The stress of a poor economy and a liberal administration led by a black president are among the causes for the recent rise, the report from the Southern Poverty Law Center says. Conspiracy theories about a secret Mexican plan to reclaim the Southwest are also growing amid the public debate about illegal immigration.

Bart McEntire, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told SPLC researchers that this is the most growth he’s seen in more than a decade.

‘All it’s lacking is a spark,’ McEntire said in the report.

It’s not a coincidence that Glenn Beck is begging his audience members not to go out and Timothy McVeigh anyone.

Hal Turner, an intermittent Internet radio talk show host and blogger, was arrested today by FBI agents at his home in North Bergen, N.J., on a federal complaint filed in Chicago alleging that he made Internet postings threatening to assault and murder three federal appeals court judges in Chicago in retaliation for their recent ruling upholding handgun bans in Chicago and a suburb.

Internet postings on June 2 and 3 proclaimed ‘outrage’ over the June 2, 2009, handgun decision by Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook and Judges Richard Posner and William Bauer, of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, further stating, among other things: ‘Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed.’ The postings included photographs, phone numbers, work address and room numbers of these judges, along with a photo of the building in which they work and a map of its location.

Turner, 47, of North Bergen, N.J., was arrested this morning after FBI agents went to his residence to execute a search warrant. He was charged with threatening to assault and murder three federal judges with intent to retaliate against them for performing official duties in a criminal complaint filed today in U.S. District Court in Chicago. He is scheduled to have an initial court appearance at 12:30 p.m. tomorrow (Thursday) before U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael A. Shipp in U.S. District Court in Newark.

‘We take threats to federal judges very seriously. Period,’ said Patrick J. Fitzgerald, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who announced the charges with Robert D. Grant, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Chicago Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey and the FBI Office in Newark are providing local assistance.

This last comment was a reference to popular right-wing conspiracy theories about Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)-constructed prisons and concentration camps for U.S. citizens. Such conspiracy theories had long been staples of the militia movement, but received a reinvigorating shot in the arm following the election of Barack Obama as president. Almost overnight, right-wing conspiracists across the country revived all of their 1990s militia conspiracy theories about the “New World Order,” planned gun confiscations, and government plots against the citizenry. Once more, wild speculations about SHTF (“s—t hits the fan”) and TEOTWAKI (“the end of the world as we know it”) scenarios became rampant.

Poplawski bought into the SHTF/TEOTWAKI conspiracy theories hook, line and sinker, even posting a link to Stormfront of a YouTube video featuring talk show host Glenn Beck talking about FEMA camps with Congressman Ron Paul.

So Oliver might want to become better informed before he wildly accuses mainstream conservative outlets of promoting “conspiracy theories.” The Obama is a Muslim – wasn’t born here – fake birth certificate – is a terrorst – crew are relegated to the fringes of conservatism with most mainstream conservatives condemning the idiocy.

Andy McCarthy on National Review Online, July 6, 2008:

Our Jim Geraghty seemed to pooh-pooh the birth certificate controversy about a week ago, but according to the above cited report (at a site called DougRoss@Journal) and a new one from Israeli Insider, there are new developments, and the Obama campaign appears to be stonewalling. Shouldn’t it be a fairly easy matter to prove he was born in Hawaii if he really was? Why wouldn’t Obama just end this quickly?

Granted, National Review is the sort of publication that once advocated against Martin Luther King so it should be consigned to the fringes of American society. But alas, what is fringe and nutty to most Americans is mainstream conservative thought. Like the National Review. Like the ideas being pushed by Fox News, right wing radio and the like about Democrats and liberals from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama.

The right refuses to acknowledge the consequences of the atmosphere they helped create and continue to foster, so its up to regular Joes like myself to point them out.

Also:

UPDATE: Ooooh, this one clearly rankles old Insty, because he actually responded… Oh, no he didn’t. He called me a “shill” for Media Matters and accused me of being on a listserv. Its days like this I’m glad that when I was deciding what side of the political aisle I wanted to be on, I didn’t make the same mistake as Glenn Reynolds and choose the one where we encourage people to shoot cops. Also, kind of funny for Reynolds to call me a shill when he spent years writing articles for a lobbyist and is a key figurehead in the joke that is “PajamasTV”. But whatever, this clearly annoyed The Prickly One.

UPDATE 2: Reynolds has updated his post again. First, “Jim Treacher emails”. Funny, this isn’t the first time that has happened. In the past Reynolds has forwarded me attacks that Jim Treacher, who last I checked is some kind of comedy writer for the unfunny RedEye show on Fox News (apparently Treacher doesn’t write for Red Eye, but wrote a blog for the unfunny guy who hosts the ridiculously unfunny Redeye or some crap that I don’t care about, but I do know for sure Treacher sends cowardly emails to Reynolds about me), sent to him. Apparently they’re some kind of email buddies and Treacher isn’t the guy who can’t talk to your face without big bad Instapundit to back him up.

Then, Reynolds characterizes himself as “an early booster of Oliver Willis’s blogging career”. Hmmm. I started blogging a while before he did, and in the aftermath of 9/11 we linked back and forth. We agreed on the invasion of Afghanistan, but when Reynolds started advocating for the invasion of Iraq and calling those who were against it pro-Saddam anti-Americans I and others called that out for the bullshit it is and was. Reynolds, as is the usual tactic from him and the right, tries somehow to change history and make out that when I began working for Media Matters it changed my outlook on things. Oh, to be as intellectually dishonest as Glenn Harland Reynolds and have to look at yourself in the mirror every morning, knowing that you’ve built an entire media persona and career filled with excrement and that you’re past the point of no return on it. I would have sympathy for him, but he signed up for it on his own and churns out swill every day without anybody compelling him to.

Furthermore, Reynolds has an almost patholigical aversion to pushing out his own position and instead hides behind others. My guess is he does it because he’s wrong so often and get called on it, it must be easier to just link to someone and say “Heh. Read the whole thing.” Or say “so and so emailed me to say x”. Some of us, especially some of us liberals, have the balls to put our own opinions up and stand behind them.

Not to pat myself on the back – but I will anyways – I am one of those people.

ALSO: Don Surber jumps on Reynolds idiot train as well, doing the conservative thing they always do by trying to use a totally unrelated recent event as comparison. Surber’s argument is that because I didn’t write about the shooting in Oakland, somehow I can’t write about this one. Does the right understand that we are completely on to this silly game of theirs? We’ve watched it for years. The mainstream media laps up this “two sides” bull, but we don’t.

The shooting in Oakland was horrible, but the guy who did it was just a bad guy. The killing in Pittsburgh was the result of right-wingers spreading disinformation. This guy, already disturbed, was apparently helped over the edge by conspiracy theories pushed by the mainstream right in America.

August notes: “Wow, Oliver, you know you’ve pissed off Instapundit when he has to link to five other people’s thoughts.” Heh. Indeed.

A writer at Volokh report cites happiness studies to try and prove that people on Fox News haven’t been pushing paranoia about Obama being anti-gun (which is what I and others have ben saying). Or something. Oh, conservatives…. distraction is the name of the game.

Pittsburgh police say a man wearing a bulletproof vest opened fire on officers during a domestic disturbance call, killing three of them.

Police chief Nate Harper says the motive for Saturday’s shooting isn’t clear.

Friends say the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and that he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.

>> Was Pittsburgh shooter driven by right-wing gun paranoia about Obama?

>> In this video, Richard Poplawski’s friend says that he was concerned over “Zionist control of the government” which is a key belief of the extremist militia right.