Lou Dobbs, the CNN host who has been frequently criticized for turning his program, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” into a forum for anti-immigrant extremists, is at it again. In the past few months, Dobbs has aired six different reports featuring anti-immigrant activist Rick Oltman of Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS). The reports, all narrated by CNN correspondent Casey Wian, primarily discussed California’s budget woes, with Oltman blaming them on undocumented workers.

If Wian had conducted a simple Web search for Oltman, he would have dug up a laundry list of Oltman’s extremist activities. For example, Wian would have quickly found out that in 1998, Oltman, who was then the western regional representative for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), traveled to Cullman, Ala., for a protest against a swelling local population of Mexican workers. The event was put on by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which “oppose[s] all efforts to mix the races of mankind,” and featured an unrobed Klansman burning a Mexican flag. In the CCC’s ad for the event, Oltman was described as a member of that group. There also is a photograph that has been available on the Web since last year of Oltman participating in a 1997 CCC conference panel entitled, “Immigration: Are We Being Overrun?,” which ran in the group’s in-house publication, Citizens Informer.

Wian can’t claim ignorance of the CCC. In 2006, during a report that Wian was narrating on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” about a state visit by Mexico’s then-president Vicente Fox, a graphic appeared of “Aztlan,” the southwestern portion of the current United States that conspiracy theorists claim Mexico is secretly plotting to “reconquer” with the aid of “invading” Mexican immigrants. Wian joked as the image was aired: “You could call this the Vicente Fox Aztlan tour, since the three states he’ll visit — Utah, Washington, and California — are all part of some radical group’s vision of the mythical indigenous homeland.” CNN’s accompanying full-screen map depicting “Aztlan” was prominently sourced to the CCC, causing widespread criticism of Dobbs for relying on hate group material. A spokesman for Dobbs went on the record shortly afterward saying that the producer who had found and used the hate group map was “disciplined” as a result. ( continue to full post… )

A revelation published earlier this month by Hatewatch — that Chloe Black, wife of former Klan leader Don Black, was the public relations contact for a philanthropist’s efforts to build a campus for children of poor black and Latino children in Florida — caused quite a stir in the media and elsewhere. The Gawker.com website was one of the first to revisit the story, recounting the Hatewatch item under the headline, “The Socialite’s Nazi Publicist.” (The title referred to the fact that Chloe Black, whose husband founded and runs the major white supremacist website Stormfront, was the contact for a school established by Emilia Fanjul, whose wealthy family runs the Florida Crystals sugar conglomerate.) Then it was the turn of The New York Post’s Page Six — probably the best known celebrity gossip column in America — which ran “Sugar Baron’s Aide’s KKK Link,” setting off a whole bevy of similar reports on celebrity gossip websites.

But it was when a version of Hatewatch’s revelations was published in the Palm Beach Post this past Saturday that sparks flew in the white supremacist circles that Chloe, her husband, and ex-husband David Duke inhabit. Even though she had just attended a June event put on by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, Black told the Post: “I am not involved with the Web site [Stormfront] and do not agree with extremist or racially prejudiced views.” Not only that, but the Post, based on information provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center, also reported that Don Black had recently toned down Stormfront, banning many symbols of Nazism that formerly were common on the site, including swastikas and SS lightning bolts, and getting rid of particularly offensive terms, including “nigger.”

White supremacists were not happy. In racist Web forums, they ripped both Don and Chloe Black, denouncing them for caring more about money than their beliefs. ( continue to full post… )

As part of its ongoing “Black in America” project, CNN posted a story to its website earlier this week titled “Could an Obama presidency hurt black Americans?” Credited to CNN correspondent John Blake, the piece quotes the wit and wisdom of Steve Sailer, identified only as “a columnist for The American Conservative magazine.”

Specifically, the CNN story quotes a column by Sailer first published last year in which he opined that Obama offers voters “White guilt repellent.”

“So many whites want to be able to say, ‘I’m not one of them, those bad whites. … Hey, I voted for a black guy for president,’” Sailer wrote.

