It’s been a heck of a year in the world of hate. As usual, white supremacists and sundry others on the radical right have shot, bludgeoned and maimed their way into police blotters and newspapers across the land. They’ve cursed, defamed and insulted the usual laundry list of their enemies. But for Hatewatch aficionados, that’s all par for the course. After all, just about anyone can do something really ugly or violent if they set their mind to it. That’s why the Hatewatch 1st Annual Year-End Smackdown Awards Committee had such a very tough time. Sifting through huge piles of ne’er-do-well candidates, intrepid committee members sought to go beyond the merely quotidian and reach for the truly extraordinary. Here, with apologies to Keith Olbermann, is our Hatewatch countdown for the very worst of 2007:

10. Grossest Pervert Award
The hands-down winner here is Kevin Alfred Strom, the founder of the neo-Nazi National Vanguard group based in Virginia who saw charges of enticing a 10-year-old girl for sex dropped, only to have the judge announce to the world that there was “overwhelming evidence that [Strom] was sexually drawn to this child.” That, along with Strom’s wife’s testimony about finding her man naked and aroused in front of a computer screen peopled by young girls, isn’t a very hopeful prelude to Strom’s second trial, coming up in February, on possession of child porn charges. Top gross-out moment so far: The revelation that Strom had written a sonnet about marrying the 10-year-old, to be sung to the tune of “Here We Come A-Wassailing.”

The competition in this category, it should be pointed out, was fierce. Warren Jeffs, the polygamous leader of a racist Mormon offshoot sect, was convicted on two counts of rape as an accomplice for forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-year-old cousin. Tony Alamo, leader of an anti-Catholic and anti-gay cult, was accused of taking child brides. And David Lane, 69, a white supremacist movement icon in prison for his role in a 1984 assassination, had this to say about the blonde, 14-year-old Gaede girls who make up the neo-Nazi Prussian Blue singing duo: “When the girls were little, they were like daughters or something. Now that they are grown women, and being a natural male, it’s… well, you know what I’m trying to say.” Yes, sadly, we do.

9. Most Gullible Broadcaster Award
Who can forget Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” and his June 21 segment, “Violent Lesbian Gangs a Growing Problem”? In this piece of addled fiction, O’Reilly and “Fox News crime analyst” Rod Wheeler contended that “a national underground network” of lesbian gangs, armed with pink pistols, was “terrorizing America,” in part by raping middle school girls with sex toys purchased on the Internet. As it turned out, the report was entirely false, as the Intelligence Report revealed. The next day, Wheeler issued a statement saying that he had only “inadvertently stated” that the lesbians carried pink pistols, that he hadn’t meant to say there were 150 lesbian gangs in the Washington, D.C., area, that he hadn’t meant to say there was a “national epidemic” of lesbian gangs, and that he hadn’t meant to defame the Pink Pistols, a lesbian gun-rights group. Glad we got that straight!

8. Most Obnoxious Extremist Award
Although there was considerable support for the candidacy of Fred Phelps, the Godhatesfags.com website proprietor who likes to picket the funerals of soldiers, Virginia neo-Nazi Bill White won in a squeaker. The former left-wing anarchist and one-time correspondent for the Russian Communist Party’s Pravda newspaper spent the year issuing racist insults, not-so-veiled threats and attacks on reporters. He posted the home addresses of a long list of his enemies — from a Miami Herald columnist to journalists from his hometown newspaper to the editor of this blog — but also defamed large numbers of fellow racists. The rabid dog in White may have come out most clearly in his call to white supremacists to crash the wedding of the niece of a newspaper official to “annoy this Jew-loving piece of shit.”

