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.

“We’ve worn handmade peace shirts every Thursday since the first week of school, without fail,” Skylar said.

But what started out as a light-hearted gesture soon started to be taken out of context.

Students started approaching the group members, yelling obscene things at them, said Lauren.

“People just turned on us like that,” she said. “At least 10 boys stood up and yelled things at me at once, and we couldn’t even walk through the halls without a harsh comment being made.”

The heckling began early in the school year, according to group members. They said they were putting small posters promoting peace on friends’ lockers with their permission.

They thought it was OK, because the cheerleaders and football players had signs on theirs. Eventually, though, group members said they were told by the school’s administration they could no longer hang up the posters.

“People tore them down and drew swastikas and ‘white power’ stuff on them,” Lauren said.

Skylar had similar things written on her posters.

“Someone taped an ‘I Love Bush’ sign over my ‘Wage Peace’ sign,” she said. “So I tore it down, threw it away, and the whole commons starting booing. I walk by later and find that someone has completely tore my sign down and placed an ‘I Love America, Because America Loves War’ sign up.”

—Students Wear Confederate Flag Shirts To Oppose Peace-Shirt Group, commondreams.org | sombrero tip to C&L

IT SAYS SOMETHING very revealing that there are young people who think that symbols made immortal by Adolf Hitler are a valid response to a peace sign today. Who see the confederate flag (and it is not being used here to represent "heritage," if you don't mind) as a sane response to a peace symbol. Who feel that White Supremacy is the counter-argument to those who ask to live without war between nations. And maybe those pundits who entertain the notion that the USA is engaged in wars of "Liberation" and such should look to the children, who so often lead the way. When we care to pay attention, that is. Because clearly, the kids are not misled. Not by our equivocating fairNBalanced frenzies. When they go crazy it is because of the binds we provide, a series of traps to which we've often long been blind. But those newer, more naive, less compromised and cluttered minds always suss out the truth behind our apathy-weighted sighs and rationalized diatribes. And they know what these wars are about. No, not about Freedom, or Peace, or Liberty, or Democracy, of course. Those are soundbytes for Fox-Watchers, para-citizens on brain vacation. The wars of our dear United States of America are about that dark desire that moves mobs to cheer a lynching; they are about about colonialism and imperialism and genocidal impulse and an all-too-human lust for dominance and violence and power at any cost.