Capping four
years of explosive growth sparked by the election of America’s first
black president and anger over the economy, the number of
conspiracy-minded antigovernment “Patriot” groups reached an all-time
high of 1,360 in 2012, while the number of hard-core hate groups
remained above 1,000. As President Obama enters his second term with an
agenda of gun control and immigration reform, the rage on the right is
likely to intensify.
The
furious reaction to the Obama administration’s gun control proposals is
reminiscent of the anger that greeted the passage of the 1993 Brady
Bill and the 1994 ban on assault weapons supported by another relatively
liberal Democrat — Bill Clinton. The passage of those bills, along with
what was seen by the right as the federal government’s violent
suppression of political dissidents at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge,
Idaho, in the early 1990s, led to the first wave of the Patriot movement
that burst into public consciousness with the 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing. The number of Patriot groups in that era peaked in 1996 at 858,
more than 500 groups fewer than the number active in 2012.
For
many, the election of America’s first black president symbolizes the
country’s changing demographics, with the loss of its white majority
predicted by 2043. (In 2011, for
the first time, non-white births outnumbered the births of white
children.) But the backlash to that trend predates Obama’s presidency by
many years. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of hate groups rose from
602 to more than 1,000, where the count remains today. Now that
comprehensive immigration reform is poised to legitimize and potentially
accelerate the country’s demographic change, the backlash to that
change may accelerate as well.
While
the number of hate groups remained essentially unchanged last year —
going from 1,018 in 2011 to 1,007 in 2012 — the Southern Poverty Law
Center (SPLC) count of 1,360 Patriot groups in 2012 was up about 7% from
the 1,274 active in 2011. And that was only the latest growth spurt in
the Patriot movement, which generally believes that the federal
government is conspiring to take Americans’ guns and destroy their
liberties as it paves the way for a global “one-world government.” From a
mere 149 organizations in 2008, the number of Patriot groups shot up to
512 in 2009, jumped again to 824 in 2010, and then skyrocketed to 1,274
in 2011 before hitting their all-time high last year.
Now,
in the wake of the mass murder of 26 children and adults at a
Connecticut school and the Obama-led gun control efforts that followed,
it seems likely that that growth will pick up speed once again.
The Hysteria Mounts
Even
before the Dec. 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, gun and
ammunition sales shot up in the wake of the re-election of the country’s
first black president, the result of shrill conspiracy theories about
Obama’s secret plans to confiscate Americans’ guns. When the killings
actually did spark gun control efforts that clearly had not been in the
Obama administration’s plans, the reaction on the political right was so
harsh that it seemed to border on hysteria.
Sen.
Rand Paul (R-Ky.) proposed a law that would nullify any executive gun
control actions by Obama, accusing the president of having a “king
complex.” U.S. Rep. Trey Radel (R-Fla.) said the president could be
impeached for those actions. State lawmakers in Arizona, Mississippi,
South Carolina and Tennessee proposed laws that sought to prevent
federal gun control from applying to their states.
Richard
Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who sued the Clinton administration over
the Brady Bill’s imposition of background checks on gun buyers, claimed
that of 200 sheriffs he’d met with, most “have said they would lay down
their lives first rather than allow any more federal control.” Matt
Barber of the anti-gay Liberty Counsel said he feared that the nation,
which he described as already on the brink of civil unrest, was headed
for “a second civil war.” “Freedom ends. Tyranny begins,” tweeted Fox
News Radio host Todd Starnes. “Get ready,” TeaParty.org said. “Right now
government gun grabbing plans are being covertly organized.”
“MARTIAL
LAW IN THE UNITED STATES IS NOW A VERY REAL POSSIBILITY!” added the
ConservativeDaily.com’s Tony Adkins, responding to Obama’s use of
executive orders to further gun control with a doomsday prediction that
could have come straight from the Patriot movement. “SUSPENSION OF THE
U.S. CONSTITUTION IS A VERY REAL POSSIBILITY!” The Conservative Monster,
a similar website, concluded that the president was conspiring with a
variety of foreign enemies “to force Socialism on the American people.”
Even
further to the right, the reaction was more intense yet (see also
related story, p. 36). Chuck Baldwin, a Montana-based Patriot leader
long associated with the Constitution Party, made the unusual claim that
Christ had ordered his disciples to carry “their own personal arms” and
vowed to refuse to register or surrender his firearms. The Oath
Keepers, a conspiracy-oriented Patriot group of current and former
military and law enforcement officials, issued a threat — “MESSAGE TO
THE OATH BREAKERS AND TRAITORS: We will never disarm” — and added that
gun control plans were “unconstitutional filth.” Judicial Watch founder
Larry Klayman called the proposals “a declaration of war against the
American people” and demanded “liberation” from the “evil clutches” of
proponents.
The
one sector of the radical right that shrank dramatically last year was
the “nativist extremist” groups that go beyond advocating for
immigration reduction and confront or physically harass suspected
unauthorized immigrants. From a 2010 high of 319 groups, they fell over
the following two years by about 90%, to 38 groups. The collapse was due
to criminal scandals, internecine sniping within the movement, and the
co-opting of their issue by state legislatures.
Progress and Backlashes
Even
before serious talk of gun control began in Washington, the far right
was already in something of a meltdown in the immediate aftermath of
Obama’s re-election, which came to many who got their campaign news from
right-wing sources as a jarring shock. Hundreds of thousands of
Americans signed petitions seeking the secession of each of the 50
states. Right-wing outfits like TeaParty.org said a “Communist coup” was
under way. The anti-gay Family Research Council charged Obama with
“dismantling” the country.
