Source: The Phoenix

As director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, Mark Potok spends his days monitoring organized extremism and more ad-hoc manifestations of right-wing hatred. And early this past November, Potok was a busy man. The server for stormfront.org, the Web site of the world’s largest white-supremacist organization, crashed immediately after Election Day; so did the server for cofcc.org, the Web site of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group dedicated to “advocating against minorities and racial integration.”

What’s more, says Potok, there was a sharp spike in on-the-ground anti-Obama incidents following the election. Obama was hung in effigy, he says; Obama supporters had crosses burned in their yards; an Obama volunteer was beaten in New Orleans; kids on a school bus in Idaho struck up an “assassinate Obama” chant.

“Here, we’re not really talking about a white-supremacist backlash,” Potok contends. “The way I read it, this was very much a backlash from a sector of mainstream white America. That’s what was most remarkable about it. Those kids in Idaho — that stuff doesn’t come out of nowhere.”

But then . . . things got quiet. “Within two to three weeks after the election,” says Potok, “most of this just disappeared. Clearly, the immediate signs of an angry backlash have subsided. And whether it’s something that’s going to reverberate into the future is really in question.”

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