Boo!

In the hysterical tradition of Janet Nincompoopitano's Homeland Security outfit, an organization called the Southern Poverty Law Center is raising the spectre of scary, knuckle-dragging, gun-toting right-wingers on the loose and running wild in Obamaland. 

Who are these terrifying forces? According to the SPCU they include skin-heads, John Birchers, KKKers, tea baggers, foes of big government, FOX TV and, oh yeah, Glenn Beck. In other words, anyone--and everyone--who opposes the Obama agenda. (There's method to this "lump 'em all together" madness--it tars everyone who objects to the saintly leftist ideology as a bigot and extremist.) Here's a taste of the SPLC's latest analysis of the dire situation, as reported in lefty rag The Guardian:

The US is facing a surge in anti-government extremist groups and armed militias, driven by deepening hostility on the right to Barack Obama, anger over the economy, and the increasing propagation of conspiracy theories by parts of the mass media such as Fox News.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre, the US's most prominent civil rights group focused on hate organisations, said in a report that extremist "patriot" groups "came roaring back to life" last year as their number jumped nearly 250% to more than 500 with deepening ties to conservative mainstream politics.

The SPLC report, called Rage on the Right, said the rise in extremist groups was "a cause for grave concern" given their propensity to use violence during their heyday in the 90s, most notably with the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. It added that the issues driving support for such groups were increasingly populist and that "signs of growing radicalisation are everywhere".

"Patriot groups have been fuelled by anger over the changing demographics of the country, the soaring public debt, the troubled economy and an array of initiatives by President Obama that have been branded "socialist" or even "fascist" by his political opponents," the report said.

"Already there are signs of … violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, rightwing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation's first black president. One man from Brockton, Massachusetts – who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites – is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama's inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with anti-government, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases."

The report says the patriot movement has "made significant inroads into the conservative political scene" in part driven by a growing view of the US administration "as part of a plot to impose 'one-world government' on liberty-loving Americans".

"The Tea Parties and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism," the report says.

The SPLC notes that the rise comes as part of a deepening disillusionment with government in which just one quarter of Americans think government can be trusted. It said that a recent poll found that the anti-tax Tea Party movement is viewed in more positive terms than the Democratic or Republican parties...

Ooooo. Scary. But not nearly as scary as the genuine threat of jihadi laddies shouting "Allahu Akbar!" as they mow down people at an army base, or adorn their gonads with a plastic explosive in order to bring down an airliner full of infidels. But you wouldn't expect a far-left outfit like the SPLC to go into any of that, would you?

Update: OMIGOD! Guess who uses the SPLC to bolster its case for censoring the 'Net? The Jennifer Lynch mob, that's who. But I thought Conservative appointee Jen would have, you know, a conservative worldview. What's up with that? Mark Steyn explains:

A year or two back, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me saying, "You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense."

Makes perfect sense. Except that Canada already has a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the "human rights" commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference.

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists — sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate" statists, but always statists.

Oh.