Robert L. Duecaster helps lead a nativist extremist group and regularly makes defamatory comments about Catholics, Muslims and undocumented immigrants, calling the latter in an October 2007 blog post “an invasion of parasites set on reducing this country to the levels of their own.”

But all that didn’t stop the Prince William (Va.) Board of County Supervisors from appointing him to a committee that will influence county decision making on human services policy and budget priorities. After a closed-door discussion, the board voted 5-3 on Sept. 16 to approve Duecaster’s nomination to the Human Services Strategic Goals Task Force, which will develop a roadmap for the next four years of human services planning.

Duecaster is secretary of Help Save Manassas, an anti-immigration group that has spawned other “Help Save” chapters in Virginia and Maryland. In 2007, he helped author a local ordinance aimed at denying county services to undocumented immigrants and empowering local police to enforce federal immigration law. County officials later softened the ordinance because of concerns that it could lead to racial profiling.

Duecaster is known for his inflammatory remarks. “This country is being invaded no less than if hordes of armed people came across its borders,” he said during an October 2007 county supervisors meeting. “This invasion is not armed, but they’ve got weapons. The weapons that they use are their anchor babies. … This invasion is being funded by foreign governments.” He offered another dire warning to the supervisors in April 2008: “You’re at an historic crossroad today. You can fund and continue to enforce the rule of law resolution or you can let it go by the wayside and watch this county and the rest of this region degenerate into a third world slum.” ( continue to full post… )

Two years after glorifying the border vigilante movement in Minutemen: Battle to Secure America’s Borders, a book he co-authored with Minuteman Project leader Jim Gilchrist, right-wing propagandist and conspiracy hound Jerome Corsi found himself being deported—from Kenya.

Immigration agents in Nairobi detained Corsi earlier today because, as one official told the New York Times, “His immigration forms were not in order.”

Corsi was on his way to a press conference when he was taken into custody and forced to surrender his passport.

It wasn’t the first time in recent months that Corsi’s attempts to generate publicity have gone awry. In mid-August, just as Corsi was in the midst of a blitz of media appearances to promote his latest bestseller, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, Hatewatch revealed that Corsi had recently been a guest on the Political Cesspool, an overtly anti-Semitic and white supremacist radio show, and that he was scheduled to appear on the show again. (Corsi subsequently backed out of the second Cesspool appearance).

According to WorldNetDaily, a far-right website to which he’s a prolific contributor, Corsi had been invited to Kenya by Christian missionaries who are concerned about the spread of Islam in the East African country. One of the principal, and thoroughly discredited, tenets of Corsi’s newest book is that Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama, whose father is Kenyan, is secretly a Muslim. (Corsi is hardly a Republican operative; earlier this year he just as spuriously attacked GOP presidential candidate John McCain for supposedly accepting funding from a group with ties to Al Qaeda).

Corsi was in Kenya to investigate and “expose details of secret deep ties” between Obama and certain Muslim politicians in Kenya, according to WorldNetDaily. No doubt Corsi’s failure to obtain a work permit in Kenya, which led to his detention, according to the Associated Press, is the result of dark forces at work.

Also according to the AP, Kenyan officials transported Corsi to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, where he was awaiting an evening flight to London.

The first wave of nominations are in, and one man stands head and shoulders above the rest to claim our inaugural Dobbsy Award – Neil Cavuto of Fox News.

The host of “Your World with Neil Cavuto” used his program to put the blame for the subprime mortgage meltdown squarely where he believes it belongs – on the shoulders of poor minorities who have dared try to own a home. In doing so, Cavuto has exemplified what it means to be a Dobbsy winner – a “mainstream” figure who makes utterly false or misleading statements that denigrate or defame an entire group of people.

Cavuto played Pin-the-Blame-on-the-Minority during a Sept. 18 interview with U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.).

“[W]hen you and many of your colleagues were pushing for more minority lending and more expanded lending to folks who heretofore couldn’t get mortgages, when you were pushing homeownership… . Are you totally without culpability here?” he asked. “Are you totally blameless? Are you totally irresponsible of anything that happened?” ( continue to full post… )

Submit your own Dobbsy Award nomination

In an important decision, the Academic Senate representing the faculty of California State University, Long Beach, voted overwhelmingly Oct. 2 in favor of a resolution to disassociate the university from the anti-Semitic and racist views of Psychology Professor Kevin MacDonald. This decision follows the posting of similar statements of disassociation from MacDonald’s work by CSULB’s Jewish Studies, History and Psychology departments. Though his research has never been publicly condemned by CSULB’s President F. King Alexander, in early 2008 MacDonald was removed from teaching undergraduate courses.

The resolution was discussed during a Sept. 18 meeting whose unapproved minutes read, “Dr. Kevin MacDonald of the Department of Psychology has made public statements and produced publications with a highly prejudicial view of Jews and non whites. His ideas have been taken up by white separatists who use MacDonald’s academic credentials to legitimize their agenda. Dr. MacDonald has done little to distance himself from these groups.” The final resolution has yet to be posted to the CSULB Academic Senate website.

