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Ardem at Blue Arkansas reports a horrifying case (with graphic pictures of the cat, may not be safe for children):

Last night, I got the most chilling phone call I have ever received. It was Jake Burris, Ken Aden’s campaign manager. Last night, Jake and his four kids had come back to their Russellville home. As they were getting out of the car, one of his children discovered their family cat dead on the front porch. One side of the animal’s head had been bashed in and an eyeball was hanging out of its socket. But there was something even more horrifying to be found on the corpse.

Written across the animal’s fur in black marker was the word “LIBERAL“.

It does make you wonder if the perpetrator of this act has himself one of those "Liberal Hunting Licenses", doesn't it?
Scott Keyes at Think Progress reports:

Pope County, where Burris lives, is a highly-conservative area of Arkansas. Aden has been running for the 3rd congressional district seat, currently held by Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR), since August 2011. He released a statement on the matter this morning: “To kill a child’s pet is just unconscionable. As a former combat soldier, I’ve seen the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. Whoever did this is definitely part of the worst of humanity.”

Ken Aden is a Blue America candidate, so go read more about him.

As Ardem observes:

This is terrorism. There’s no other word for it. A police report has been filed. Jake said the kids seem to be handling it okay. The one that discovered the cat was too young to be able to read and Jake had quickly gotten the others into the house before they saw it. Pope County is an insanely conservative area and the Aden campaign has been shaking things up even there and it looks like another right wing sociopath with a taste for violence has come crawling out of the woodwork in response. I asked Aden for a comment on the record:

“This is sickening. To kill a child’s pet…I’m at a loss for words…I’ve seen the best and the worst of humanity, but this is something else.”

Both Ken and Jake though made it clear that they weren’t going to back down on the campaign trail, both agreeing that caving to this kind of behavior would only make things worse.

“I’ve got a gun and I know how to use it.”, Jake said. “If I have to protect my kids I’ll do it without hesitation.”

Most of you know I've written at length about this kind of right-wing behavior, especially in my book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. Unfortunately, the book's publisher went belly up in the past year, and it's currently hard to obtain, though we are working on at least making it available in Kindle form.

In any event, I thought I'd include some relevant passages, all from the Introduction:

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We know that right-wing thinkers like Peter King and Bill O'Reilly believe the only serious domestic-terrorism threat Americans face is from "radical Islam" and its adherents. So no doubt they will again turn a blind eye to the most recent case of right-wing domestic terrorism, this time involving a plan involving one of the most toxic biological agents -- ricin, which is lethal in small doses -- and explosives.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

Four North Georgia men accused of being members of a fringe militia group were arrested Tuesday by federal authorities for planning to make the deadly toxin ricin and obtain explosives, federal authorities said.

Authorities said that, beginning in March, the men held clandestine militia meetings and discussed using toxic agents and assassinations in an effort to undermine federal and state government and advance their interests.

The four men taken into federal custody are: Frederick Thomas, 73, of Cleveland, and Toccoa residents Dan Roberts, 67; Ray H. Adams, 65; and Samuel J. Crump, 68.

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Much as folks on the Right seem eager to dismiss the murderous rampage of Norwegian domestic terrorist Anders Breivik as yet another "isolated incident" involving someone who was mentally unstable, a lone wolf whose views had nothing to do with his violent act -- after all, it worked so well in the Gabrielle Giffords shooting -- the story is not going to go away so readily.

First, there's the news that Breivik says there are still "two cells" in his organization out there. So the terrorism may not be over and done with just yet.

Moreover, as we sift through the discernible facts about Breivik and his motives for embarking on a murderous rampage, it's becoming increasingly evident that he was an ardent right-winger -- but decidedly not a neo-Nazi or any other kind of fascist. Breivik did not belong to any overtly racist, white supremacist or anti-Semitic organizations.