Polling
after the election showed how broad antipathy toward President Obama
remained in a deeply polarized America. A Public Policy Poll survey
found that 49% of all Republicans believed that ACORN — a community
organizing group that went belly up in 2010 after attacks from the far
right — had stolen the election from Mitt Romney. A quarter of GOP
members in the same poll favored secession. A January 2013 poll from
Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind project found that 36% of
all Americans still don’t believe Obama is a citizen, despite the 2011
release of the president’s “long-form” birth certificate.
As
they did in 2008 and 2009, groups on the radical right clearly
benefited from that antipathy. “Since Obama’s first term, our numbers
have doubled and now we’re headed to a second term, it’s going to
triple,” one Virginia Klansman told WTVR-TV in Richmond. Daniel Miller,
president of the secessionist Texas National Movement, said that his
membership shot up 400% after Obama’s re-election. White News Now, a
website run by white supremacist Jamie Kelso, said that it had had “an
incredible year” in the run-up to the vote, reaching more people than
ever.
To
the surprise of many prognosticators, anti-black racism in America —
not just that limited to the far right — actually rose over the four
years of Obama’s first term, according to a 2012 Associated Press poll.
The poll found 51% of Americans expressed explicitly anti-black
attitudes, compared to 48% in 2008, while 56% showed implicitly
anti-black attitudes, up from 49% four years earlier. Another AP poll,
in 2011, found that 52% of non-Latino whites expressed explicitly
anti-Latino attitudes, a figure that rose to 59% when measured by an
implicit attitudes test.
“We
have this false idea that there is uniformity in progress and that
things change in one big step. That is not the way history has worked,”
Jelani Cobb, a history professor and director of the Institute for
African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut, told the
Huffington Post with regard to the AP poll findings. “When we’ve seen
progress, we’ve also seen backlash.”
Some
broad social progress that did occur last year — the rapidly increasing
acceptance of LGBT people and same-sex marriage — fueled just such a
backlash among anti-gay religious groups that saw themselves beginning
to lose the issue. (A December USA Today poll found that 53% of Americans now support same-sex marriage, up dramatically from 1996, when 27% supported such unions.)
The
American Family Association issued predictions for the future that
included the claims that conservative Christians will be treated like
African Americans before the civil rights movement, that the state will
take charge of children at birth, and that cities with names like St.
Petersburg will be forced to change their names. Peter LaBarbera of
Americans for Truth About Homosexuality said the 2012 election of openly
gay Tammy Baldwin to a Senate seat representing Wisconsin signaled that
America is “falling apart.” The volume of these kinds of comments
seemed higher than ever before.
Conspiracies and Terror
Another
factor driving the expansion of the radical right over the last decade
or so has been the mainstreaming of formerly marginal conspiracy
theories. The latest and most dramatic example of that may be the
completely baseless claim that Agenda 21 — a United Nations
sustainability plan that was signed by President George H.W. Bush but
has no mandatory provisions whatsoever — is part of a plan to impose
socialism on America and strip away private property rights.
That
claim has been pushed heavily by, among others, the John Birch Society,
a conspiracist Patriot organization that was exiled from the
conservative movement a half century ago after claiming President Dwight
D. Eisenhower was a Communist agent (see story, p. 24)."Last year, the
Republican National Committee passed a plank opposing Agenda 21 and
describing it as a “destructive and insidious scheme” to impose
“socialist/communist redistribution of wealth.” The state of Alabama
passed a law barring any policies traceable to Agenda 21 without “due
process.”
The
radical right last year produced more than its fair share of political
violence. Most dramatically, a neo-Nazi gunman stormed into a Sikh
temple in Wisconsin, murdering six people before killing himself. In
Georgia, meanwhile, officials arrested 10 people, most of them
active-duty military, who were allegedly part of a plot to take over the
Army’s Fort Stewart, among many other things. The group is accused of
murdering two former members suspected of talking.
Then,
this January, an Alabama high school student was arrested for allegedly
plotting to attack his black and gay classmates and bomb his school.
Former friends of the student said he and a group of up to 11 other
students regularly shouted “white power” and gave stiff-arm Nazi salutes
in the halls of their Seale, Ala., school but were ignored by school
officials and security officers.
These
were only the latest incidents of just over 100 domestic radical-right
plots, conspiracies and racist rampages that the SPLC has counted since
the Oklahoma City bombing left 168 men, women and children dead in 1995.
Now,
it seems likely that the radical right’s growth will continue. In 2012,
before Obama’s re-election and the Newtown, Conn., massacre, the rate
of Patriot growth had slackened somewhat, although it remained
significant. Anger over the idea of four more years under a black,
Democratic president — and, even more explosively, the same kinds of gun
control efforts that fueled the militia movement of the 1990s — seems
already to be fomenting another Patriot spurt.
Even before
the election last year, self-described Patriots sounded ready for
action. “Our Federal Government is just a tool of International
Socialism now, operating under UN Agendas not our American agenda,” the
United States Patriots Union wrote last year in a letter “sent to ALL
conservative state legislators, all states.” “This means that freedom
and liberty must be defended by the states under their Constitutional
Balance of Power, or we are headed to Civil War wherein the people will
have no choice but to take matters into their own hands.”
Four-star
General in the United States Marine Corps and the 35th and current
Commandant of the Marine Corps James F. Amos has sent out a letter,
dated March 2, 2013, to all Marines informing them of the Obama
administration’s plan to use the sequester to cut roughly $1.4 billion
dollars to the United States Marine Corps for the remainder of the
fiscal year and roughly $2 billion each year following.
