Just one month after taking the reins of The Washington Times — a paper with a long history of far-right reporting and several top editors linked to white supremacist ideas — Editor-in-Chief John Solomon has signaled a major change in direction.

In an internal memo issued on Monday, Feb. 25, the Times’ Patrick Tuohy listed a set of five changes to the publication’s rules of style. The brief E-mail spoke volumes.

No longer will the Times refer snidely in headlines to “Hillary”; the new headline reference to the New York senator and presidential candidate will now be “Clinton.” The word “gay” will replace the word “homosexual” in copy — “except in clinical references or references to sexual activity,” as Tuohy writes. The newspaper, which had fiercely opposed gay marriage in its editorials and less explicitly in many of its news columns, will stop using sarcastic quotes around the word “marriage” when discussing same-sex unions. It has now approved the word “moderate” (”centrist” was the formerly preferred term) for discussing a particular range of political views — a word it apparently avoided in the past because it carried the connotation of “reasonable.” Finally, the newspaper will now refer to “illegal immigrants,” not “illegal aliens,” a term many immigrants and human rights activists feel is denigrating and conjures up visions of frightening other-worldly beings. ( continue to full post… )

Kyle Bristow — the pugnacious chair of the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (MSU-YAF), a student organization listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — announced Sunday that he’s resigning “so that the next generation of YAFers can replace me.”

Bristow (right) also confirmed that an MSU-YAF-sponsored lecture by Jared Taylor, the editor of the academic racist journal American Renaissance, would not occur on the MSU campus in March as originally planned. “Though MSU-YAF is not officially hosting Jared Taylor as a speaker this semester, I did see to it that he will be able to speak at a location near MSU and be hosted by another organization (the show will go on!),” Bristow wrote. (As it happens, the three-day biannual conference of American Renaissance, held in Herndon, Va., and featuring former Klan leaders and other assorted white supremacists, wrapped up the same day he spoke.)

MSU-YAF was added to the SPLC list in early 2007, after MSU-YAF attempted to organize a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day” contest, held a “Koran Desecration” competition, joked about distributing smallpox-infested blankets to Native American students, and hosted a series of lectures by hate group leaders such as Nick Griffin that drew skinheads and other white supremacists to the MSU campus. Griffin is the Holocaust-denying leader of the extreme-right British National Party. ( continue to full post… )

A founder of Watchmen on the Walls, an international organization that is ferociously anti-gay, isn’t who Hatewatch would choose to speak at an MLK day event. But that’s what happened on Jan. 17, when the Rev. Ken Hutcherson spoke at Mt. Si High School in Snoqualmie, Wash.

At the student-planned assembly, Hutcherson, founder of a Seattle-area megachurch, was booed by English teacher George Potratz. Kit McCormick, an adviser for the school’s Gay/Straight Alliance club, asked Hutcherson how he could admire Dr. King but fight against civil rights for homosexuals. “I think her deal was that I don’t believe in equal rights for everybody,” Hutcherson told a reporter later. During his speech, Hutcherson talked about growing up as a black man in the South.

Last week, school principal Randy Taylor disciplined the teachers for their actions with a letter that will be included in their personnel files. But for Hutcherson, that’s not enough. He told the American Family Association that he wants the teachers fired. ( continue to full post… )

With the selection of Barack Obama as the first black Democratic nominee for president seeming more possible by the day, racists and white supremacists are posting increasingly ugly and even threatening remarks on the Internet.

“OBAMA WILL DIE, KKK FOREVER,” concludes a Feb. 15 post by “Rodney” to a blog run by a person identified only as Strider333. Above that signoff, Rodney wrote: “The KKK or someone WILL assassinate Obama! If we get a NIGGER President all you NIGGER’s [sic] will think you’ve won and that the WHITE people will have to bow to you[.] FUCK THAT.”

