Growing up, CNN host Glenn Beck thought the extreme-right John Birch Society was “a bunch of nuts.” But on his July 25 Headline News show, Beck told his JBS guest, “You are starting to make more and more sense to me.”

The visitor to the “Glenn Beck” show was Sam Antonio, the 31-year-old Southern California coordinator of the John Birch Society. Antonio said JBS believes a 2005 agreement with Canada and Mexico “has allowed the Mexican government to get a hold on our enforcement of laws here in America.”

Antonio was referring to the SPP, the Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement. The pact, aimed at easing regulatory barriers between the United States, Canada and Mexico, has been seized upon by nativists and far-right groups as a secret conspiracy to eliminate borders and replace the dollar bill with the “Amero,” accepted everywhere from Toronto to Mexico City. No one has done more to promote this bogus conspiracy theory than JBS, which in the bad old days saw communists hiding under every bed — including President Eisenhower, hardly a commie candidate in most minds. ( continue to full post… )

Kevin MacDonald, the California State University, Long Beach, psychology professor who wrote an anti-Semitic trilogy explaining why he thinks Jews are bad for white societies, has been removed from instructing certain classes. Gerry Riposa, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, told Hatewatch that MacDonald would no longer be teaching lower-level courses, including a required course for psych majors specializing in child development. MacDonald, at right, received an award and $10,000 for his work on the Jews from The Occidental Quarterly, a white supremacist journal. He was accompanied at the 2004 ceremony by Virginia Abernethy, a self-described “white separatist” and official of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens. ( continue to full post… )

Since Fox News host Bill O’Reilly refuses to stop comparing the liberal Daily Kos blog to the KKK, Nazis, and former Klan boss David Duke, we feel obligated to clarify for the record that the Daily Kos is NOT one of the 566 U.S.-based hate websites monitored by the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.

Not that we expect O’Reilly to correct course anytime soon. It’s been more than a month and the host of “The O’Reilly Factor” has yet to fully retract the absurd “pink pistol-packing” lesbian gangs segment that aired in late June that we helped make infamous with our point-by-point takedown. ( continue to full post… )

This morning, the Southern Poverty Law Center followed up an earlier lawsuit against two Klansmen by filing a complaint against their organization, the Imperial Klans of America (IKA), and three additional individuals (full story here). Both legal actions are based on the savage July 2006 beating by several IKA members of a 16-year-old boy at the Meade County Fairgrounds in Brandenburg, Ky. The attackers, one of whom weighed 300 pounds, called their 150-pound victim a “spic” and left him with broken bones and other serious injuries. ( continue to full post… )

The latest edition of our quarterly magazine hit the streets last week. Take a read. The cover story details how two North Carolina criminal cases against Klansmen open a window onto a bizarre Southern underworld of murder, cocaine and a plot to murder a sheriff and blow up a county courthouse. Others dig into facts, fiction and conspiracy theories about undocumented immigration; escalating hate violence against the homeless; a battle between anti-Semitic “radical traditionalist Catholics” and townsfolk in New Hampshire; the re-emergence of David Lynch as a racist skinhead leader; and a whole lot more. Read it and let us know what you think.

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Welcome to Hatewatch, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s new blog. The writers and editors of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, an investigative magazine covering the American radical right, will be using this space to share tantalizing tidbits and serious commentary about the world of hate. We thought we’d launch by showing parts of a remarkable, never-before-seen videotape that was critically important to our work battling hate groups. Our obtaining and publicizing of the contents of this video contributed to the downfall of the National Alliance, a key neo-Nazi group. We hope that telling this story will shed light on the work we try to do here. ( continue to full post… )