Breivik's only known political affiliation is with the Progress Party, which is functionally Norway's version of the Tea Party. Indeed, Tea Party heavyweight Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity spoke at the Progress Party's national convention in Oslo last fall. (It would be interesting to determine if Breivik was in attendance; hopefully, some enterprising Norwegian journalist will look into it.)

This has produced some interesting commentary from the sane world, and a frantic scramble among right-wingers eager to distance themselves from this madman. In the New York Times, Scott Shane reported on the significance of Breivik's right-wing politics in inspiring his rampage -- and how the sources of that inspiration included supposedly mainstream conservatives:

His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.

More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists and renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.

... Mr. Breivik frequently cited another blog, Atlas Shrugs, and recommended the Gates of Vienna among Web sites. Pamela Geller, an outspoken critic of Islam who runs Atlas Shrugs, wrote on her blog Sunday that any assertion that she or other antijihad writers bore any responsibility for Mr. Breivik’s actions was “ridiculous.”

“If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists,” she wrote.

At the Atlantic, Joshua Foust tried his hand at a bit of sophistry to see if the culpability for Breivik could be scrubbed away from his political cohorts and the like-minded:

Behavior, ultimately, is a product of one's environment: ideas, yes, but also social pressure, family pressure, norms, constraints, inspirations, barriers, and expectations. Sometimes, these constraints push a man to do any number of heinous things. It doesn't excuse the man himself (at the end of the day, you always have the choice and the responsibility not to react to your circumstances violently), but it makes the question of "why" terribly difficult to understand. It is deeply complex.

Focusing only on Breivik's words, as the commentariat has done this weekend, is not just hypocrisy, it misses the point. Breivik wanted us to focus on his words -- in a way, his disgusting butchery was meant to advertise his writing. We owe his victims better than that, better than playing his game. Breivik the man was more than a book-length rant on race politics. He was the product of his own environment, one we have not even begun to understand. Moving from rhetoric into action is really difficult, and it happens for reasons we just don't understand. To really answer the question of why Breivik committed such atrocity, we have to move beyond his politics and his carefully placed manifesto. Anything less would be a disservice to the children he so ruthlessly murdered.

We commend Foust for his high principle, but we have a feeling that such complexity would not be admitted if the perpetrators had turned out to be Muslim. Certainly it is rare to see such considerations be applied to Islamic radicals. Rather, what happens uniformly among the "anti-jihadist" crowd (particularly Geller, Spencer, et. al.) is that they readily leap to condemn all of Islam for the acts of a few radicals whose motivations, indeed, are never considered "beyond their politics".

Indeed, the scramble among right-wing pundits to come up with some kind of decent rationale that will let them talk about Breivik -- or better yet, blame liberals or Muslims for him -- is on, as Media Matters reports. Over at Red State, a regular contributor tied Breivik's attack to the pro-choice movement and end-of-life issues. Then there's the post over at Breitbart's "Big Peace" site titled "Anders Behring Breivik: Jihadist":

This Norwegian terrorist was not a Christian or a conservative. He acted contrary to the teachings of the Bible and conservatives from Burke to Madison. He was instead a jihadist, blinded by an ideology who resorted to violence rather than engaging in a public debate of ideas. He was a coward who planted bombs and killed innocent people. For him, violence was the only answer. He claimed to be fighting jihadists...but he actually became one. He didn't kill one islamist [sic] terrorist with his actions-only innocent Norwegians. Change the location, and he acted like so many jihadists in the Middle East. He became one of them.

In a way, he's actually onto something, a reality that right-wingers themselves don't ever admit: Islamic radicals are themselves fundamentally right-wing ultra-conservatives in their orientation. They are devout anti-modernists who despise all things liberal. They have far more in common, in terms of their personal psychological orientations, with the anti-immigration radicals who dominate the modern Right, both in Europe and in the USA.

This is why you can put together a map of violent incidents over the past three years involving right-wing extremists in the USA and come up with 24 of them and counting, but you can't even begin to do the same with left-wing extremists because the map would be blank.