7. Weirdest Political Alliance Award
The honors here go to Kirkpatrick Sale, director of the New York-based Middlebury Institute, dedicated to secessionism. Known for decades as a left-wing intellectual, Sale last year buddied up to the white supremacist League of the South (LOS) — a group that opposes racial intermarriage, defends segregation, and calls for a return to “European cultural hegemony” in the South — to the point of actually co-sponsoring the Oct. 3-4 Second North American Secessionist Convention in Tennessee with the LOS. Now, the left-right love affair promoted by Sale has turned positively torrid, with a “North-South Secession Summit” planned for January. Attending will be top officials of the Middlebury Institute, LOS, the Southern National Congress, and the Second Vermont Republic, to seek “the peaceful dissolution” of the United States.

6. Stupidest Conspiracy Theory Award
You know it can’t be good when the John Birch Society, the rabidly anti-Communist group that called President Eisenhower a commie, teams up with Jerome Corsi, the man who orchestrated the Swift-boating of John Kerry. Corsi and the JBS are the prime promoters of a nativist conspiracy theory that claims Mexico, Canada and the United States are secretly planning a merger that would result in something called the “North American Union” (NAU). They insist that a 2005 tri-national agreement called the Security and Prosperity Partnership — a series of working groups to study cooperation in transportation, energy, aviation and the environment — is the leading edge of the conspiracy that may, in Corsi’s words, end in “an executive branch coup d’etat.” This would be merely an exercise in the ridiculous were it not for the fact that public figures from CNN anchor Lou Dobbs to U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) to nativist leader Jim Gilchrist keep plugging it. Thanks to them and their ilk, the houses of representatives of 18 states have now passed resolutions opposing the much-feared NAU — an entity that does not exist and has never been planned.

5. Most Annoying Snot-Nosed College Kid Award
Kyle Bristow was irritating enough way back in 2006, when the soon-to-be leader of Young Americans for Freedom at Michigan State University posted his 13-point agenda, including elimination from student government of virtually every non-white, non-heterosexual and non-Christian group. He ratcheted it up with a “Straight Power” demonstration featuring “End Faggotry” and “Go Back in the Closet” signs. From there, Bristow and his MSU-YAF degenerated into “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day” contests, a “Koran Desecration” competition, and even, last September, an attack on a new Latino studies doctoral program under this headline: “MSU Offers Doctorate in Savagery.” Bristow went on to invite such speakers to MSU as Nick Griffin, head of the racist British National Party and a long-time Holocaust denier. All of this was bad enough on its own. Truly appalling, however, were the accolades Bristow received from mainstream politicians including Michigan GOP boss Saul Anuzis, who, shortly after the Southern Poverty Law Center named MSU-YAF a hate group, had this to say: “This [Bristow] is exactly the kind of young kid we want out there.” Good call, Saul!

4. Unlikeliest White Supremacist Award
Our old nemesis, H.K. Edgerton, was in our hometown of Montgomery, Ala., back in November, and it reminded all of us just how nutty he really is. Edgerton, faithful readers of the Intelligence Report will remember, is a lonely black man in the overwhelmingly white — and white supremacist — neo-Confederate movement. As he made clear in an interview with Hatewatch, H.K. hasn’t dropped any of his strange ideas about slavery, the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan and related topics. A sampling: Before the slaves were freed, “Black folks and white folks were family. …White people and slaves saw each other on the streets and they tipped their hats to each other.” Slaves “were given a new pair of pants and a new pair of shoes every day” and “had the same medical facilities that the white man had.” The Klan was “just protecting the people — all the people, black and white.” If you really believe that, H.K., we suggest you skip straight down this list to award No. 1 and join up.

3. Weakest Relationship With Reality Award
The Southern Poverty Law Center last year engaged in a sort of epic battle with Lou Dobbs, the CNN host who has probably done more to defame immigrants than any other public figure in contemporary America. The struggle was epitomized by a debate over Dobbs’ claim that the United States had experienced a surge of 7,000 new cases of leprosy in a recent three-year period, due at least in part to immigrants. In a seemingly endless series of debates, interviews and on his own show, Dobbs stuck to his guns, despite crystal-clear government statistics that pegged the number of new cases for the years in question at 398. The whole sorry affair was dramatized best in a comment Dobbs made to Lesley Stahl of CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which first pointed out Dobbs’ error in a profile of the broadcaster that aired last May. Said Dobbs: “If we reported it, it’s a fact.” Stahl asked how Dobbs could guarantee that. “Because I’m the managing editor, and that’s how we do business.” Ah, NOW we understand.

