ABSTRACT
The Washington Post reported that the indictments brought to twenty-eight the number of White Patriots and Klansmen who had been charged with violent crimes in North Carolina in the previous eighteen months. The accounts of the violent events are intended to persuade the reader that radical right activity, though it may not pose a mortal threat to the republic, does represent an exceedingly serious political phenomenon to which attention should be paid. The most numerous kind of radical right group active in the United States is linked to a particular theology, Christian Identity. Affiliation with radical right groups is rarely as formalized as, say, membership in the American Medical Association. Radical right activism also has some allure for prison inmates and professional criminals. The information concerning the social composition of the Radical Right, both leaders and followers, furnished in the accounts is hardly comprehensive.
