"Reflecting on the past five years, a leading far-right extremism expert I recently interviewed described the homeland security report as “prophetic.”
Mark Pitcavage, the Anti-Defamation League’s director of investigative research, explained that most of the warnings in the 2009 report have become realities. "
Looking clearly at right-wing terrorism Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
"New rise of the far right. For almost 15 years after the Oklahoma City bombing, far-right extremism remained a relative constant; now it has risen again in group numbers, violence, and latent explosiveness. To gain greater clarity on this alarming trajectory, I recently spoke with Mark Potok, an expert in domestic extremism and director of the
Southern Poverty Law Center. Addressing the numerical ebb and flow with far-right “hate groups” (that is,
US white supremacist and other groups whose beliefs or practices attack or malign an entire class of people), Potok said, “What we’ve been seeing is a long slow steady rise since 2000—it has gone from 602 groups that year to 1,007 groups in 2012.” The rise was connected to the election of an African-American president and accompanying conspiracy theories, Potok explained; a severe economic recession and fears related to immigration also were factors.
This expansion of hate groups has been paralleled by growth in the number of “
patriot groups” (defined as US militias and other strongly anti-government related groups that are not primarily white supremacist or racist in orientation). The Southern Poverty Law Center's count of such groups initially peaked in the mid-1990s, at 858. A steep decline ensued, especially after the so-called Y2K bug—the potential mass demise of computers made before the year 2000—failed to bring about societal chaos, rapture, or a millenarian apocalypse. In 2001, the movement hit its nadir with 150 groups and remained low throughout both of President George W. Bush’s terms.
But in 2009, Potok said, “[t]he patriot group numbers began skyrocketing. By 2011 there were 1,274, and in 2012 the numbers peaked at 1,360.”
