The morning of Sept. 25, fliers posted across the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing blared “GAYS SPREAD AIDS.” They bore the insignia of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and invited students to attend a lecture that evening by anti-gay agitator Ryan Sorba entitled “The Born Gay Hoax.”

About 100 MSU students made it to the talk. At least two-thirds were anti-YAF demonstrators who silently protested Sorba’s message by wearing brightly colored “I Have a Story” T-shirts and holding signs aloft throughout Sorba’s 90-minute presentation. One male student’s placard read, “I made out with all the YAF boys.”

Sorba — pictured below with his arm around MSU YAF leader Kyle Bristow (thanks to East Lansing-based journalist Todd Heywood for the photo) — for the most part stuck to a standard anti-gay script of branding homosexuality a degenerate lifestyle “choice” rather than an innate trait, though he deployed a few of his own rather bizarre rhetorical flourishes. “When a male dog mounts another male dog, he simply desires to be stimulated … just as when he slavishly mounts a shrub or your dinner guest’s leg,” Sorba declared. “Would this dog consider himself homosexual? Does he bark with a lisp?”

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The Washington Times, which has a long history of shoddy journalism and extremism, has recently endured a spate of staff departures, including that of Washington insider Tony Blankley. Blankley, the newspaper’s editorial page editor and former press secretary for then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), joined the PR firm Edelman on Sept. 18 as its executive vice president for global public affairs. Following him out the Times’ door in October will be Cathy Gainor, the business news editor. Earlier this year, two of the Times’ top advertising salesmen, Michael McGrath and Aaron Finely, bolted as well.

These resignations come after an onslaught of press accounts revealing white supremacist thinking by Managing Editor Francis Coombs (pictured right, see Coombs’ blog here), whose wife Marian has direct ties to white supremacists (as revealed in 2005 by the Intelligence Report). One of Coombs’ favored editors, Robert Stacy McCain, is an ardent foe of interracial marriage and a former member of the white supremacist League of the South. Most damaging to Coombs have been recent revelations of the Coombses’ alleged associations with neo-Nazi leader Bill White. White, the leader of the American National Socialist Workers party, is currently being probed by the FBI after suggesting that the “Jena 6” should be lynched and listing the home addresses and phone numbers of five of the teenagers on his website.

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A well-known Mississippi white supremacist is working to exploit the family of Justin Barker, a white teenager allegedly beaten by six black youths in Jena, La., who were later charged with attempted murder. The local authorities’ heavy-handed treatment of the black suspects in the Barker case, compared with others where white teens accused of crimes were handled with leniency, sparked a massive anti-racism rally in Jena last Thursday. The rally drew, by most estimates, at least 20,000 people.

Richard Barrett, leader of the Nationalist Movement hate group, claims on his website to have met with 17-year-old Barker, along with his father David Barker, the night before the rally. Barrett says he got a statement from Justin, complaining that “the ones who attacked me are getting money for beating me up,” which Barrett promptly posted. Justin (pictured, above right, posing with Barrett in a photo now on Barrett’s website) also reportedly expressed gratitude for the encouragement he has received from some people and said he hopes to hear from other supporters.

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The New York Times’ Sunday fashion insert doesn’t normally cross paths with Hatewatch. But a headline in the Sunday, Sept. 16, edition caught our attention:  “Skinheads are Moshing Their Way Into the Style Mainstream.”

According to the brief magazine article, big-name designers like Dior Homme and Heidi Slimane are bringing skinhead style back to the runway. For a movement now largely known for its racist violence, that’s quite a comeback.

Skinhead researcher and Portland [Ore.] State University professor Randy Blazak says that while he hasn’t seen a pair of Doc Martens boots in over three years, skinhead style as a mainstream fashion fad isn’t anything new. As a matter of fact, racist skinheads are often angered to see their style co-opted, whether by anti-racist skinheads or trend-seeking teenagers. “It undermines their message when that style is diffused to the mainstream,” said Blazak. ( continue to full post… )

As tens of thousands of people were preparing to make their way to Jena, La., for today’s anti-racism rally, white supremacists were burning up the Internet with furious denunciations, bloody predictions, promises of future violence and calls for lynching.

“The best crowd control for such a situation would be a squad of men armed with full automatics and preferably a machine gun as well,” is how one person put it on the Web forum hosted by the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network. Added another hopeful VNN poster: “I’m not really that angry at the nogs [a recent variation on an ancient racial slur] — they are just soldiers in an undeclared race war. But any white that’s in that support rally I would like to … have them machine-gunned.” ( continue to full post… )

Our friends over at the Center for American Progress (CAP), which describes itself as “a progressive think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action,” just posted an important article skewering large parts of the media for their frequent depiction of racist or nativist ideologues as mainstream commentators.