2. Creepiest Psychotherapist Award
Richard Cohen won this one by acclamation, but it didn’t become official until we convinced our own CEO — Richard Cohen — that we weren’t talking about him. The Cohen in question describes himself as “ex-gay” and conducts controversial “healing touch” therapy that involves men striving to rid themselves of their homosexuality cradling and rocking other men in their arms. This technique was demonstrated by the licensed psychotherapist on Paula Zahn’s CNN show, an appearance that also included Cohen’s excited demonstration of “bioenergetics,” which involves beating on chairs with tennis rackets while shouting, “Mom, why did you do this to me?” The CNN appearance was almost universally described as a disaster, and Cohen’s name promptly disappeared from several “ex-gay” websites.

1. Most Surprising ‘Hate’ Group Award
For the better part of 142 years, the Ku Klux Klan has been the most infamous racist group in America, leading a campaign of terror that involved murders, lynchings, rapes, castrations, bombings, church arsons, and any number of other horrors. But now comes the Alabama Christian Klan, “The Voice of the New Civil Rights Era,” with a Web page that currently features an approving photo of Birmingham’s black mayor and a banner announcing an upcoming Klan rally in rather unusual (for the Klan) terms: “Birmingham At a Crossroads: Can We Come Together?” This is followed by the announcement of a “diligent campaign” to get other Klan groups to abandon their racism and shun any “acts of disrespect to any community.” The man behind the group, Trussville, Ala., resident Ken Mier, already has taken credit for the decision by another Klan group to cancel a rally last November, saying in an E-mail to Hatewatch that he considered this “a victory for the Christian residence [sic] of Alabama.” Way to go, Ken!

And with that, we wrap up the year here at Hatewatch. We’ll be taking the next two weeks off, but you can expect to see us again the week of Jan. 7, followed by a whole year of lively posts skewering the American radical right. Stick around long enough, and it’ll be time for the Hatewatch 2nd Annual Year-End Smackdown Awards — an event we’ll soon start storing up goodies for. In the meantime, happy holidays!

We’re pleased as punch to report that we just learned that the Intelligence Report — the quarterly magazine published by the Southern Poverty Law Center and written by the authors of this blog — has won an important award. The Utne Reader, which aggregates and reprints selected articles from some 1,300 publications around the country, gave the Report its award for best U.S. periodical in the “In-Depth/Investigative Reporting” category of its 2007 Utne Independent Press Awards. Publications cannot apply for the Utne Awards — Utne’s editors make the selections completely on their own initiative. This was not the first award for the Intelligence Report. The magazine has won two Society of Professional Journalists awards — for Non-Deadline Reporting in 2003, and for Investigative Reporting in 2005. In 1999, shortly after converting to color, it won the Society of Publication Designers’ award for Best Redesign.

Here’s what Utne Reader had to say about us:

In a time when media reflection on the country’s race issues comes down to parsing the latest celebrity gaffe, Intelligence Report reminds us that organized, violent racism — often written-off as a troubling relic of a bygone era — endures. Published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the venerable Montgomery, Alabama-based civil rights organization, the magazine tracks extremist movements and their ideological ripples throughout society. In the Spring 2007 issue, for instance, it was reported that the number of hate groups in the United States has swelled along with the nation’s rising tide of populist anti-immigration sentiments, climbing 40 percent to 844 in a six-year period (2000 to 2006). The Winter 2006 cover story took aim at Latino gangs targeting African Americans in Los Angeles. In Fall 2007, the magazine exposed the “Watchmen on the Walls,” a virulent anti-gay group fomenting hatred among fellow Slavic immigrants in Sacramento. Managing their wide-ranging mission by carrying on the fine but increasingly rare tradition of old-school investigative journalism, the writers and editors weed through mountains of paper, work the phones, hit the pavement, and connect the dots.

