The Southern Poverty Law Center's annual report just came out, and it reported that there was a 244% increase in the amount of "Patriot" groups forming. These groups espouse anti-government conspiracy theories and blind Patriotic messages of upholding the constitution. This rise blamed on the state of the economy, frustrations of unemployment, and derivations of rhetoric coming out of the Tea Party movement.There was a 40% overall increase in hate groups throughout the U.S. in the past year. The report also sites a number of crimes connected to these hate groups in the past year.
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-report-number-of-patriot-groups-militias-surges-by-244-in-past-year
In the report they talked about a moving toward a bit of a threshold. In my opinion I very much believe that this report is related to the events at the various universities. I think that frustration, especially economic frustration is a potent variable when it comes to expressing prejudice and hate toward the out-group. Moreover, when frustration is fueled by conspiracy theories, fear mongering, and misinformation, the corollaries are to sure to be hateful and harmful.
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-report-number-of-patriot-groups-militias-surges-by-244-in-past-year
In the report they talked about a moving toward a bit of a threshold. In my opinion I very much believe that this report is related to the events at the various universities. I think that frustration, especially economic frustration is a potent variable when it comes to expressing prejudice and hate toward the out-group. Moreover, when frustration is fueled by conspiracy theories, fear mongering, and misinformation, the corollaries are to sure to be hateful and harmful.
This is rather disconcerting. A lot of these groups are government distrust groups, and it makes scene that they would be increasing over the last year. Most of them are right wing groups, so they have the stimulus package to rally behind as a bad thing, and the democrats to blame because they have been in power. They also have fox news going off the deep end telling them that everyone hates the government. With such a skewed vision of what the country is like there are going to be more groups cropping up.
I was encouraged to see that Iowa only had 5 groups, and 3 of those are "We Are Change", a group that thinks that the government was behind 9/11. It’s still nuts, but it focuses on older problems rather than newer ones. We also don't have any militia groups and that makes me happy. We don't have the lowest numbers (DC only having 2 and some states with 3), but we are a long way off from Michigan (47) or Texas (52).
The question becomes how can we slow the growth of these types of groups. If we could get news stations to report in a more balanced way it would help. The people who are not yet members of groups like these would become less polarized (or stop trusting their news source). The problem is that people who are already members of these groups will just ignore information that is contrary to their world view, so reducing the number of groups could take a long time, because some members may have to age out of the group.
What do you all think we could do to reduce the growth of these groups?