Let's be clear: Initially at least -- until it becomes condoned -- it is only a tiny subset of these movements that is ultimately inspired to violent action like this. The real question to ponder is: Why are right-wing movements so attractive to people who eventually act out violently?

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Some of our readers have been wondering C&L, of all places, jumped on the speculative bandwagon that presumed early on yesterday that the terrorist attacks in Norway were the work of Islamic radicals -- speculation that turned out, of course, to be dead wrong. After all, we have been warning for several years now that assuming that terrorism is the sole realm of brown-skinned Muslims is a recipe for disaster.

But the reality is that we, like everyone else, only published "is it Islamists?" speculation because that was the only speculation available from the so-called "terrorism experts. (And for what it's worth, we only posed it as a possibility with a question mark, and declined to speculate about the meaning of it in terms of Muslims.)

And the reason for it is that everyone in the press acted like a mindless pack in broadcasting the first bit of "expert" information that came along -- even though the "expert" in question was in fact completely wrong, and working from dubious information in the first place.

Benjamin Doherty at Electronic Intifada has the complete story of "How a clueless 'terrorism expert' set media suspicion on Muslims after Oslo horror", setting out the whole sequence of pack behavior:

The New York Times originally reported:

A terror group, Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or the Helpers of the Global Jihad, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the attack, according to Will McCants, a terrorism analyst at C.N.A., a research institute that studies terrorism.

In later editions, the story was revised to read:

Initial reports focused on the possibility of Islamic militants, in particular Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or Helpers of the Global Jihad, cited by some analysts as claiming responsibility for the attacks. American officials said the group was previously unknown and might not even exist.

The source is Will McCants, adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University. On his website he describes himself as formerly “Senior Adviser for Countering Violent Extremism at the U.S. Department of State, program manager of the Minerva Initiative at the Department of Defense, and fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.” This morning, he posted “Alleged Claim for Oslo Attacks” on his blog Jihadica:

This was posted by Abu Sulayman al-Nasir to the Arabic jihadi forum, Shmukh, around 10:30am EST (thread 118187). Shmukh is the main forum for Arabic-speaking jihadis who support al-Qaeda. Since the thread is now inaccessible (either locked or taken down), I am posting it here. I don’t have time at the moment to translate the whole thing but I translated the most important bits on twitter.

The Shmukh web site is not accessible to just anyone, so he is the primary source for this claim. McCants stated from the beginning that the claim had been removed or hidden, and on Twitter he even cast doubt on whether it was a claim of responsibility at all.

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... McCants later reported that the claim of responsibility was retracted by the author “Abu Sulayman al-Nasir.” Furthermore, according to McCants, the moderator of this forum declared that speculation about the attack would be prohibited because the contents of the forum were appearing in mainstream media. It does seem more than a little bit odd that genuine “jihadis” would post on a closed forum that a former US official and “counterterrorism expert” openly writes about infiltrating.

The result was that the NYT's bad reportage gave a green light to every other TV journalist and every so-called "terrorism expert" who only seemed to have information about Islamic terrorism to run wild speculating that this was a product of Muslim radicals. This was especially the case, of course, at Fox News, where Greg Burke quickly declared from his seat of expertise in Rome that "this looks like the work of Al Qaeda," as well as Fox "terrorism expert" Peter Neumann, who agreed wholeheartedly (with an assist from the network's chryon writer, too).

Moreover, as Doherty observes, none of these folks will ever pay the price for being dead wrong. After all, Steve Emerson -- who infamously led the American journalistic pack down the same dead end in 1995 by declaring the Oklahoma City bombing likely the work of Muslim radicals -- is still peddling his snake oil:

Disseminating false, unverifiable information should be a blemish on McCants’ credibility, but what is more likely is that his failure will harm other communities elsewhere before it harms his career.