On traditional white supremacist and neo-Nazi sites (for instance, here and here), there are lengthy discussion threads about what would happen if Obama were elected president. Dozens of those posts are derogatory and employ all kinds of racist slurs. Others speculate that such an Obama victory would kick off a race war between whites and blacks. And some even raise the possibility that he could be assassinated. But talk like that is rare and extremely careful — probable evidence that the “white nationalists” who inhabit these sites are deeply concerned that their comments are being monitored by law enforcement for any criminal threat relating to the presidential race. In fact, Obama reportedly received federal Secret Service protection unusually early in the campaign season because of concerns about a racially motivated attack.

The most heated anti-Obama talk appears to be on Internet sites that allow people to post messages anonymously. One such site, JD Underground, is a list ostensibly devoted to lawyers, although further details were not available. It has carried a particularly venomous thread, entitled “Nigger President,” that has stretched from January into this month.

“I’m hoping someone will do his public duty of putting a bullet through Obama’s head,” said a poster identified as “Kill Da Nigga.” Another poster suggests “bring[ing] back lynchings” and concludes with a warning: “LOOK OUT NIGGER. THE KLAN IS GETTING BIGGER!!!!!!” And a third, using the screen name “amerikkkan,” says only, “The deep south is making plans.”

This Monday, Feb. 18, 52-year-old white supremacist James “Yankee Jim” Leshkevich sat before his computer screen and typed these words: “This will be the last post on [Leshkevich’s blog] The Hudson Valley Freeman for a while. I’m just too depressed over all this to continue. Hopefully that will change in the future.”

It didn’t.

The following morning, police in West Hurley, N.Y., found Leshkevich’s body hanging in a garage attached to the home he shared with his 55-year-old wife Deborah, who was found beaten and strangled to death in the couple’s bedroom, the victim of an apparent murder-suicide.

Leshkevich, a prolific white supremacist blogger, letter-to-the-editor writer and radio host, detailed what was apparently his motive in a rambling blog post spread over 10 days. Beginning Feb. 8, the post was titled, “I Caught My Wife Sleeping With Another Man…” ( continue to full post… )

St. Mary’s Academy, a K-12 school and college run by the “radical traditionalist Catholic” group known as the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) and located in St. Marys, Kan., barred a female referee from officiating a boys’ basketball game held on its campus on Feb. 2. According to a Feb. 13 article in Sports Illustrated, the referee, retired police officer Michelle Campbell of the Kansas State High School Activities Association, was told that “as a woman, [she] could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy’s beliefs.” ( continue to full post… )

Even by the twisted standards of the neo-Nazi underworld, Hardy Lloyd is one sick individual. The 30-year-old skinhead, who describes himself as the “doctor of all hate,” was kicked out of the ultra-violent World Church of the Creator in 2003 after he was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. “I do not believe killing is wrong,” Lloyd wrote in 2004. “Our new religion must be the worship of death and murder.”

Later that year, Lloyd (right) was arrested for murder after he killed his girlfriend. The victim, 41-year-old Lori Hann, was a divorced legal secretary who met Lloyd through an Internet dating service. Lloyd admitted shooting Hann in the face during an argument over another woman, but claimed that she’d threatened him with a handgun minutes earlier and that he fired in self-defense.

Prosecutors argued that Hann was gunned down in the street while running for help (she’d pulled over her car and gotten out in front of a stranger’s house with Lloyd in the passenger seat), and pointed out that Hann was unarmed when Lloyd shot her (Hann’s handgun was found in her vehicle). Nevertheless, a jury in November 2006 acquitted Lloyd of first-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter, finding him guilty only of carrying a firearm without a license.

Narrowly escaping a murder conviction has done nothing to dampen Lloyd’s enthusiasm for celebrating violence, including mass murder, on his “Universal Fascism” website, on which he encourages fascists of all colors to unite and kill Jews. But in recent weeks he’s sunken to a new sadistic low by taunting Hann’s loved ones and bragging about ending her life by posting lyrics to his own sadistic versions of hit pop songs and gangsta rap singles.

