The Eagle Forum of Alabama is holding a series of “grassroots workshops” around the state entitled “What YOU can do about Illegal Immigration.” Clearly aimed at riling up nativist fury, the fliers for the event allege that “the average illegal immigrant household receives approximately $30,000 in government benefits each year but pays only $9,000 in taxes.”

The problem, as is often the case with the “facts” nativists dredge up to illustrate the evils of immigration, is that these calculations are wildly misleading at best. The numbers above originate in a quote from Robert Rector that was posted on the website NoFreeMustang.com, a new anti-immigration site put up by the conservative Heritage Foundation where Rector is a senior fellow. The website’s title refers to the difference between the two numbers above, $21,000, which Rector alleges is the net cost taxpayers pick up for undocumented workers. “That’s like buying each of these illegal immigrant families a brand new Mustang convertible,” he claims.

Rector is almost certainly wrong, as is reflected in a fact sheet summarizing immigration studies that was put together by the Immigration Policy Center. ( continue to full post… )

More than a dozen high-profile white nationalist activists muddied their reputations in the world of the radical right recently by organizing and publicizing a protest campaign on behalf of a teenage shooting victim they assumed was a “pure-blooded” white.

It all began last Wednesday, March 19, when Suffolk County, N.Y., resident John H. White, 55, was sentenced to two to four years in prison for killing 18-year-old Daniel Cicciaro Jr. in August 2006. White, who is African-American, shot Cicciaro in the face at close range when the unarmed young man and three of his friends confronted White at the foot of White’s driveway on Long Island. They had followed White’s teenaged son, Aaron, home from a party after a quarrel. A jury convicted White of manslaughter earlier this year.

Minutes after a judge handed down the relatively light sentence (White faced up to 15 years in prison), the victim’s father, Daniel Cicciaro Sr., shouted to reporters, “As long as you’re black and there’s a problem at the foot of your driveway, you can shoot my son in the face? Let’s see what happens when Aaron White gets shot! Let’s see what the laws are then!”

The following day, white nationalist John Anthony Boone, posting as “OTPTT,” started a discussion thread on the neo-Nazi website Vanguard News Network (VNN) entitled, “White Father Responds Like White Man Over Light Sentence Given to Nigger!” ( continue to full post… )

Like a jackbooted Energizer bunny, Hal Turner just keeps on ticking. The New Jersey neo-Nazi, infamous for repeatedly proposing that certain of his enemies be killed, is now suggesting that all three presidential candidates should suffer a similar fate.

Despite a series of travails — a report in this space that he was allegedly a paid FBI informant, his “quitting” of the white power movement only to rejoin days later, and attacks from other white supremacists — Turner is gamely playing on.

And for him, that means issuing threats.

A few days ago, Turner wrote on his website that John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were all “traitors.” “If you think real Patriots like me are going to sit idly by while you turn our country over to such people, you are sadly mistaken. … Think I’m kidding? My audience includes the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, skinheads and Nazis. … The deadly serious kind.” Then Turner proceeded to recount how he once said that a federal judge who had ruled against a neo-Nazi group in a 2005 copyright case was “worthy of being killed” — and how the judge’s mother and husband were subsequently murdered in her home. “I hope,” Turner wrote, “I don’t have to start talking the same way about Clinton, McCain and Obama.”

Hatewatch first printed allegations that Turner was an FBI informant on Jan. 11. Although Turner had told supporters just a day earlier that he was leaving the racist movement, he responded by bringing his Internet radio show and website back to life and insisting the allegations were false. Since then, Hatewatch has confirmed through numerous knowledgeable sources that Turner was, in fact, a paid FBI informant, and that he had worked for the agency’s Newark, N.J., office for years. As reported here in January, experts in police procedure severely criticized the FBI’s use of Turner because he was clearly doing more to provoke violence than to contain it. ( continue to full post… )

The “World Famous Redneck Shop” in downtown Laurens, S.C., has been headquarters to two different Klan factions and the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement. It has played host to a reunion of the infamous neo-Nazi group, the Aryan Nations, and sells cheap racist merchandise including T-shirts that read, “Ain’t Racist, Just Never Met a Nigger I Liked.” Yet for more than 10 years, a black Baptist church has owned the store in an unusual legal arrangement. The Rev. David Kennedy says that in 1997 his church bought the Echo Theater, the building that houses the Redneck Shop, out of pity for a poor family and a misguided belief that the owner had changed his racist ways.

The Redneck Shop was built up by Michael Burden Jr., a former grand dragon in a South Carolina Klan group who acquired it from John Howard, another one-time Klansman who had had taken Burden under his wing. But Kennedy told Hatewatch that in the late ’90s, Burden’s family was desperately poor and Burden begged him to buy the property. “His family was about to starve,” the Rev. Kennedy said. The family was so famished, Kennedy added, that they had trouble standing up. Moved, Kennedy embarked on a tentative relationship with the one-time Klan leader.