Remember the good old days, back in the 1990s, when the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) was still claiming to be a non-racist, if conservative, group? That was when then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) was still trying to defend his ties to the CCC in the aftermath of an SPLC exposé revealing the virulent racism at the core of the group. By 2000, the CCC had relaxed a little, letting its ideological hair down with a Web posting advertising South Carolina’s “whiter beaches” (the state was being subjected to a tourism boycott by the NAACP) and, in a final display of let-them-think-whatever-they-damn-want-to insouciance, an essay calling blacks a “retrograde species of humanity.” But still, CCC officials soldiered on, telling anyone who would listen that theirs was a mainstream group and that those who criticized it were the real haters. Even as the politicians it once influenced fled, the CCC struggled to remain relevant.

Now comes Larry Darby, the newly appointed chairman of the CCC’s Alabama Capital Region. The man is not an advertisement for the CCC’s alleged moderation.

For years, Darby was a lonely atheist in hyper-religious Alabama, denouncing religion every time he could get a TV camera pointed his way. He supported the legalization of marijuana. Then, in late 2005, he invited David Irving, the world’s leading Holocaust denier, to central Alabama, billing him as an “expert” on World War II and “free speech.” Running (unsuccessfully) for state attorney general the following year, he said the Nazi Holocaust “never happened,” the Voting Rights Act of 1965 should be repealed, and segregated schools should be reinstated. He suggested that martial law be imposed and troops stationed on interstates to deal with “illegal aliens.” He traveled to a May 13, 2006, rally in New Jersey held by the neo-Nazi group, National Vanguard, to speak alongside other neo-Nazi leaders, including David Duke. A photograph from the rally show a smiling Darby arm in arm with infamous neo-Nazi stage mom April Gaede. ( continue to full post… )

Charles Barefoot, the leader of a North Carolina Klan group that plotted to blow up the local sheriff’s office in 2001, has been found mentally incompetent to stand trial for orchestrating the murder of a fellow Klansman. After reviewing a psychologist’s evaluation, a Sampson County Superior Court judge ruled that Barefoot, 45, was “not competent to stand trial because he currently does not possess a rational understanding of the proceedings against him.”

The judge ordered that Barefoot be committed indefinitely at Dorothea Dix Hospital in order “to determine whether there is a substantial probability that his competency will be restored in the foreseeable future.”

Barefoot and his KKK splinter faction were examined in last summer’s edition of the Intelligence Report, which detailed how the criminal investigation of Barefoot “opened a rare window into the inner workings of the modern-day Klan in the South, a secret and sordid culture of violence, racism and paranoia, where coon dogs are traded for liquid dynamite, crosses are burned next to the local Waffle House, and a Klan grand dragon presides over meetings in a ramshackle clubhouse on the edge of a swamp.” ( continue to full post… )

Lou Dobbs was at it again last night, unleashing a foaming-mouth attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which the CNN host variously described as “left wing,” “liberal,” “pitiful,” “an absolute disgrace,” and a “socio-ethnic centric special interest” group with an “open borders agenda.” Dobbs was livid because a short, just-released story in the SPLC’s Intelligence Report — about two Border Patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and José Compean, now serving 11- and 12-year prison terms for shooting an unarmed border crosser and then covering up evidence and filing false official reports — highlighted and criticized Dobbs’ glorification of the pair.

Repeatedly promoting his upcoming segment last night, Dobbs said he’d have a thing or two to say about the SPLC’s “concept of law and justice” and added that the SPLC “doesn’t understand the concept of justice and presumption of innocence.” “[I]n this country,” Dobbs sputtered once he finally got to his segment, “there is a nativist tradition that says people are presumed innocent until proved guilty. What the Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t seem to understand is that in this country, the burden of proof lies with the prosecution, not the defendants.”

Well, yes. But isn’t that, umm, before conviction?

