WESTCLIFFE, Colo. — A top aide to imprisoned fundamentalist Mormon polygamist leader Warren S. Jeffs has purchased $2 million worth of property in five locations along the remote eastern flank of the rugged Sangre De Cristo Mountains about 175 miles southwest of Denver, Hatewatch has learned.

Men, women and children members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS, are occupying at least three of the properties. Their presence is causing anxiety among neighbors and public officials unsure how to react to the presence of a racist sect known to coerce underage girls into plural marriages.

“Quite frankly, we don’t know what to do,” said Custer County Sheriff Fred Jobe. “We are definitely aware that they here … but until they break some laws, there isn’t much that we can do.”

The real estate purchases by Lee A. Steed, a senior member of the FLDS, constitute the largest known cluster of land holdings outside of the FLDS-dominated communities of Colorado City, Ariz., and adjacent Hildale, Utah. Steed paid $1 million cash to acquire deeds to three of the properties, real estate records show.

County commissioner Dick Downey said government officials have been quietly observing the influx of FLDS into the community but have not made it publicly known. But rumors abound in this small town and adjacent Silver Cliff, Colo., with a combined population about 1,000. ( continue to full post… )

[MO] Two Men Convicted Of Hate Crime Thrill Killing
The Kansas City Star / May 8, 2008
Kansas City residents Gary Eye, 21, and Steven Sandstrom, 22, were both convicted of randomly shooting to death a homeless black man targeted for the color of his skin in March 2005.

[CA] Public Defender Blames School For Murder Of Gay Student
The Los Angeles Times / May 8, 2008
The lawyer representing 14-year-old Brandon McInerney, who allegedly shot to death a gay classmate, argued that school officials should have quelled tensions between the two boys rather than allowing the victim to wear feminine accessories and flirt with McInerny.

[MI] Neo-Nazi Leader Schemes To Exploit Ailing Economy
The Livingston Daily Press & Argus / May 12, 2008
National Socialist Movement commander Jeff Schoep, who relocated the NSM to the Detroit area last December, sees recruitment opportunities in the region’s economic malaise and racial tensions.

[WI] ‘Die, Jew’ Scrawled On Synagogue Doors
The Wisconsin State Journal / May 5, 2008
Vandals drew three swastikas and wrote “Die, Jew” on the outside door and walls of the Beth Israel Center in Madison.

[GA] ‘Swastika Lawn Mower Man’ Re-Arrested
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution / May 9, 2008
Steven Whitfield, 31, who was arrested April 16 after he mowed swastikas into his lawn and pointed a rifle at passerby, was taken into custody again for aiming a firearm at a juvenile girl.

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[TN] Hate Crimes Against Hispanics Spiking In Tennessee
The Tennessean / May 10, 2008
As “illegal alien” for many people became synonymous with anyone Hispanic, the number of hate crimes targeting Hispanics in Tennessee more than doubled between 2006 and 2007.

[MO] FAIR-Backed Missouri Group Pushes Higher Education Ban
The Columbia Missourian / May 8, 2008
Missourians Against Illegal Immigration, a group founded by the Missouri state adviser to Federation for American Immigration Reform, placed advertisements in newspapers across the state to support a Senate bill that would ban illegal immigrants from higher education and jobs.

[CA] Lawyers For San Diego Minutemen Argue Highway Sign Case
The International Herald Tribune / May 10, 2008
Lawyers for the San Diego Minutemen argued in federal court that the state of California violated the group’s constitutional rights by relocating its Adopt-A-Highway location away from a border patrol checkpoint.

[CA] Minuteman Project Extends Consulate Protests
The Press-Enterprise / May 8, 2008
Minuteman Project activists continued demonstrating outside Mexican consulates in San Bernardino, Santa Ana and San Diego.

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It’s been a bad month at Black Rock for the Patriots Border Alliance, a border vigilante group formed last year by disgruntled former Minuteman Civil Defense Corps officials.

