the murder of Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya. ( continue to full post… )

Steve Klein, who served as a consultant for the Islam-bashing film that sparked the deadly assault on a U.S. Consulate in Libya, is a longtime religious-right activist who has helped train paramilitary militias at a secretive church in California.

Four American citizens, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed by mobs enraged by the depiction of the prophet Muhammad in the film “Innocence of Muslims”  produced by Sam Bacile, a California real estate developer.

Klein is a Marine veteran who served in the Vietnam War and is based in Hemet, Calif. He believes that his state is riddled with Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cells “who are awaiting the trigger date and will begin randomly killing as many of us as they can,” according to an article in the Spring 2012 issue of the SPLC Intelligence Report. ( continue to full post… )

Are U.S.-born vigilantes murdering Latino immigrants near the U.S.-Arizona border?

The Southern Poverty Law Center today released its latest issue of the Intelligence Report, and the magazine’s cover story sifts through some of the evidence suggesting that undocumented immigrants may have been killed by nativist extremists in Arizona.

While the story is not conclusive, it cites internal law enforcement documents focusing on the murders of four people in two 2007 incidents near Eloy, Ariz., that say that “[i]t appears that the same group of individuals is working in concert to intentionally kill IAs [illegal aliens].” The story also examines the remarkably similar murders of two people this April in the same remote area of the state. ( continue to full post… )

Five years ago today, we kicked off the Hatewatch blog with a post marking the fifth anniversary of the July 23, 2002, death of William Luther Pierce, the founder and leader of what for three decades was the most important hate group in America. Now, exactly 10 years after Pierce’s death, the neo-Nazi National Alliance is widely seen as a joke on the neo-Nazi scene and has lost most of its members, almost all of its income, and all of its once-substantial prestige. Here is an investigative story on the Alliance that will also be published in the August issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report.

Click here to read the story.

The number of antigovernment “Patriot” groups grew at an astounding pace last year, as it has in all three years of the Obama presidency, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) annual count of extremist groups, released today. The number of these groups rose from 824 in 2010 to 1,274 last year.

This dramatic expansion of the radical right was driven by fears related to economic dislocation, the country’s changing racial makeup, and the prospect of four more years under our first black president. The campaign season, with its vitriolic rhetoric, has also contributed to the overheated atmosphere that is fostering these groups. In addition, many politicians and other public figures increasingly have been pushing conspiracy theories and demonizing rhetoric into the political mainstream.

The report on SPLC’s annual count and review of the last year in American extremism may be found here. The table of contents for the entire new issue of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report is here. What follows are synopses of the major stories found in the new edition. ( continue to full post… )

The Southern Poverty Law Center today released the latest issue of its quarterly investigative magazine on the radical right, Intelligence Report. Overall, the issue covers the extreme right’s increasingly heated rhetoric, laced with talk of war and weaponry, as it faces the possibility of four more years under a black president.

The issue’s cover story focuses on Montana, where white supremacists and antigovernment “Patriots” are gathering for a last stand against the greater society that one leader likens to the Battle of the Alamo. Another story, also focusing on increasingly belligerent rhetoric and actions, examines the continuing radicalization of the neo-secessionist League of the South. A third examines the unbelievable vicious rhetoric and background of Bryan Fischer, who has become the main spokesman for the gay-bashing American Family Association. My own editorial discusses all three stories as part of a trend toward radicalization. ( continue to full post… )

The latest issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, released today, focuses on the threat of homegrown Muslim terrorists, even as it warns in an editorial against demonizing Muslims in the U.S. and neglecting threats from white supremacists and others on the radical right. Entitled “Ten Years After,” a reference to the Islamist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the cover story is accompanied by profiles of 10 leading domestic jihadists and a timeline describing 30 plots since 9/11.

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