Moreover, you have to wonder when the media will wake up and realize that their operative paradigm for understanding terrorism is broken. As we observed this morning about the attacks:

It's also a sobering reminder that, while we've been obsessing nationally over the supposed threat of Islamist radicals -- embodied by Peter King's haplessly myopic hearings on domestic terrorism -- the reality remains that right-wing extremist terrorism remains the most potent domestic-terrorism threat in America as well. Indeed, the number of violent domestic-terrorism incidents has been steadily rising for the past two years, but the threat has gone largely ignored. Indeed, the Obama administration has kowtowed to right-wing complaints by gutting our own government's intelligence-gathering capacities in this area.

Charles Pierce has a piece in this month's Esquire describing how, indeed, "the truth is, the overwhelming majority of our terrorism has always been homegrown. And it is times like these — times of anger and disaffection — when we turn on ourselves, and kill" (and he gives our work a nice shout-out, too):

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It looks like everyone's first guess (including ours) about the perpetrators of yesterday's terrorist attacks in Norway that killed 80 people -- that it was Islamist radicals -- was dead wrong.

Devin Burghart at IREHR has the wrapup:

Shortly before midnight on Friday, July 22, police arrested a 32-year-old Norwegian man who allegedly went on a murderous shooting spree at a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utoya and may also be responsible for the horrific bombing in Oslo earlier in the day.

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Anders Behring Breivik

The man arrested for the attack has been identified as Anders Behring Breivik. Norwegian TV2 reports that Breivik belongs to "right-wing circles" in Oslo. Sources in Norway tell IREHR that Breivik has been known to write posts in right-wing internet forums in Norway, where he has described himself as a “nationalist” and has also written numerous screeds critical of Muslims.

The Associated Press reports that Breivik has a Glock pistol, a rifle and a shotgun registered in the Norwegian gun registry. According to his Facebook page (since taken down), in 2009 Breivik established a business called GeoFarm, which he claimed to be engaged in the cultivation of vegetables. Such a business would give him access to large amounts of fertilizer, which could be used in the making of explosives.

According to witnesses in Utoya, the gunman was dressed as a police officer and gunned down young people as they ran for their lives at a youth camp. Police said Friday evening that they've linked the youth camp shooting and Oslo bombing. Late Friday, police also tell Reuters that the killings are of "catastrophic dimensions", and that the total number dead from the attacks may rise above eighty, just on Utoya. Seven people are currently reported dead from the Oslo bomb blast, though that number may climb.

William MacLean at Reuters reports that the attack signals an intensification in right-wing extremist activity in Europe, which was already rising significantly in recent years:

A report that Norway's bomb and gun rampage may be the work of a far-right militant confronts Europe with the possibility that a new paramilitary threat is emerging, a decade after al-Qaida's Sept. 11 attacks.

One analyst called the attacks possibly Europe's "Oklahoma City" moment, a reference to American right-wing militant Timothy McVeigh who detonated a truck bomb at a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.

Police forces in many western European countries worry about rising far-right sentiment, fueled by a toxic mix of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry and increasing economic hardship.

But violence, while sometimes fatal, has rarely escalated beyond group thuggery and the use of knives.

That may have changed in Oslo and on the holiday island of Utoya on Friday. Seven people were killed in a bombing in the capital — Western Europe's worst since the 2005 London al-Qaida-linked suicide attacks that killed 52 people — and at least 80 in a shooting rampage by a lake.

Independent Norwegian television TV2 reported on Saturday that the Norwegian man detained after the attacks had links to right-wing extremism.

Police were searching a flat in west Oslo where he lived, TV2 said.

"If true this would be pretty significant — such a far-right attack in Europe, and certainly Scandinavia, would be unprecedented," said Hagai Segal, a security specialist at New York University in London.

"It would be the European/Scandinavian equivalent of Oklahoma City — an attack by a individual (with extremist anti-government views, linked to certain groups) aimed at the government by attacking its buildings/institutions."

"The next key question is whether he was acting alone, or whether he is part of a group."