First Phoenix New Times blogger Stephen Lemons unearthed a photo of Patriots Border Alliance leaders and members posing with a wheelchair-bound Elton Hall, a septuagenarian neo-Nazi and past Arizona organizer for George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party who still frequently attends racist skinhead festivals and anti-immigration demonstrations in the Phoenix area. Hall was injured in February when he was struck by a car while participating in a Patriots Border Alliance-sponsored protest outside a day labor center. The photo of him surrounded by adoring Patriots Border Alliance activists was posted on the group’s website accompanied by this caption: “PATRIOTS BORDER ALLIANCE HONORING ELTON HALL: In appreciation for your service, devotion, commitment to securing American border and promoting THE RULE OF LAW.”

Three days after the Hall photo surfaced, the El Paso Times ran a story in which Border Patrol spokesman Doug Mosier debunked several outlandish claims made by Patriots Border Alliance president Bob Wright at a recent meeting of the far-right Eagle Forum in Alamagordo, N.M. ( continue to full post… )

[MO] Neo-Nazi Inmate Wins Lawsuit Seeking Kosher Meals
St. Louis Post-Dispatch / April 26, 2008
Norman Lee Toler, who claims he’s Jewish despite his SS tattoos, links to white supremacists and fondness for Hitler paraphernalia, is legally entitled to kosher meals in prison, a federal judge ruled.

[PN] Skinheads Held For Trial On Weapons, Conspiracy, Assault Charges
Philadelphia Daily News / April 26, 2008
Three members of the Keystone State Skinheads face a criminal trial for allegedly conspiring to attack a fourth member of the gang last Memorial Day weekend because he got a tattoo they didn’t like.

[FL] Synagogue Defaced With Swastikas
Miami Herald / May 1, 2008
Vandals spray-painted a series of swastikas on a synagogue along with pro-Hitler graffiti nearby two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day.

[FL] White Supremacist Arrested For Sexual Battery
The Suncoast News / April 28, 2008
Self-proclaimed Aryan Brotherhood member Larry Austin Gregory, 37, was arrested for allegedly raping a 17-year-old girl.

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On May 1, the racist British National Party (BNP) won a seat on the 25-member London Assembly, which has the power to amend the London mayor’s budget and investigate and publish findings on matters of interest to Londoners. Richard Barnbrook, who will take the BNP seat after coming in fifth in the mayoral race and winning 5% of the overall vote, became the extreme right’s most visible elected politician in Britain as a result. All major parties had denounced the BNP in the run-up to the city elections, saying that it represented “hatred, violence and stupidity.”

In 2001, BNP head Nick Griffin, a Holocaust denier, told reporters that his party did not admit anyone not descended from European whites or “kindred” peoples. (The BNP has since accepted a tiny handful of people of color in order to bolster its battle against Muslims.) The party is particularly well known for its hardline anti-immigrant views. Its officials have proposed deporting all illegal immigrants and even paying legal immigrants to leave England, promising “voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin.”

Despite his party’s affiliation with white nationalism, Barnbrook tried to reassure foreign-born Londoners after his election. “Do not be nervous. As long as you abide by our identity and laws of this land, come to me and I will see where we can help,” Barnbrook told the BBC.

Barnbrook was the best known of several BNP councillors — the rough equivalent of local City Council members in the United States — before his May election to the higher-ranking post. He was well known to most Londoners, in part because in 2006 he was accused of making a film 17 years earlier that was widely described as gay pornography. (The BNP opposes the “promotion” of homosexuality.) He angrily disputed the charge, saying it was simply an art film about “sexuality.” ( continue to full post… )

[AZ] Patriots Border Alliance Honors Neo-Nazi
Phoenix New Times / May 2, 2008
Leaders of the Patriots Border Alliance, a Minuteman splinter faction, posted a photo of PBA members posing with Elton Hall, 74, a former organizer for the American Nazi Party, above the caption “PATRIOTS’ BORDER ALLIANCE HONORING ELTON HALL.”

[AZ] American Freedom Riders Join Recall Effort Against Phoenix Mayor
The Arizona Republic / April 30, 2008
American Freedom Riders member Keith LeFebvre announced that his group was the core of American Citizens United, a political action coalition formed to attempt to recall Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon for being “soft” on illegal immigration.

[TX] Border Mayors Spar With Tancredo
San Antonio Express-News / May 2, 2008
Members of the Texas Border Coalition took issue with U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo’s muttered suggestion that a border fence should be placed north of Brownsville, Tex.