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Citing his father’s illness and “strain on [his] marriage,” James Edwards (below, right), a prominent white nationalist and host of the hate radio program, “The Political Cesspool,” sent out an E-mail to supporters Wednesday with the subject heading “All Good Things Come To An End.” In it, Edwards announced that he would broadcast his final show on Friday after three years on the air and 865 broadcasts. In a seeming about face, Edwards’ shutdown notice came only 10 weeks after he syndicated the program through Dixie Broadcasting. Dixie Broadcasting is an Internet radio outfit run by Ray McBerry, the chairman of the Georgia chapter of the League of the South, which is a neo-Confederate, white supremacist group. The show was broadcast on the Internet and by WLRM-AM for two hours every weeknight from a studio near Memphis, Tenn., where Edwards grew up and still lives.

Since co-founding “The Political Cesspool” in 2005, Edwards has become a golden boy in white nationalist circles and his show has served as the primary radio nexus of hate in America. Its sponsors included the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) and the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a leading Holocaust denial organization. And its guest roster for 2007 reads like a “Who’s Who” of the radical racist right, including such people as the leader of the CCC, Gordon Lee Baum; Holocaust denier and IHR chief Mark Weber; neo-Nazi activist April Gaede; and anti-Semitic professor Kevin MacDonald. The show’s most frequent celebrity racist guest is former Klan leader and neo-Nazi ideologue David Duke, who has logged three appearances.

Though he won’t be on the radio anymore, Edwards does not intend to give up his role as a self-described “European American activist,” promising his listeners he would continue to serve actively on the CCC’s board. He also thanked many of the extremists who had been on his show as well as several hate groups that sponsored it. “It’s been a thrill of a lifetime,” Edwards gushed, reminding his racist supporters that he hasn’t given up their cause. “Well, similar to the Great White, I’d die if I were not contributing to the survival of our race.”

A lecture series featuring presentations by two virulently anti-Semitic “radical traditionalist Catholics” was cancelled by The Catholic University of America on Monday after Hatewatch contacted the university to ask about the events. Radical traditionalist Catholics (read a major investigation of this theology here) deny certain Vatican teachings, particularly the Second Vatican Council’s reforms of the 1960s, and most hold anti-Semitic views that are rejected by the Roman Catholic Church. Many radical traditionalists have been excommunicated by the church.

E. Michael Jones (right) was scheduled to speak Wednesday at the university’s Edward M. Crough Center for Architectural Studies as part of a lecture series “exploring how to create new communities based on the tradition and teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.” The lectures are sponsored by an off-campus, private group called Building Catholic Communities, which describes itself as “an informal confederation of scholars, architects, religious and lay leaders who are hungry to rediscover the rich history and tradition of community life based on Catholic principals [sic].” ( continue to full post… )

Psychology Professor Kevin MacDonald (below, right) is facing condemnation from his colleagues for his anti-Semitic research, according to the California State University, Long Beach (CSU-LB), student newspaper, The Daily 49er. This academic year, MacDonald was removed from certain undergraduate courses that had long been taught by him. University sources told Hatewatch in July that large numbers of complaints about MacDonald’s anti-Semitism and racism, which followed the April 2007 publication of the Intelligence Report’s exposé, “Promoting Hate,” spurred the change.

In December, MacDonald held a closed forum to defend his work before the psychology department’s faculty. He was pressed there to explain his research methodology, his ethics and his controversial theories alleging that Jews are genetically compelled to undermine Western societies (for more on MacDonald’s anti-Semitic research, see here and here). He was also asked to explain his many connections to white supremacists. Since the turn of the millennium, MacDonald has held leadership positions in several white supremacist groups, and in 2004 he was honored with a $10,000 prize for his work on the Jews by The Occidental Quarterly, a white supremacist publication where he currently serves on the editorial advisory board.

According to The Daily 49er, CSU-LB’s psychology department’s advisory committee will meet next week to discuss issuing a statement that would formally disassociate the department from MacDonald’s work. The committee has reportedly determined that the three statements already posted on the department website are inadequate for that purpose. Two of the statements reiterate the department’s commitment to diversity and denounce any use of psychological research as propaganda for racist groups. The third includes the expectation that faculty members whose work is controversial will “state that their views may not represent those of the department.”