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Mark Potok
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As director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project and editor of its award-winning, quarterly investigative journal Intelligence Report, Mark Potok leads one of the most highly regarded operations monitoring the extreme right in the world today. In addition to editing the magazine and the Hatewatch blog, Potok acts as a key spokesman for the SPLC, a well-known civil rights organization based in Alabama, and has testified before the Senate, the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights and in other venues. Before coming to the SPLC in 1997, Potok spent almost 20 years as an award-winning reporter at newspapers including USA Today, the Dallas Times Herald and The Miami Herald. While at USA Today, he covered the 1993 siege in Waco, the rise of militias, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the trial of Timothy McVeigh. In 1996, his editors nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize for a package of stories on racism in Texas public housing. In his current position, Potok is regularly quoted by major media, scholars and book authors in both the United States and abroad.

Blog Entries by Mark Potok

Once Again, FAIR Reveals Its Heartlessness

Posted February 3, 2012 | 2/3/12

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has never been a pleasant organization. Its top leaders have warned shrilly of a "Latin onslaught," defended a racist 1924 quota system, insisted that America needs a "European-American majority," and fretted that Latinos are "outbreeding" white people. Its founder has sought...

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New SPLC Intelligence Report: The Rhetoric of War

Posted November 15, 2011 | 11/15/11

Something is happening on the radical right. Even as the presidential campaign season heats up and, with it, the possibility of ridding themselves of their hated black president, extremists are ratcheting up the rhetoric of war.

The League of the South, for instance, has long been threatening a...

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FBI Reports Dramatic Spike in Anti-Muslim Hate Violence

Posted November 14, 2011 | 11/14/11

Anti-Muslim hate crimes soared by an astounding 50% last year, skyrocketing over 2009 levels in a year marked by the vicious rhetoric of Islam-bashing politicians and activists, especially over the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" in New York City.

Although the national statistics compiled by the FBI each year are...

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Alleged Georgia Plotters Belonged to Racist, Anti-Semitic Group

Posted November 3, 2011 | 11/3/11

The FBI undercover tapes of four North Georgia militiamen arrested Tuesday offer an extraordinary glimpse of the terrorism the group is accused of planning. Details of how they allegedly intended to commit mass murder with deadly ricin, carry out assassinations of officials, and bomb government buildings abound in government...

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Values Voter Summit -- Or Anti-LGBT Hate Fest?

Posted October 7, 2011 | 10/7/11

Starting today, a number of prominent public figures will be attending and speaking at the Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of socially conservative activists in Washington. But just what kind of values are they promoting?

The summit is hosted by the Family Research Council (FRC) and co-hosted...

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DOJ Says Suffolk County, N.Y., Police Need Improvements on Hate Crimes

Posted September 16, 2011 | 9/16/11

The Department of Justice (DOJ) sent a letter (pdf) to officials earlier urging non-mandatory improvements in the way that the Suffolk County, N.Y., Police Department (SFPD) investigates hate crimes and other practices. The preliminary findings letter was part of a DOJ investigation of the department's patterns and practices in...

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As 9/11 Anniversary Approaches, a Call for Balance

Posted August 23, 2011 | 8/23/11

Even before a Norwegian madman named Anders Behring Breivik opened fire this July on fellow citizens he believed were abetting large-scale Muslim immigration, it was clear that Islamophobic propaganda, much of it from American politicians and activists, was having a poisonous effect on Western societies.

And the revelation...

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Anti-Latino Hate Crimes Spike in California in Possible Trend

Posted August 12, 2011 | 8/12/11

Anti-Latino hate crimes in California spiked up by almost 50% last year, the state's attorney general's office reported Wednesday. That dramatic rise, from 81 such crimes in 2009 to 119 in 2010, followed a decade of declines.

The numbers may be indicative of a renewed national rise in hate...

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New White House Extremism Report Sober, Tepid

Posted August 3, 2011 | 8/3/11

The White House today released a new report, "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States," that describes a national plan to take on homegrown violent radicals of all types. It is broad, sober, careful not to assign blame to any particular community, and fairly uninspiring.

It's...

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Klansman Who Almost Got Away With Murder Dies in Prison

Posted August 3, 2011 | 8/3/11

James Ford Seale, a long-time member of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who very nearly got away with murder, has died. After serving less than four years of three life sentences for the 1964 murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, both...

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Let's Call the 'Birthers' What They Are

Posted April 28, 2011 | 4/28/11

Perhaps the time has come to state the obvious.

The people who have been selling claims that President Obama is not American -- the Donald Trumps, the Orly Taitzes, the miserable state legislators hawking their snake-oil laws insisting that presidential candidates prove their citizenship -- are mostly a pack of...

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Why Are Peter King's Hearings So Loathsome? Let Us Count the Ways

Posted March 9, 2011 | 3/9/11

Some people seem to have great difficulty in understanding why U.S. Rep. Peter King's hearings on radicalization of American Muslims, set to open this Thursday, are seen as so loathsome by so many. Let me try to explain.

Imagine, for starters, if another congressman -- say, Keith Ellison of...

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The Arizonification of America

Posted February 23, 2011 | 2/23/11

When even leading conservatives worry out loud about the right-wing vitriol and demonizing propaganda so commonplace in contemporary America, you've got to be concerned about where our country is headed.

This January, former President George W. Bush, speaking in a question-and-answer session at Texas' Southern Methodist University,

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Once Again, Racism Rears up in the Sons of Confederate Veterans

Posted February 11, 2011 | 2/11/11

For much of the last decade, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) has been roiled by an internal civil war between racial extremists and those who want to keep the Southern heritage group a kind of history and genealogy club.

It's beginning to look like the...

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Nativist Laws Wreak Havoc Across Nation

Posted January 24, 2011 | 1/24/11

In the last decade, high levels of non-white immigration have sparked a backlash against the changing racial makeup of the United States. Hate crimes against Latinos, who make up the bulk of the immigrants, have spiked. The number of racist hate groups has expanded by more than half. Frustration with...

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Who is Jared Lee Loughner?

Posted January 9, 2011 | 1/9/11

Is Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged mass murderer who shot U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, a right-wing extremist?

It's hard to say. When you look at the Internet material he purportedly produced, the first impression you get is that the 22-year-old now in custody for the shooting of 19...

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Responding to Attack by FRC, Conservative Republicans

Posted December 15, 2010 | 12/15/10

This morning, 22 members of Congress and a large number of other conservatives signed on to a public statement attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for listing several anti-gay religious right organizations as hate groups. Published in two Washington, D.C., newspapers as a full-page ad, the statement was...

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Tony Perkins Defends Family Research Council, Sort of

Posted December 1, 2010 | 12/1/10

I went up against Tony Perkins, the head of the hard-line anti-gay group Family Research Council (FRC), on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews earlier this week. Perkins was there to defend his organization after the SPLC listed it as a hate group last week. The whole experience was like...

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James Jay Lee, Apparent Eco-Terrorist Hostage-Taker, Zeroes in on Immigrants

Posted September 1, 2010 | 9/1/10

The gunman holding hostages in the Silver Spring, Md., headquarters of the Discovery Channel has been tentatively identified as James Jay Lee, an apparent eco-fascist who thinks that immigrants are breeding "filthy human children" and helping to wreck the planet. Lee, 43, had been arrested in February 2008 at a...

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The Paranoid Style: Conspiracy Theories Gain Traction

Posted August 12, 2010 | 8/12/10

In West Memphis, Ark., a man and his son shoot two police officers to death after being pulled over. In Washington, D.C., one man murders a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, while a year later another badly wounds two Pentagon police officers. In Austin, Texas, a man commits...

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