According to a report released yesterday by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), right-wing extremist militia groups grew a shocking 37% just from 2014 to 2015 (202 identified groups to 276). Not surprisingly, the number of right-wing militias rocketed after President Obama's election to 334 in 2011, before declining. However, the 2014 standoff with Federal officials at the Bundy Klan ranch apparently encouraged the extremists to organize and initiate new extremist anti-Government actions. According to the director for the SPLC's Intelligence Project:
“We believe these armed extremists have been emboldened by what they saw as a clear victory at the Cliven Bundy ranch and the fact that no one was held accountable for taking up arms against agents of the federal government...When the federal government was stopped from enforcing the law at gunpoint, it energized the entire movement. The fact is, Bundy is still a free man and has not paid the money he owes to the federal government – and the militiamen who aimed rifles at federal agents have gotten away with it.” (emphasis added)These wingnut "militia" have learned that taking up arms against the Federal Government apparently has no cost…yet. It's a dangerous assumption, but they're "heroes" in their own paranoid and narcissistic comic book minds so they won't be dissuaded easily, if at all.
