Movie director Ronald Maxwell (below, right) — the writer, director and producer of the god-awful 2003 movie “Gods and Generals,” a wildly pro-Confederate and ahistorical take on the Civil War — has adopted a new cause: the threat allegedly posed to right-thinking Americans by undocumented Mexican immigrants. In a Sept. 17 interview with Jeff Mellott of the Daily News Record of Harrisonburg, Va., Maxwell declared that Mexican immigrants’ ultimate goal was “outright annexation” of the Southwestern United States. Adopting the so-called reconquista conspiracy theory widely touted by the radical right, Maxwell explained to Mellot that “they [Mexican politicians and intellectuals] see it as a re-conquering.” “The American people are funding their own suicide,” Maxwell said. “If we stop paying taxes, this craziness stops.”

Maxwell also last month stumped for anti-immigrant hard-liners running for Republican offices in Virginia. The Washington Post reported on Sept. 23 that Maxwell wrote in to the Loudoun Times-Mirror, which covers the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., to ask: “Why on earth would we want to create the conditions in the American Southwest, or for that matter all across America, for future civil strife, or in a worst case scenario, civil war?” Similarly, in an open letter to President Bush last year, Maxwell referred to immigration as an “invasion masquerading as immigration.” He told Bush that his legacy would be described “as the President who saved (or lost) the South-West of the United States.” ( continue to full post… )

The Robert A. Taft Club, a group headed by a man with a network of racist connections, has announced that a U.S. congressman, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), will address the group this Thursday at a restaurant in Arlington, Va.

The Taft Club is led by Marcus Epstein (right), who serves as the executive director of both white nationalist Pat Buchanan’s The American Cause and the Team America PAC, which is run by Buchanan’s sister, Bay Buchanan. Epstein writes for the anti-immigrant hate site vdare.com and he advocates for white supremacist organizations. He is especially fond of American Renaissance — a white supremacist journal that has suggested that blacks have “psychopathic personalities” — and attends the journal’s biannual conferences. In 2006, Epstein invited the head of American Renaissance’s parent organization, Jared Taylor, to speak to the Taft Club on the issue of “Race and Conservatism.” ( continue to full post… )

Scott Suchman, an accomplished photographer hired by the Intelligence Report to photograph a press conference put on Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., by the hate group The Social Contract Press, was thrown out of the event by its organizers. The Press Club is considered the “sanctum sanctorum of American journalists” and is dedicated to “the promotion of free expression.”

When Suchman arrived at the Club’s Lisagor Room with camera in hand, he was questioned about who he was free-lancing for. He was told by Diana Hull, head of the press conference’s co-sponsor Californians for Population Stabilization, that because he was shooting photographs for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which publishes the Report, he could not attend.

Club House Manager David King told Hatewatch that the Club doesn’t censor or discriminate against those who rent their facilities. “Those crazy folks have the full right to say that they don’t want a [particular] photographer in their event,” he explained. The press conference’s organizer, Fran Griffin of Griffin Communications, held another event that featured speeches by several hate group members at the Club in March. One speech, by “radical traditionalist Catholic” E. Michael Jones, consisted of an anti-Semitic rant about the evil “revolutionary Jew,” which was so rabid it caused C-SPAN to cancel its planned coverage of the event.

A federal judge in Charlottesville, Va., yesterday dismissed charges of sexually enticing a 10-year-old girl and intimidating a witness against neo-Nazi leader Kevin Alfred Strom, ending the case. The move came during the second day of Strom’s trial, after the prosecution rested its case against the founder of National Vanguard, who took a “leave of absence” as leader after the charges were brought last year. Prosecutors had detailed how Strom, 50, sent the child gifts, drove by her house and school, and wrote in his computer about how he wanted to marry the girl. But a day earlier, U.S. District Judge Norman Moon, hearing accounts of Strom’s wife discovering him naked, sexually aroused, and staring at computer images of young girls’ faces with older women’s naked bodies superimposed, sounded skeptical. Moon pointed out that the images were not illegal and added, “It’s not illegal to sit there naked.” Strom still faces a January federal trial for possession of child pornography.

The federal trial of neo-Nazi leader Kevin Alfred Strom for allegedly sexually enticing a minor and intimidating a witness opened yesterday, and some of the details that emerged weren’t pretty (here and here). Strom, the 50-year-old, Virginia-based leader of the National Vanguard hate group until he took a “leave of absence” last year, is accused of attempting to start a sexual relationship with the girl, who is now 12, when she was 10.

In the first day of testimony, Strom’s wife, neo-Nazi activist Elisha Strom, described returning home one day to find her husband naked, sexually aroused, and staring at a computer screen. He ran into the bathroom, she alleged, leaving behind images on the screen in which he had superimposed photos of the heads of two 14-year-old girls he knew well — the neo-Nazi twins who make up the infamous singing duet Prussian Blue and were then associated with National Vanguard — onto photos of grown, naked lesbians having sex.

Elisha Strom also testified that she caught her husband on another occasion looking at pictures of young girls and, when she tried to phone someone, struck Strom with the phone after he began choking her. A year later, Strom reported his wife to police for assaulting him with the phone and filed several legal motions against her (these actions are part of the basis of the witness intimidation charges against him). Testimony also revealed that Elisha Strom finally turned her husband in to the authorities — a fact that she has strenuously denied in many statements to white supremacist websites and activists.

Kevin Strom also faces possession of child pornography charges in a separate federal trial scheduled for next January.

The Social Contract Press, which has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2001 for publishing articles by white supremacists and promoting the idea that America should be populated by white people, is co-hosting a news conference at the National Press Club today. The topic is “How Many Illegal Aliens are in the United States?” and it will dispute official government data that shows approximately 12 million undocumented immigrants residing in the US.

The Social Contract Press is one of several programs that make up U.S. Inc., a foundation run for decades by John Tanton (right), the architect of much of the modern anti-immigration movement and the co-founder of the country’s largest immigration restriction outfit, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). FAIR has its own ties to white supremacists, having accepted more than $1 million from the Pioneer Fund, a hate group that funds controversial studies on race and intelligence.

Tanton has a history of bigotry. Perhaps most famous were the remarks he penned on immigrants in internal 1986 memos to his FAIR colleagues. In them, Tanton questioned the “educability” of Latinos compared to others and wondered whether “those with their pants up [whites] are going to get caught by those with their pants down [Latinos]” in what he characterized as a race to procreate. Tanton’s Social Contract Press also has republished and given a full-throated endorsement to a racist novel called The Camp of the Saints. The book depicts a future invasion of France by starving hordes of Indian emigrants, who are characterized as sexually voracious beasts determined to wreck Western civilization. ( continue to full post… )

This Sunday, The New York Times Magazine ran a 3,000-plus-word piece on one Doug Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho, pastor described as trying to “reinvent conservative Protestant education” with his New Saint Andrews College. The story, a major feature in the magazine’s annual “college issue,” suggests that Saint Andrews is home to “a band of cultured missionaries,” a place that “tries to unite faith and reason.”

Well, sort of. “Onward, Christian Scholars,” by Molly Worthen, does describe Wilson’s religious empire as “radically conservative” and notes that Wilson (pictured, right) would like to see Jefferson Davis, late president of the Confederacy, as president. But Worthen, a student of American religious history, omits a few critical points (here and here and here).

In fact, Doug Wilson is co-author of a piece of sorry scholarship, entitled Southern Slavery, As It Was, that argues that “[s]lavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence.” “There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world,” the book continues. And then: “Slave life was to them [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.” No serious scholar of slavery or the Civil War accepts these ludicrous assertions. ( continue to full post… )