James Fallows has a tart reminder for those who, like Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, took that ounce of speculation and tried making a ton of speculative anti-Islamic hay out of it:

No, this is a sobering reminder for those who think it's too tedious to reserve judgment about horrifying events rather than instantly turning them into talking points for pre-conceived views. On a per capita basis, Norway lost twice as many people today as the U.S. did on 9/11. Imagine the political repercussions through the world if double-9/11-scale damage had been done by an al-Qaeda offshoot. The unbelievably sweeping damage is there in either case.

It's also a sobering reminder that, while we've been obsessing nationally over the supposed threat of Islamist radicals -- embodied by Peter King's haplessly myopic hearings on domestic terrorism -- the reality remains that right-wing extremist terrorism remains the most potent domestic-terrorism threat in America as well. Indeed, the number of violent domestic-terrorism incidents has been steadily rising for the past two years, but the threat has gone largely ignored. Indeed, the Obama administration has kowtowed to right-wing complaints by gutting our own government's intelligence-gathering capacities in this area.

We shouldn't assume that this is a problem isolated to Europe -- especially given the track record of right-wing extremists in the USA in recent years.

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Militiamen are really a bunch of bad pennies who just keep popping back up:

LOLO - A former militia leader who went on the run Sunday after allegedly shooting at Missoula County sheriff's deputies seems well-equipped for a long sojourn in the woods, given the caches of weapons, food and gear already discovered, Undersheriff Mike Dominick said Monday.

Some 65 county, city, state and federal authorities combed a 30-square-mile area west of Lolo on Monday for David Burgert, who once led Project 7, a Flathead County militia group accused of plotting to assassinate judges and law enforcement officers in hopes of provoking a war with the federal government and NATO.

Burgert holds intense anti-government views, and has survivalist skills, Dominick said.

"He has that type of mentality where he believes in training, in preparation," he said. "... This guy seems to have had a plan."

Authorities discovered ammunition in the Jeep Cherokee in which Burgert originally fled on Sunday and also located a second car, loaded with ammunition, food and camping gear, that they believe belongs to Burgert. They're searching for yet another that Dominick described as a tan or red Jeep Wagoneer-type vehicle dating to the 1980s.

I reported on Burgert's original spree back when it happened:

Kalispell made the news last year when a militia outfit called Project 7 was broken up by local police. Its leader, a 38-year-old named David Burgert, was arrested for jumping bail on an earlier conviction for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest; when captured, officers uncovered him in possession of an arms cache of about 30 weapons and some 30,000 rounds of ammo.66

What was even more disturbing was the simultaneous discovery of his plans for this materiel: To run amok in a killing spree against local authorities. Burgert had organized a team of about 10 people to target some 26 city and county officials, including some of those same police officials, mayors and judges who came out for the potluck last summer.

Burgert, who received support from the usual far-right suspects, eventually pleaded guilty to federal firearms charges in the case, and faces a maximum 10-year prison term when he's sentenced in September. But no one has ever been charged in the alleged conspiracy, partly because any evidence that the plot extended much beyond Burgert's fantasies was not very strong. He has countered by filing a lawsuit against the FBI and Montana's state Division of Criminal Investigation.

Of course, we've been reporting for quite some time now that the Patriot movement of the 1990s is fully resurgent in 2011, thanks in large part to its close associations with the Tea Party movement. Indeed, we've reported that places like Montana are significant hotbeds for this kind of extremist revival.

David Holthouse at Media Matters observes that Burgert's fugitive run is occurring in the context of a fully resurgent extremist right in western Montana:

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[H/t Heather]

Apparently, the SPLC's intelligence director, Mark Potok agrees with our assessment of the Obama administration's disastrous failure to take right-wing domestic terrorism seriously. Here is on The Ed Show the other night, discussing the report in the Washington Post on ex-Homeland Security analyst Daryl Johnson raising the red flag on the issue:

POTOK: What it means in concrete terms is that law enforcement officials, agencies out there in the 50 states, are not getting the intelligence that was very useful to them in helping to understand what was going on out there.

