SPLC: Radical-right violence continues to plague U.S. as number of extremist groups declines

[inanna]

03/10/2015

...

The SPLC found in its annual census that the number of hate groups operating in 2014 was 17 percent lower than in 2013.

Antigovernment “Patriot” groups – armed militias and others animated by conspiracy theories about the federal government – fell by 20 percent during the same period.

“The drop in the number of extremist groups doesn’t tell the entire story,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC and editor of the Intelligence Report. “It appears that extremists are leaving these groups for the anonymity of the Internet, which allows their message to reach a huge audience. Domestic terrorists and other extremists with criminal intentions also are increasingly acting alone, choosing to commit lethal attacks without the help of an organized group.”

Extremist violence, in fact, is continuing at levels comparable to the 1990s, at the height of that decade’s militia movement. But rather than coming from organized groups, fully 90 percent of domestic terrorist attacks in recent years have been carried out by “lone wolves” or pairs of extremists who don’t belong to any organization.

cont'd...

Link: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-s-intelligence-report-radical-right-violence-continues-to-plague-us-as-number

The updated SPLC Hate Group Map:

[inanna]

1. I'd really encourage people to read the actual SPLC report:

The Year in Hate and Extremism

Excerpt:

Power of the Internet

The move to cyberspace is reflected in the large numbers of people joining Stormfront, the largest and most active radical-right Web forum in America, especially since Obama became the nation's first black president in early 2009. That year, the site added 32,736 registered users, its largest numerical growth ever. In later years, the numbers of users steadily increased and today, the total of registered users is just shy of 300,000, a fairly astounding number for a site run by an ex-felon and former Alabama Klan leader. And that doesn't include thousands of visitors who never register as users. At press time, Stormfront ranked as the Internet's 13,648th most popular site, while the NAACP site, by comparison, ranked 32,640th.

Moreover, the action is not at all limited to Stormfront. Another major American forum, the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network, is highly active as well, although it does not provide numbers of users. In addition, while Facebook has largely kicked haters off its network, large numbers of American extremists (along with those of many other nations) have migrated to VK, a huge Russian online social network that is much more welcoming to those with radical-right views. There, many extremists congregate anonymously in password-protected forums.

This kind of activity in cyberspace has expanded to other sites. That can be seen clearly in the propagation of often incredibly hateful forums on Reddit, which favors untrammeled free speech over the kind of rules that govern Facebook. And it’s not only on forums like VK and Reddit, which don’t bother to police hateful posts or comments. Increasingly, hateful views and propaganda appear regularly in newspaper and blog comment fields. There has been a conscious move on the part of U.S. extremists in recent years to propagate extreme-right memes, slogans and arguments on such mainstream sites.

Violent radicals are finding one another on the Internet as well. An example of that is Die Auserwählten, a small but incredibly violent skinhead crew that was started in 2013 by a Nebraska man. Members of the short-lived group - it collapsed in 2014 amid a raft of criminal charges - met each other in cyberspace.

[FargoGuy]

2. FTA: At press time, Stormfront ranked as the Internet's 13,648th most popular site,

while the NAACP site, by comparison, ranked 32,640th.

At the moment Alexa traffic rank for DU is 3150 with 221,696 user registrations.

Looks to me that the real "power of the internet" is that it keeps people busy doing message boards while real people with real lives go about their everyday business.

[inanna]

3. Welcome to the DU message board. n/t