From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Now back to the FBI raids on that Michigan-based militia group, which is now accused of hatching plans to kill police officers, as the group members said they were waiting for the coming of the Antichrist.

The news that a militia group called Houtari

had been foiled in its plot to foment a violent uprising

capped a week of verbal and physical rage

that ricocheted around U.S. politics.

The intensity of the Houtari's anger

and the looniness of their plot

seemed to have taken the media by surprise,

but it didn't particularly shock Mark

Potock. The information director for the Southern Poverty Law Center and former journalist

who covered the rise of the militia movement in the 1990s, Potock leads the center's annual

census of hate groups and extremism. The most recent study just published found that in the last

18 months, and shortly before President Obama's election, the number of right-wing hate

groups had grown to 512, an increase of 244 percent, and anti-immigrant vigilante groups

soared by nearly 80%.

Potock's job is to ferret out these groups and their plans,

but he says that much of their anger and alienation is hiding in plain sight,

as the Houtari's website, complete with paramilitary videos, showed all too well.

A great many of them are quite easy to find.

I mean, we had found the Houtari militia long before these indictments about a year earlier.

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