The Sept. 18 minutes also state that there “had been no recent evidence of [MacDonald teaching his controversial ideas in class] though another member of the Psychology Faculty said that a former student had reported that MacDonald had done so about ten years ago.”

MacDonald, who is beloved by major American anti-Semites including former Klan leader David Duke, believes that Jews are impelled by genetic factors to undermine the majority populations of the societies they live in. In fact, MacDonald put it like this in journalist Jon Entine’s recent book, Abraham’s Children: “Jews do not act in the best interest of society. We need to systematically put in place some controls, call it discrimination if you will, to restore parity with other groups.” Since the turn of the millennium, MacDonald has also become a white supremacist activist. He has held leadership positions in several white supremacist groups, and in 2004 he was honored with a $10,000 prize for his work on the Jews by The Occidental Quarterly, a white supremacist publication on whose editorial advisory board he sits.

Regardless of these resolutions, MacDonald continues to crank out more anti-Semitic research. In April, his new book, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilization, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism, was published by the Occidental Press, the white nationalist hate group that also publishes The Occidental Quarterly. In one indication of the work’s extremism, the book’s forward was written by Virginia Abernethy, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University who is a self-described “white separatist.”

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that prosecutors decided to add a hate crime enhancement to the premeditated murder charge against 14-year-old Brandon McInerney, who allegedly gunned down gay junior high school classmate Lawrence “Larry” King, 15, after investigators discovered a “trove” of neo-Nazi literature and drawings in McInerney’s bedroom.

According to a court document filed by Senior District Attorney Maeve Fox earlier this week, the materials seized from McInerney’s room included white supremacist literature and drawings concerning “a racist skinhead philosophy of the variety espoused by Tom Metzger, David Lane and others.”

McInerney is awaiting trial as an adult for the Feb. 12 murder of King, who was shot in the head in a classroom full of students at E.O. Green Junior High School. McInerney fled the scene after the shooting and was apprehended a few blocks away.  Witnesses said that King, who had recently revealed that he was gay and started to wear make-up and jewelry, had a verbal confrontation with McInerney regarding King’s sexual orientation the day before the killing.

McInerney’s public defender explained that his client had the items only because he was researching a term paper on Adolf Hitler.

The accused killer turned 14, the legal cutoff for charging a juvenile as an adult in California, less than a month before the murder. He could face 50 years to life if convicted, plus one to three years for the hate crime enhancement.

On this week’s podcast, Heidi Beirich and I discuss her story “The Tanton Files,” which was posted last week on Hatewatch. Heidi’s story takes a look at what she discovered while researching the papers of John Tanton, who founded the modern anti-immigration movement and is still on the board of the anti-immigrant hate group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Tanton’s correspondence, which is lodged at the Bentley Historical Library, reveals not only that Tanton is an unabashed racist, but that he has been enmeshed in the white nationalist movement for decades.

“Is it luck or am I a thief?”

That’s the question neo-Nazi April Gaede posed Sept. 10 on the forum of the Vanguard News Network website (motto: “No Jews. Just right.”). Gaede, whose teenage daughters form the racist pop-singing duo Prussian Blue, recently boasted in an online post that she regularly scores free merchandise through underhanded means. “My family seems to have this gift of confusing clerks at large chain stores,” she confessed. “We end up not getting charged for items all the time. I think this happens to me because I talk to them and distract them (not on purpose) by saying outrageous things.”

It’s not hard to imagine Gaede uttering something unsettling. The neo-Nazi stage mom propelled her twin daughters, Lynx and Lamb, to international stardom in white power circles. Fans watch the blond, blue-eyed girls sieg heil and sing odes to “white survival,” though a 2007 documentary about the pair showed them tiring of their mother’s overbearing ways.

Now Gaede, a prolific contributor to neo-Nazi web forums, has revealed that micro-managing her daughters’ musical act isn’t her only skill. In her post on the VNN site, she tallied the thousands of dollars she’d saved by walking out of stores without paying for merchandise. Shopping in Kmart one day for window coolers, Gaede wrote, she saw a sign asking shoppers to donate money for Iraq veterans. “I asked to speak to a manager about how much the CEOs of Kmart were personally giving and why should they ask poor Kmart shoppers for money when they are a multibillion dollar company?” She reported that the “riled up” employee failed to ring up one of the coolers in her cart, saving her $150.

Another time, according to Gaede, she picked out some pricey merchandise at Ikea, only to find that the store was unable to charge her credit card for more than $300. So Gaede decided to return the following day to buy the remaining items. “When they loaded up our car they included the $500 table we had not paid for,” she recounted. “Dumb Mexicans.”

But Gaede apparently doesn’t want readers to think she lacks ethics. “Now if this happens at a mom and pop store we always correct it and if a clerk gives me the wrong change I always correct it (if they are white) because I dont [sic] want them to get in trouble for their till to be wrong. But otherwise if it is some big store I go for it… What do you all think? Is that evil???”