“Dobbs just doesn’t get it,” said Richard Cohen, president of the SPLC and, unlike Dobbs, an actual lawyer. “The presumption of innocence applies throughout the trial process, but not after a jury has rendered a guilty verdict. Dobbs can presume Ramos and Compean to be innocent all he wants. But in the eyes of the law, they’re guilty because they’ve been tried and convicted.” ( continue to full post… )

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is almost certainly the most-quoted immigration restriction organization in America. In just the last few weeks, its leaders have enlightened cable viewers with their views on such topics as “American ‘Intifada’ in Our Future?” “Driving While Illegal,” “Should ALL Illegal Aliens Be Deported?” and “Economic Impact of Migration.” In the past six years, FAIR officials have testified at least 30 times to Congress. Day in and day out, FAIR is taken seriously as a mainstream commentator on the immigration debate.

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It shouldn’t be. The founder, chief ideologue and long-time funder of FAIR is a racist. Key staff members have ties to white supremacist groups, some are members, and some have spoken at hate group functions. FAIR has accepted more than $1 million from a racist foundation devoted to studies of race and IQ, and to eugenics — the pseudo-science of breeding a better human race that was utterly discredited by the Nazi euthanasia program. It spreads racist conspiracy theories. Its political ads have caused numerous politicians, Democratic and Republican, to denounce it.

Much of this has been known for years. But last February, underlining the way that FAIR does business, its leaders met with the leaders of Vlaams Belang — a hastily renamed Belgian party that under a prior appellation, Vlaams Blok, was officially banned by the Belgian Supreme Court as a racist and xenophobic group. It was, for some, a final straw — the Rubicon of hate, as it were. When FAIR officials met with Vlaams Belang leaders to seek their “advice” on immigration, we decided to take another look at FAIR. When our work was done, it was obvious that FAIR qualified as a hate group. Early next year, when the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual hate group list is published, FAIR will be on the list.

The results of our investigation are contained in an article being published today in SPLC’s Intelligence Report and on the Web. In addition to this evidence, the Report in 2002 published a major investigation of John Tanton, who founded FAIR and remains a key player on its board today. A 2001 Report article also included brief profiles of immigration restrictionist groups, including FAIR.

The identification of FAIR as a bona fide hate group is important. FAIR is the hub of the American nativist movement, the group that more than any other has contributed to the rancid turn the national immigration discussion has taken. With FAIR fanning the flames of xenophobic intolerance, hate groups, hate crimes and hate speech directed at foreigners and Latinos continue to rise in America.

When Nobel Prize winner James D. Watson suggested in October that Africans are innately less intelligent than others, he was met by an international firestorm of scientific criticism, ultimately resulting in his public apology and later resignation from the Long Island laboratory where he was chancellor. Many experts on intelligence challenged the scientific basis for Watson’s comment, and the director of the Human Genome Research Institute, who took up his post after Watson left it, described Watson’s remark as “a racist statement.” In fact, the weight of current scientific evidence suggests that differences in IQ between racial groups are principally caused by environmental factors.

In the aftermath of the Watson controversy, Slate.com, a normally liberal online magazine, published a three-part series by its science and technology columnist, William Saletan, that suggested strongly that IQ differences were, in fact, related to race. But within days, Saletan had published an essay entitled “Regrets,” in which he admitted that he had done a particularly poor job of summarizing the state of science on the IQ question. (Another Slate writer, Stephen Metcalf, also posted a major critical response to Saletan’s series.) In fact, as Saletan partly admitted in his apology, almost all of his conclusions came from the work of J. Philippe Rushton — a man who heads up a racist foundation, the Pioneer Fund, dedicated to race and IQ studies. The fund was created in 1937 to pursue policies of “race betterment,” specifically promoting the genetic stock of the white settlers of the original 13 colonies.