“Know Your Sources,” by CAP Senior Fellow Henry Fernandez, mentions some of the country’s most unpleasant nativists, including hate group leader John Vinson (here and here), Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) founder John Tanton (here and here), and former FAIR official Rick Oltman. Fernandez’s point — and it’s an important one — is that the background of these men and others is rarely mentioned in the mainstream press, which frequently quotes them as if they were legitimate critics or analysts of the immigration situation in the United States. Partly based on Southern Poverty Law Center research, Fernandez also points out several other connections linking nativist groups and individuals to unsavory extremists of the far right.

“J.T.” Ready, a prominent Minuteman Civil Defense Corps volunteer and anti-immigration activist based in Phoenix, has been flitting around the edges of the neo-Nazi movement for more than a year now, quietly creating a profile on the racist social networking website New Saxon and attending a private gathering organized by the neo-Nazi organization National Vanguard.

But when the National Socialist Movement held an anti-immigration rally in Omaha, Neb., on Sept. 1, the leader of the Americans First nativist extremist group was making his public debut as a full-blown neo-Nazi. Photographs (above) captured a grinning Ready, clad in a grey business suit, standing side-by-side with NSM members who wore brown-shirt uniforms with swastika armbands. Any doubt that Ready was an open white supremacist, as well as a hard-line nativist, evaporated at that point. ( continue to full post… )

A new academic paper rebuts the anti-Semitic theories of Professor Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at Cal State Long Beach who is widely read in neo-Nazi and white supremacist circles. MacDonald, who also is a member of a white supremacist group, published a trilogy that supposedly “proves” that Jews are genetically driven to destroy Western societies. MacDonald also argues that anti-Semitism, rather than being an irrational hatred for Jews, is a logical reaction to Jewish success. So the Nazis, like many other anti-Semites, were only anti-Semitic because they were countering a genuine Jewish threat to their wellbeing.

The unpublished paper is entitled “Jews Will Be Jews: A Scientific Racialism for the 21st Century,” and is written by David Isadore Lieberman, who has published several items in ABC-Clio’s Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. Lieberman presented a shorter version of the paper during a 2005 seminar held at the University of Southampton’s Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations in England and has now made it available on the web. ( continue to full post… )

Hammerskin Nation and the Vinlander Social Club have negotiated a truce ending a bloody three-year feud between America’s two largest coalitions of racist skinhead gangs, according to a remarkable declaration published last week by Vinlanders co-founder and Hoosier State Skinheads leader Brien James on the Vinlander Social Club website.

“I salute the people on both sides who had the courage to initiate this peace, and the people who had the maturity to look past our egos and our grudges,” James stated. “We will die fighting together for self-determination and self-respect in a world that has turned its back on natural law and common sense.”

James and another infamous thug, Eric “The Butcher” Fairburn formed the Vinlander Social Club in 2004 as a direct challenge to the authority of Hammerskin Nation (HSN), a nationwide skinhead syndicate that has asserted dominion over U.S. skins since 1988. HSN’s power has waned in recent years as growing numbers of local skinhead “crews” have declared allegiance to the Vinlanders, a skinhead “warrior clan” devoted to drinking, fighting and a racist variant of the Viking pagan religion Odinism. A detailed history of the feud and its impact on the criminal sub-culture of racist skinheads is available here. ( continue to full post… )

The National Alliance, for years the leading American neo-Nazi organization until it was crippled by the 2002 death of its founder, can apparently still inspire its few remaining members to criminality. The group’s rap sheet—which already features multiple crimes by its members, including murder—may be about to grow longer.

During a Labor Day weekend crime spree, Alliance member John Rocissano, 20, allegedly spray-painted swastikas, SS Lightning bolts and a National Alliance rune on the Reconstructionist Synagogue of the North Shore in Plandome, N.Y. Rocissano and his teenage accomplice, Matthew Felicetti, 17, were arrested on September 1 and stand charged of multiple counts of aggravated harassment and criminal mischief. The pair also defaced a school bus, an elementary school and a house. The suspects have both pleaded not guilty to the charges and posted bail.

Rocissano was already known to North Shore police for handing out the National Alliance tract “Who Rules America?” which claims Jews control the national media. On his MySpace page, he lists his affiliation with the National Alliance and includes their logo in his photo gallery. ( continue to full post… )