The number of organizations classified as ‘hate groups’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center has risen in recent years, seemingly fueled by the bizarre idea that president Obama is some kind of weird Muslim, Kenyan, communist usurper of American legitimacy who must be overthrown by force before he destroys motherhood and eats all the apple pie. These people cannot seem to see the obvious, which is that Obama is the latest in standard-issue, center-right, pro-oligarchic, authoritarian, political leaders.
On the bright side, though, it looks like membership in the KKK is in steep decline.
Membership totals are hard to track, because the Klan doesn’t willingly release member lists. Over the long term, the KKK is clearly contracting, since its rolls have shrunk from millions in the 1920s to between 3,000 and 5,000 today.
Part of the reason may be that the newer generation of racists now have other options.
The KKK is also suffering from a proliferation of competitors. People who wanted to join a white supremacist movement back in the 1920s didn’t have a lot of choices. Today, there are countless options, enabling an extremist to find a group that matches his personal brand of intolerance. The more extreme groups in the burgeoning patriot movement cater to anti-Muslim, homophobic, and xenophobic sentiment, with less animosity toward African-Americans and Jews. Aryan Nations offers a heavy focus on Christian identity. Some groups preach more violence, while others offer a veneer of intellectualism. American Renaissance, for example, caters to “suit-and-tie” racists, offering pseudo-scientific papers on white supremacy. The group even holds conferences at a hotel near Dulles airport in Virginia.
Or maybe what’s destroying the KKK now is a cunning plan that was formulated at the time of its origin.
“These people cannot seem to see the obvious, which is that Obama is the latest in standard-issue, center-right, pro-oligarchic, authoritarian, political leaders.”
Well, there is the problem. Obama isn’t nearly extreme enough…therefore, liberal socialist foreign commie he must be.
“The number of organizations classified as ‘hate groups’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center has risen in recent years”
It is worth noting that these “hate groups” are indeed classified BY the SPLC and according to their own dubious criteria.
There is no legal definition of “hate group,” which is why even the FBI does not, cannot, designate “hate groups.”
The SPLC is a private fund-raising group with assets exceeding $223 million dollars. It has no authority, no mandate, legal or moral, to designate anyone as anything.
The SPLC uses the deliberately meaningless term “hate group” in its fund-raising materials because it provokes their mostly elderly donor base without accusing these groups of any actual crimes.
Of the 1,018 groups designated by the SPLC for 2011, fully 247 of them (nearly 1 in 4) are not associated with any known city or town. They are simply included on the map to pad out the numbers and no one in the Media can be bothered to check the SPLC’s claims.
http://wp.me/pCLYZ-ce
For an example of how ridiculous the blatant padding has become, one need only look at the “hate groups” for Georgia as identified on the SPLC’s “Hate Map.”
Of the 20 chapters of “the Georgia Militia” on the list, fully 18 of them are homeless, merely floating along in limbo.
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map#s=GA
Some “experts”
Among the more amusing news stories I read recently was about the existence of Polish Neo-nazis in the predominantly Polish neighbourhood of Greenpoint in Brooklyn, NY. Apparently, some have forgotten what happened on 1 September 1939 and what the Nazis thought of the Poles.