NPR: Southern Poverty Law Center highlights extremism on the right, scary stuff

The Southern Poverty Law Center highlights extremism on the right, scary stuff, here's their Intelligence Report, Spring 2010, Issue Number: 137.

NPR had a great piece on yesterday highlighting the return of rightwing extremism, the piece is certainly worth a listen, if you're not disturbed you should be!

Some scary polling on the Republican Party:

-Angry anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80 percent last year.

-In 2009, militias and the larger Patriot movement grew with 363 new militias and related groups, an increase of 244 percent.

-Two-thirds of Republicans think Obama is a socialist.

-57 percent think he's a Muslim.

-40 percent of Republicans agree with the birthers in their belief that Obama was not born in the United States and is therefore not eligible to be president.

-38 percent of Republicans say President Obama is doing many of the things that Hitler did.

-24 percent of Republicans say Obama may be the anti-Christ.



Here's a tidbit of some extremist ideology:

"One of the interesting things about the meeting was how kind of non-denominational it was. I mean, there were Holocaust deniers there. There were anti-Semites. There were also people who have none of those feelings, who are all about the idea that the federal income tax is unconstitutional.

Many people in tax protest world believe that they are so-called sovereign citizens. This was an idea that was very much a part of the militia movement in the 1990s as well. Well, that idea of sovereign citizenship really comes directly from racist groups in the 1980s and 1970s, which came up with this idea basically that essentially God has handed America to the white man.

So white people are the organic citizens of this country. We're the ones who are connected by God to the land. Then that means that no one can tell us what to do. It's God who gave us this country. There's no government that can tell us to pay taxes or to have drivers licenses or car registrations or any of those things.

The other piece of this idea is that the other people are so-called 14th Amendment citizens - that is, people who were made citizens by the 14th Amendment, which of course made citizens of former slaves. So you know, it has this fundamental racist idea at its base, or at least much of the tax protest movement does."