What DHS really did or used to do was to produce intelligence. It wasn‘t so much building actual criminal cases as in intelligence as to what was going on out there on the radical right.

Daryl‘s report was really a very prescient report. It very much fell in line with our own independent findings. And of course, it was immediately confirmed. As it was being pilloried by people like Michelle Malkin, the columnist, by the American Leagues and so on, things were happening that absolutely confirmed it.

Very shortly after the leak of the report, for instance, George Tiller, an abortion provider, was murdered. Not long after that, I‘m sure viewers will remember, a guard was murdered at the Holocaust Museum by a well-known neo-Nazi.

And the list goes on and on. In January of this year, a man tried to murder hundreds of people at a Martin Luther King Day Parade in Spokane, Washington, A well known neo-Nazi, allegedly at least.

SCHULTZ: Daryl Johnson—

POTOK: So it‘s a disaster basically.

SCHULTZ: You spoke with him. How adamant is he about the fact that this lack of resources being focused here is really playing into the increase of some of these events that you are talking about?

POTOK: Well, Daryl is a friend. And I think that Daryl is really deeply concerned. And it is not only him. I know that he‘s received all kinds of messages in the last few days since he went public from other people in law enforcement, talking about how very right he was.

And, you know, the shame of this, as you suggested in your intro, is that Secretary Napolitano essentially seemed to have acted out of mere political cowardice. You know, the fact is that the DHS report of 2009 did not pillory conservatives. It did not suggest that all veterans were potential Timothy McVeighs or people who were concerned about abortion or immigration were terrorists.

And yet it was accused of all of those things. And the reaction of the Department of Homeland Security was after a very brief and kind of weak knee defense of the report, was to absolutely pull back and, moreover, to suggest that Daryl had gone out of normal channels, that this was an unauthorized release of the report, when in fact it had been fully authorized.

The secretary was briefed on the report by Daryl personally before it was released. And then beyond that, as you suggested already, the unit was gutted. It has produced not a single substantial report since the report of 2009. Daryl has left the agency, as have four other senior analysts there.

So essentially, the department is doing nothing because it is afraid of offending conservatives, or at least the leadership of the department.

Of course, we've been writing about this issue for awhile now. But it is yet further confirmation -- beyond simply the reported data already available -- that we have a serious problem on our hands.

Unfortunately, there has been no indication whatsoever from the administration that it intends to address the issue. Apparently it's bought into the Beltway Village narrative that merely bringing up these matters is deeply uncivil.

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[H/t Heather]

60 Minutes' Byron Pitt had a superb segment last night on the sovereign citizens movement, springboarding from the tragic case of Jerry and Joe Kane, two sovereign citizens who mowed down a couple of West Memphis, Arkansas, police officers before themselves being killed.

It was actually a well assembled and insightful piece of reporting, including the analysis provided by J.J. McNabb, who is unquestionably one of the leading experts on the movement from the outside. And while they let movement guru Alfred Adask run off at the mouth, in the end his own radicalism and complete lack of any connection to reality were made self-evident by his own words.

The only question is: Will Peter King finally listen and hold a congressional hearing on right-wing-extremist domestic terrorism, too?

The story particularly featured the work of Bob Paudert, the police chief in West Memphis father of one of the two slain officers. We've discussed Paudert's work previously (more here). He's been adamant that the information that could have saved his officers that day hadn't been disseminated to them because it was being bottled up.

Why is that happening? Well, as we noted then, we need look no further than the right-wing shriekosphere, which has done everything it can to demonize factual reportage of the actual threat of domestic terrorist activity from right-wing extremists:
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The incident was yet another reminder that one of the most significant ongoing threats to law enforcement officers in this country comes from right-wing extremists of the Patriot/"sovereign citizen" variety -- people who take Republicans' government-bashing rhetoric to its illogical extreme and declare themselves free of federal laws and functionally laws unto themselves. There are constant reminders of this threat -- from the Hutaree Militia to the Richard Poplawskis out there.

