The Southern Poverty Law Center has been showing an increase in the number of these groups for a quite a while. They are not confined to the Old Confederacy. SPLC hate group map. Current SPLC Intelligence report. 2008 summary. You can subscribe to the report and search their archives. I recommend.

The two groups that concern me the most are the KKK and Neo-Nazi groups, though they are not the only ones. It looks to me like they are stepping up their recruiting efforts, and read a while back in a trustworthy source that the military has a problem with white supremacists joining up, volunteering for combat units, and then returning to civilian life with those skills. A sort of “train the trainer” from hell. If you just scanned the The Timothy McVeigh Finishing School the first time around, you might want to give it a close read. It’s an important piece of this puzzle.

I want to be clear about what I know versus what I just think, and do my best to avoid fearmongering, so this is going to take a little work.

Here is a plain English story that I am comfortable labeling a historical account, with a little psychology thrown in toward the end for good measure. Everything in here is there either because I am sure research will confirm it, or because I live down here and knew it was going on at the time.

(caution: rant zone ahead)

Last night I finished up six days in Wonderland.

You see, last week I agreed to allow Part 4 of my “Sexism and Misogyny” series to be serialized at FDL. That was a mistake. Part 4 was really just one big fat footnote to the rest of the series, that explained a nice big chunk in the variance in the levels of evidence of sexism. The only reason it wasn’t a footnote is because it took too long to explain that while the variance was related to the percentage of black voters in the electorate, the cause of the variance was the “shift” in the white vote that occurs in conjunction with the increase in the percentage of the black vote.

Now, even my eyes glazed over while writing that last sentence, so I’m assuming that most of yours did too while reading it.