Opinions varied. “McKinley” wrote, “I will never fill [sic] wrong about getting one over from an enemy. Morals do not count in a death match.”

But others thought Gaede was taking the wrong tack. “It’s stealing from white people,” wrote “cknott.” “Because of April’s stealing, companies raise their prices which makes honest white people pay even more at the store. If we want to beat the J*w, we have to stop acting like the J*w.”

To which Gaede promptly replied, “Oh spank me! Probably most here on this board has [sic] done this. I just have the guts to admit it.”

A year after the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report published allegations of physical abuse, statutory rape and polygamy inside Tony Alamo Christian Ministries, authorities raided the cult’s headquarters in Fouke, Ark. Some 100 state and federal agents entered the compound Saturday night, apparently searching for evidence of child abuse and child pornography.

The Report’s investigation details the sordid history of Alamo, who was released from federal prison in 1998 after completing a sentence for tax evasion. Alamo had also been charged with felony child abuse in 1989, but that charge was finally dropped in 1995. However, the family of the 11-year-old boy who allegedly was subjected to 140 blows on Alamo’s orders for minor academic infractions filed suit and won a $1.4 million judgment.

As detailed in the Fall 2007 issue of the Report, Alamo in recent years has argued that girls should marry once they start menstruating, even if they are as young as 10. In a 2006 radio broadcast, he said: “God impregnated Mary when she was about 11 years old. So the government idiots, the people that don’t know the Bible, what you’re going to have to do is get a hold of God now, you’re going to have to get up there and cuff him and send him to prison for statutory rape.”

In early 2007, Alamo cited the alleged promiscuity of 1st-graders as grounds for marrying them before the age of legal consent. “I’ve found out from people’s parents that their daughter started having sex when she was 6 years old and had sex every day of her life,” he said in another broadcast. “So right there, by the time she’s 15 years old, she’s had sex thousands of times. I mean, this is just reality.”

The Report’s story also explores the Alamo cult’s strange background and its leader’s raging hatred for Catholics and homosexuals. Alamo has blamed Catholics for “every filthy thing,” including communism, Nazism, the two world wars, the Jonestown massacre, drugs, prostitution and pornography. He has also attacked his many detractors in Fouke, saying that God would “destroy” what he characterized as his “Vaticanite” critics.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan is an unassuming place, more like a small-town library than a research institute. But hidden away in 17 cardboard boxes deep inside the simple facility are the papers of John Tanton, the retired Michigan ophthalmologist who has been the most important figure in the modern American anti-immigration movement for three decades. The papers, which include more than 20 years of letters from the founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and a batch of other nativist groups, contain explosive material about Tanton’s beliefs. They also show that FAIR, where Tanton still serves as a member of the board, has been well aware of Tanton’s views and activities for years.

Tanton has long claimed that he is no racist — that, in fact, he came to his immigration restrictionism through progressive concerns for population control and the environment, not disdain for the foreign born. He characterizes himself as a “fair person,” and on his website he condemns the “unsavory characters whose views can easily be characterized as anti-American, anti-Semitic and outright racist.”

Fair enough. But what do Tanton’s letters have to say?

As it turns out, quite a lot. Although Tanton has been linked to racist ideas in the past — fretting about the “educability” of Latinos, warning of whites being out-bred by others, and publishing a number of white nationalist authors — the papers in the Bentley Library show that Tanton has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene. He has corresponded with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers and the leading white nationalist thinkers of the era. He introduced key FAIR leaders to the president of the Pioneer Fund, a white supremacist group set up to encourage “race betterment,” at a 1997 meeting at a private club. He wrote a major funder to encourage her to read the work of a radical anti-Semitic professor — to “give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life” — and suggested that the entire FAIR board discuss the professor’s theories on the Jews. He practically worshipped a principal architect of the Immigration Act of 1924 (instituting a national origin quota system and barring Asian immigration), a rabid anti-Semite whose pro-Nazi American Coalition of Patriotic Societies was indicted for sedition in 1942.

As early as 1969, Tanton showed a sharp interest in eugenics, the “science” of breeding a better human race that was utterly discredited by the Nazis, trying to find out if Michigan had laws allowing forced sterilization. His interest stemmed, he wrote in a letter of inquiry that year, from “a local pair of sisters who have nine illegitimate children between them.” Some 30 years later, he was still worrying about “less intelligent” people being allowed children, saying that “modern medicine and social programs are eroding the human gene pool.”

Throughout, FAIR — which, along with Tanton, refused repeated requests for comment for this story — has stood by its man. Its 2004 annual report praised him for “visionary qualities that have not waned one bit.” Around the same time, Dan Stein, who has led FAIR since 1988 as executive director or president and who was copied on scores of Tanton’s letters, insisted FAIR’s founder had “never asserted the inferiority or superiority of any racial, ethnic, or religious group. Never.” ( continue to full post… )

Principals of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), including FAIR founder John Tanton and FAIR President Dan Stein, have been attacking immigrants for 20 years. The quotations below of statements made by FAIR officials reveal their anti-immigrant views. ( continue to full post… )