Kennedy says he initially encouraged the city to buy the Redneck Shop property. But when officials declined, Kennedy’s New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church paid Burden $1,000 for it on April 22, 1997, according to the property deed. The sale was organized as a life estate that allowed Howard (not Burden) to operate the Redneck Shop until Howard’s death. Kennedy says he agreed to the arrangement to help the ailing Burden family and because he believed Burden Jr. had recanted of his racist views — a story recounted that same year in an ABC America “Prime Time Live” segment entitled “The Redneck & the Reverend: A Story of Hate & Hope.” At one point during their relationship, Kennedy says, Burden even told the black reverend that Howard had suggested that Burden assassinate him. “We helped him and he wanted to apologize to the black community,” Kennedy said of Burden, adding that Burden actually began attending his church on a regular basis. “Then all of a sudden he stopped showing up.” ( continue to full post… )

Yahweh ben Yahweh is coming and he is pissed.

That’s the message being disseminated by leaders of the black supremacist cult Nation of Yahweh, who are calling on followers to gather in Canada from March 30 to April 6 at the ritzy Marriott Chateau Champlain hotel in downtown Montreal. The registration cost for the “Passover/Feast of Unleavened Bread” is $1,380 per person, a small price to witness the resurrection of cult founder Yahweh Ben Yahweh, who died last May.

“We who believe in the Son and remain in the laws of Yahweh will be fully ready and eagerly anticipating the Second Coming of Christ, Yahweh Ben Yahweh,” conference materials reveal. “His reappearance shall signify the ultimate ‘Passover,’ in which He shall execute the FINAL JUDGMENT against the nations of the earth and most especially the gods of modern day Egypt — America.”

That might not work out well for many people, especially if they’re white. Last time Yahweh ben Yahweh was on this mortal coil, he was convicted on federal conspiracy charges related to the murders of 14 people, some of whose ears were hacked off and brought back to the cult leader by his followers, in the Miami area. ( continue to full post… )

March has certainly come in like a lion for “Buffalo” Rick Galeener. It’s been a rip-roarin’ month so far for the professional singing cowboy-turned-co-founder of Riders United for a Sovereign America, or Riders USA, a Phoenix-based immigrant-bashing motorcycle gang.

Last week, Galeener was profiled in the new issue of the Intelligence Report as one of the 20 most active militant nativists in the country. Then, earlier this week, he was quoted in a National Public Radio report talking trash about Salvador Reza, a Phoenix labor organizer and U.S. Air Force veteran who operates the Macehualli Work Center, a day labor facility in Phoenix outside of which Galeener and other nativists have protested almost every day this year.

The March 11 NPR piece, though, failed to note that three days before it aired, Galeener was cited by a Phoenix police officer for exposing his penis to a Hispanic woman and her 2-year-old son outside the Macehualli center. ( continue to full post… )

According to Oklahoma lawmaker Sally Kern, gays are more of a threat to America than terrorists. Also, they are “going after our young children, as young as two years of age,” “infiltrating” city councils across the country, and have completed a hostile takeover of Eureka Springs, Ark.

These were just a few of the bizarre assertions in the anti-gay tirade Kern spewed at a recent appearance at a community event for supporters. Last week, the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, a Washington, D.C., political group posted the audio on YouTube.

Ironically, Kern represents a district in Oklahoma City, a community that became all too familiar with the true danger of terrorism when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed in 1995. She sits on the House of Representatives’ Education and Human Services Committee and chairs the Social Services Committee.

While Kern’s claims were astounding, they were hardly original. In fact, taken together they’re a greatest hits medley of unhinged claims currently in vogue among anti-gay extremists and propagandists.

( continue to full post… )

We’ve just released the “Year in Hate” issue of the Intelligence Report, showing a staggering 48% jump since 2000 in the number of hate groups that operate in America. That translates into an increase from 602 groups that year to 888 in 2007 — growth almost entirely driven by the poisonous national debate on immigration. That debate has given hate groups an issue with great resonance that they are using successfully to recruit new members.

Already, recently released FBI statistics had suggested that hate crimes against Latinos — crimes that perpetrators typically think they are carrying out against undocumented immigrants — rose 35% between 2003 and 2006. The Report has now found other evidence to support the notion that a rage against immigrants is being successfully used by hate groups: the largest numerical growth of these groups last year came in the three border states of California, Arizona and Texas.

“Hate groups continue to successfully exploit the immigration debate to their advantage, even though the immigration issue has largely disappeared from the presidential debate,” said Mark Potok, editor of the Report, the staff of which writes this blog. “The fact is that they’ve been aided and abetted by mainstream pundits and politicians who give these haters a platform for their propaganda.” ( continue to full post… )

Kyle Bristow, the former chairman of the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans For Freedom, is no stranger to erratic behavior. But the MSU junior exhibited a particularly strange emotional schism last week, rhapsodizing about bald eagles one minute, and then branding the national leaders of YAF “cowards” the next.

Bristow’s wild mood swings began last Sunday, February 24, when he announced that he was resigning his MSU-YAF post in a rambling and egomaniacal, but generally upbeat letter that concluded with Bristow graciously “passing the torch of freedom to the next generation of YAF leaders.” Then, on Thursday, February 28—the day after YAF founder William F. Buckley died—Bristow published a bitter screed on the website of the racist magazine American Renaissance. It was titled, “Why Jared Taylor Cannot Speak at MSU.” ( continue to full post… )