Of course, we all were witness to the right-wing shrieking over that Department of Homeland Security bulletin warning police officers around the country about the nature of this resurgent threat. That's because conservatives are more concerned about whitewashing away these embarrassments than they are with the lives of police officers. They like to use dead cops as props to attack liberals while loudly arguing, as Glenn Beck did a couple years ago, that even paying attention to such right-wing threats is a smear of mainstream conservatives.

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Last weekend, my old friend Bill Morlin wrote a major Sunday piece for the Spokane Spokesman-Review describing how the old scourge of white-supremacist hatred and the violence that always accompanies it has been on the rise again:

There’s also been a spike in racist activity and hate crimes in Spokane and other Pacific Northwest communities – indeed, almost everywhere in the United States.

Racist graffiti, acts of malicious harassment and distribution of hate literature in 1980 marked the emergence of the Aryan Nations in North Idaho, recalls Marshall Mend, a founding member of the human relations task force.

For nearly three decades, the Aryans and their splinter-group associates were responsible for a series of crimes, including murders and bombings, throughout the United States. The Aryan Nations held annual gatherings of hatemongers, burned KKK crosses and even got permits for disruptive parades down Sherman Avenue in Coeur d’Alene, all of which severely tarnished the region’s image.

Most local hate activity disappeared with a multimillion-dollar court verdict in 2000 that bankrupted the Aryan Nations. Four years later, Aryan founder Richard Butler died, and some wishfully thought hate, too, had disappeared in this region.

Now, though, there are two new self-proclaimed Aryan leaders in North Idaho – Gerald O’Brien and Paul Mullet – who are fighting each other for power. There are two competing Aryan Web sites. Another splinter faction, the Aryan Nations Revival, based in New York state, dissolved last week and, according to a Web posting, threw its support to O’Brien’s faction.

Meanwhile, almost a dozen hate crimes have been reported in the past 14 months to authorities in Kootenai and Spokane counties.

The region’s spike in hate crimes follows a national trend that started after the country elected its first black president in 2008. Besides more hate groups, experts say they also are seeing an increase in secretive, anti-government militia activity.

Sure enough, in the week that followed, there were three major stories involving white-supremacist violence in the Inland Empire.

First came the arrest of a Pullman white supremacist who apparently was leading hate-crime attacks on taco-truck drivers. No, really:

A Whitman County man who bragged online about being involved with racist taco truck protests in Kootenai County was arrested on a federal gun charge Wednesday.

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The chief suspect in the would-be domestic-terrorism bombing of a Colorado shopping mall was arrested today outside another mall:

Earl Albert Moore, 65, was taken into custody by the FBI, but it wasn't immediately clear where he was being held.

Police spokeswoman Kim Kobel told KMGH-TV that a shopper spotted Moore in a coffee shop inside the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday. The shopper called 911 after alerting a store manager.

Moore left the store when police arrived, but when officers ordered him to lie on the ground, he complied, Kobel said.

Authorities have been searching for him since the explosives were discovered April 20 at the Southwest Plaza Mall in the south Denver suburbs. The bomb and tanks were found after a fire, but they didn't detonate. No injuries were reported.

There is a high likelihood that Moore was associated with some kind of white-supremacist belief system, since he has tattoos indicating such a background, as well as a history of tax resistance and many years in prison. We'll be monitoring the case closely as a result.

One of the experts interviewed by 9News who (accurately) predicted the search would not last long had this to say about the would-be bomber's motives:

While the majority of his crimes seemed to benefit himself, this latest bombing attempt could have caused serious injuries or death, had the device worked properly.

"This was more a vengeance, more of an attempt to deliver a message to someone or some company or institution," Pence said. "By doing it, it is going to instill fear in a lot of people, particularly when you do it in a public place."