Then it was the turn of The New York Times. On Dec. 1, six weeks after Watson’s remarks, a story by Patricia Cohen summarized the controversy, the Slate episode, and the debate over race and intelligence. But Cohen made almost precisely the same mistake that the unfortunate Saletan did. Quoted prominently in her story was one Linda Gottfredson, identified simply as a sociologist at the University of Delaware, saying that Saletan had nothing to apologize for. Gottfredson hailed Saletan, in fact, for possibly being “the first journalist to so directly acknowledge the scientific evidence” and called the response to his series evidence of a “moral panic.”

Just one little trouble. Gottfredson, along with Rushton, is one of the merry band of Pioneer Fund grant recipients. Since 1988, she has accepted at least $267,000 from the racist foundation. Gottfredson also opposed the 1991 Civil Rights Act because she said it fails to recognize innate differences in intelligence. And she criticized what she called “the egalitarian fiction that all groups are equal in intelligence.”

What’s in a highway? It depends, it turns out, on who you’re listening to.

For years, nativist fearmongers and assorted conspiracy theorists have asserted that Interstate 35 — the highway that traverses the U.S. in a 1,568-mile path from Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minn. — is a part of a secret government plan that spells national ruin and an invasion of illegal immigrants. In the words of Jerome Corsi, the architect of the Swift boat attacks on John Kerry and a general conspiracy nut, the Bush Administration and various evil allies are “quietly but systematically” moving forward on “this key piece of the coming ‘North American Union’.” I-35, groups like the conspiracy-minded John Birch Society add, will soon be transformed into a 10-lane corridor designed expressly to bring in workers and products that will destroy American workers’ livelihoods and bring the much-feared union of Mexico, the United States and Canada one grim step closer to reality.

But wait! Now comes a whole new set of people with their own unusual ideas, and they say that I-35 isn’t evil after all — on the contrary, it’s the “Highway of Holiness,” the very same one prophesied in Isaiah 35:8: “And a highway will be there; it will be called the way of holiness.” This amazing news comes courtesy of CBN’s “The 700 Club,” the Christian Right television show hosted by Pat Robertson, who once blamed 9/11 on gays, feminists, abortionists and sundry liberals.

As recounted by 700 Club “reporter” Paul Strand (a tip of the hat to the folks at Pam’s House Blend for capturing this), a group of Texas-based Christian Right churches, “because of recent prophesies, dreams and visions,” are staging “purity sieges” up and down the highway at gay bars, abortion clinics, strip clubs and adult bookstores. Cindy Jacobs, one of the pastors behind the sieges, said she had received instructions from God to “[g]o to these cities and cry out for holiness and purity, and [then] I’ll come down and I’ll invade.” ( continue to full post… )

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of “Democracy Now,” a serious radio and television news and analysis program, conducted an hour-long interview with nativist CNN host Lou Dobbs yesterday, and it was a doozie. Dobbs was pounded with questions about the bogus “facts” that he regularly trots out to demonize undocumented immigrants, such as his claim that a “third of our prison population” are “illegal aliens.” (As “Democracy Now” pointed out, the Justice Department says about 6% of state and federal prison populations are non-citizens. The government does not know what percentage of those non-citizens are undocumented.)

Dobbs’ chief reaction was to attack the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), whose Intelligence Report has carried a series of reports on Dobbs’ inaccuracies (see here, here, here and here), his promotion of racist conspiracy theories (see here), and the appearance of hate group members and leaders on his program (see here). (“Democracy Now” relied heavily on that SPLC research to confront Dobbs, who was plugging a new book.) Bizarrely, Dobbs responded to mention of his use of a white supremacist group’s graphic by noting that he had sent producers and reporters to SPLC’s Alabama offices in late 2004 “to make certain this sort of thing doesn’t happen.” But minutes later, he described the very same SPLC as “indulging in pure BS” in order to raise money. On his own show, he has called the SPLC a “fascist” group after SPLC criticized him. The whole thing was reminiscent of the way Dobbs last spring defended his false claim of immigrant-borne leprosy in an on-air debate with SPLC officials (see here). ( continue to full post… )