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… )

Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), the ultraconservative student group sworn to defend “the West” from the “radical left” and multiculturalism, seems to be finding new friends on the radical right – and a new enemy in the federal government.

Founded just over five years ago by American University student Kevin DeAnna, YWC is already notorious for its cordial relations with white nationalists like Jared Taylor and nativists like Tom Tancredo, the former congressman who serves as its honorary chairman. The group is tied up with anti-Muslim activists, and the leader of its Towson State University chapter in Maryland is a member of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South. ( continue to full post… )

Affirming his group’s embrace of antigovernment “Patriot” ideology, League of the South (LOS) President Michael Hill on Monday sent members an E-Mail declaring the federal government an “organized criminal enterprise” led by “domestic terrorists” and telling his followers to prepare for a fight.

“I discourage the formation of private militias except as a last resort,” he wrote. “If your State and local officials refuse to serve the citizens and to protect them by the historic means of Nullification, Interposition, or Secession, then you may have reached the ‘last resort.’”

It’s not especially shocking that a group that advocates secession and sees the Civil War as an aggressive attack on a peaceful people would articulate these ideas, particularly in an era that has seen a significant rise in Patriot activity overall. The LOS has been drifting in this direction since at least 2007, and the rhetoric at its July 2011 national conference stressed Patriot and survivalist themes more than ever. ( continue to full post… )

The federal government is spying on Americans stockpiling food and asking U.S. soldiers if they will detain American citizens when the time comes. In job advertisements, the government is seeking jackbooted New World Order thugs to staff secret domestic prison camps. An  examination of archival photographs has finally solved the mysteries of the JFK assassination. And the conclusion? Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent.

It’s been an imaginative few days in the funhouse of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement. ( continue to full post… )

A man whose nickname is “Mouse” is the first member of the Hutaree Militia to strike a plea deal with the Justice Department to avoid the possibility of a lengthy federal prison sentence.

Joshua John Clough, 29, of Blissfield Township, Mich., pleaded guilty Monday in U.S. District Court in Detroit to use of a firearm in relation to a crime of violence – a federal crime that carries a five-year minimum sentence.

Clough was one of nine members of the Hutaree Militia arrested in March 2010 and charged in a plot to make homemade bombs as part of a conspiracy to murder scores of law enforcement officers. Charging documents allege “Mouse” and his co-conspirators hoped the killing of cops would spark a large uprising against the federal government. A superseding indictment returned in June 2010 accuses the defendants of seditious conspiracy and a host of other serious federal crimes. ( continue to full post… )

The FBI undercover tapes of four North Georgia militiamen arrested Tuesday offer an extraordinary glimpse of the terrorism the group is accused of planning. Details of how they allegedly intended to commit mass murder with deadly ricin, carry out assassinations of officials, and bomb government buildings abound in government affidavits that directly quote the men talking to undercover informants.

But there’s one thing the affidavits don’t tell you: What did these four elderly Georgians allegedly hope to accomplish? About as close as you get to an answer is this cryptic quote from the alleged ringleader, 73-year-old Frederick W. Thomas: “When it comes to saving the Constitution, that means some people gotta die.”

Although the group is not mentioned in the court papers, the organization the men belonged to is certainly the Georgia Militia, which on its Web page identifies one of the accused terrorists, Dan Roberts, 67, as a contact. And the Georgia Militia is one of the hardest line such groups around, going far beyond most militias’ hatred of the federal government to traffic in open racism and anti-Semitism. ( continue to full post… )

Four members of an unnamed North Georgia militia planned to attack cities including Atlanta with deadly ricin, bomb federal buildings and murder law enforcement officials and others, according to charges leveled yesterday.

The four elderly men were arrested after a lengthy investigation that began last March, when a confidential informant began secretly recording the group’s conversations. The man described as the group’s leader, 73-year-old Frederick Thomas, was recorded at a meeting that month allegedly saying, “There’s no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly illegal — murder. … When it comes to saving the Constitution, that means some people gotta die.”

Another member of the group, Samuel J. Crump, 68, allegedly said at a September meeting that he wanted to make 10 pounds of deadly ricin powder and disperse in a series of cities. He said that it could be blown out the windows of a car traveling down an interstate without harming the plotters. An affidavit said that Crump just last week said he was going to begin shelling castor beans, from which ricin is manufactured. Another alleged plotter, Ray H. Adams, 65, allegedly said he had a formula for making ricin and knew ways to get the needed ingredients. “I’d say the first ones that need to die is the ones in the government buildings,” Adams allegedly said during an April 2011 meeting. ( continue to full post… )

American Vision is a hard-line Christian Reconstruction organization whose current leader, Gary DeMar, has said that democracy should be replaced by a theocratic government run by Christians who will impose Old Testament prohibitions and the occasional executions of “sodomites” to drive gay people back into the closet. It’s no surprise, then, that American Vision has involved itself over the years with anti-gay and anti-abortion causes. ( continue to full post… )

A former “staff leader” of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations is threatening to indict members of the Montana Human Rights Network by convening a “citizen grand jury.”

The e-mail threat came from Karl Gharst, a white supremacist who was convicted and sent to prison in 2004 for threatening to kill a child protective services worker in Montana. ( continue to full post… )

Nearly eight months after President Obama released his long-form birth certificate, the carnival barkers he hoped to quiet are again clamoring to get back into the center ring.

WorldNetDaily (WND), the right-wing conspiracy website that has led the charge to question the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship, has reported that the nation’s first law enforcement investigation into the president’s birth certificate is under way. Ostensibly leading the charge is none other than Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who bills himself as “America’s toughest sheriff.” ( continue to full post… )