Mark Potok

Former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, the author of his state's draconian anti-immigrant S.B. 1070 law, issued a statement last night denouncing "the local media" for attempting to tie him to J.T. Ready, the neo-Nazi who is believed to have murdered four people earlier in the day before being...

The National Rifle Association (NRA) -- the powerful gun lobby that has called federal law enforcement agents "jack-booted thugs," accused President Obama of having secret plans to strip away Americans' guns, and been the main force behind the incredibly dangerous "Stand Your Ground" laws being used to justify the killing...

Black folks, this is a message for you: The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the country's preeminent group fighting against same-sex marriage, really, really likes you. They even want to make some of you famous!

Have NOM's principal leaders, former president Maggie Gallagher and current leader Brian S. Brown, stood...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,

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...

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...

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...

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...