[CA] Fire Coalition Teams With Minuteman Project For Consulate Protest
San Bernardino County Sun / May 1, 2008
About 20 members of the Minuteman Project and the Fire Coalition, many of them clad in red, white and blue, gathered outside a Mexican Consulate to protest illegal immigration.

[UT] Minuteman Submits Immigration Resolution To GOP Convention
The Deseret News / May 2, 2008
Utah Minuteman Project member Alex Segura submitted a resolution to the Salt Lake County GOP convention that calls for Republicans to oppose Illegal immigration, advocate for secure borders and affirm the United States as a “Christian nation.”

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MSNBC cable television commentator and two-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has once again relied on white supremacist sources for inspiration and information. In his May 2 column “The Way Our World Ends,” Buchanan complains that people of European descent are being wiped out worldwide and even in their own backyards, where “[t]he Third World is coming to colonize the mother countries.” Buchanan bemoans the prediction that whites, who were some 28% of the global population in 1950, will be only 9% by 2060. “The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans,” Buchanan laments.

And what brought on Buchanan’s gloomy mood? Apparently, he was greatly bothered by a new report put out in early April by the National Policy Institute (NPI), a white nationalist research group. Entitled “Global White Population to Plummet to Single Digit – Black Population to Double,” NPI’s research supposedly spells doom for the white “race.” In so many words, the report argues that by 2060, blacks and Asians will have whites on the run. This “status reversal” will lead to countries like Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Russia being “pressured to accept collectively hundreds of millions of refugees from India, and sub-Sahara Africa,” according to the report.

That thought has Buchanan mightily worried. “Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them,” he frets. ( continue to full post… )

[CO] Details Emerge About Hitler Birthday Prison Riot
The Rocky Mountain News / April 22, 2008
Prison guards in three watchtowers fired 300 to 400 rounds into a massive brawl on Adolf Hitler’s birthday that began after white supremacist prisoners taunted black inmates with racial slurs.

[CA] Prosecutors: White Supremacist Cop Killer Tried To Have Witness Murdered
The Sacramento Bee / April 22, 2008
White supremacist gang member Brendt Volarvich, 22, allegedly tried to have a witness killed while awaiting trial for murdering a highway patrolman, a crime for which he was convicted and now faces the death penalty.

[CA] Asian Man Stabbed By ‘White Power’ Attackers
The San Gabriel Valley Tribune / April 23, 2008
A 15-year-old and a 20-year-old were arrested on attempted murder and hate crime charges for allegedly stabbing an Asian man in the face and torso while shouting racial epithets, leaving the victim in critical condition.

[LA] Teenager Accepts Plea Deals In Noose Incident
The Town Talk / April 23, 2008
Jeremiah Munsen, 19, pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor for driving a pick-up truck displaying a hangman’s noose around a group of black civil rights marchers after a “Jena Six” rally last year.

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[CO] Lawmaker Draws International Rebukes For ‘Illiterate Peasants’ Remark
Rocky Mountain News / April 21, 2008
Rep. Douglas Bruce drew audible gasps and was ordered to step down from the speaker’s podium after he criticized a bill concerning temporary visas for immigrant farm laborers by declaring that Colorado doesn’t need “5,000 more illiterate peasants.”

[NC] Latinos Protest County Commissioner’s Comments
WBTV News / April 25, 2008
Mecklenburg County Commissioner Bill James is refusing to apologize for likening illegal immigrants to drug dealers and prostitutes.

[WI] School Official Physically Threatened Over Pledge Of Allegiance In Spanish
The Progressive / April 21, 2008
Dr. Norman Fjelstad, the school superintendent in charge of Edgerton High School, says he’s received threats of physical harm for allowing students in the school’s Spanish class to recite the pledge of allegiance in the language they’re studying.

[TX] Conservative Students Organize ‘Catch The Illegal Immigrant’ Game
The Amarillo Globe-News / April 22, 2008
Members of the Texas Tech chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas roiled their campus by playing “Catch the Illegal Immigrant,” a politically charged version of hide-and-seek.

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