What the CNN article fails to note is that in addition to writing columns and movie reviews for The American Conservative, Sailer is the founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, a neo-eugenics online discussion forum where right-wing journalists and race scientists have promoted selective breeding of the human species. He also writes frequently for the anti-immigrant hate site Vdare.com, named for the first white child born in America, and runs a website, isteve.com.
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Here’s a fresh treat for readers of Hatewatch — a brand new video, made by journalist Max Blumenthal and videographer Thomas Shomaker and co-produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, about convicted Holocaust denier David Irving. It’s an amazing, sardonic account of Irving’s visit this July 16 to a church in Manhattan, where Blumenthal presses him into a most remarkable interview.

Irving, of course, is the infamous British writer who penned numerous apologetics for Adolf Hitler and then sued American scholar Deborah Lipstadt after she called him a Holocaust denier. Irving ultimately lost his epic court battle in London, with the judge in the case concluding that he was a “pro-Nazi” polemicist. The court also found that the author of some 30 books had “persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence” to promote his racist and anti-Semitic ideas.

We’ll save most of the good stuff for viewers of the video, but offer just a couple of teasers here. At one point, Irving tells his audience: “Adolf Hitler was being kept out of the loop and was probably not at all anti-Semitic… . He repeatedly held out his hand to stop things happening to the Jews.” Just as you’re digesting that incredible piece of neo-Nazi propaganda, the video recounts how journalist Christopher Hitchens, a former Trotskyist-turned-Iraq War cheerleader, has described Irving as “a great historian” and, in Irving’s words, remains “a good friend” to the man who once said that more people died in the back of Ted Kennedy’s car than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Although the video doesn’t make this point, Hitchens was named one of the world’s “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine of Britain in 2005, long after his paean to Irving’s swell talents as a “historian.”

Take a look at this remarkable video, which we offer here a day late as a birthday present from Hatewatch, which just completed its first year of existence. As the months unfold, we hope to bring you more along these lines.

“It’s a loaded subject, but let’s get right down to it: gay men, on average, die significantly younger than the rest of the population.” So begins “Gay Men Die 20 Years Younger,” an article posted on insure.com, a publicly traded online insurance brokerage. The source for the article is identified as none other than “Dr. Paul Cameron, the President of the Family Research Institute, [who] published a study in Psychological Reports that confirmed a 20-year life expectancy gap for actively gay men.”

The study in question in fact did nothing of the sort. Its author is a notorious anti-gay propagandist who for more than 25 years has circulated bogus, homophobic “research findings” in pay-to-publish vanity magazines like Psychological Reports (which will publish most anybody willing to pay $27.50 a page). Cameron’s goal, as he says quite candidly, is to provide “ammunition for those who want laws adopted banning homosexual acts throughout the United States.” (In fact, such laws were struck down as unconstitutional by the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas.) Cameron’s propaganda is so transparently false and aimed merely at defaming homosexuals that the Southern Poverty Law Center added his Family Research Institute to its list of hate groups in 2005.

One of Cameron’s most infamous works is his 1983 “gay obituary study,” for which he used obituaries published in gay newspapers at the height of the AIDS crisis to conclude that gay men die on average at 43. “Gay Men Die 20 Years Younger,” which was written by insure.com company blogger Joseph White, is obviously based on the gay obituary study, even though Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, thoroughly debunked the study in 1997 in the online magazine Slate. ( continue to full post… )

Two years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asking him to investigate the extent to which white supremacists had infiltrated the U.S. military and urging him to adopt a zero-tolerance policy on racist extremists.

We had just published “A Few Bad Men,” a report containing significant evidence that thousands of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads and other white supremacists were learning the art of warfare as members of the armed services. Pressure to meet manpower goals for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had led recruiters and commanders to relax the military standards designed to weed out these extremists.

Forty members of Congress joined our call for an investigation. U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, also urged Rumsfeld to adopt a zero-tolerance policy. “Military extremists present an elevated threat to both their fellow servicemembers and the public,” Shelby wrote. “We witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today’s racist extremist may become tomorrow’s domestic terrorist.”

Three months later, the Pentagon — apparently without any investigation whatsoever — responded by rejecting our findings as “inaccurate and misleadingly alarmist.”

This week, NBC News producer Jim Popkin uncovered a new, unpublished FBI report that reinforces our findings. In fact, it documents a sort of revolving door between the military and white supremacist organizations. According to Popkin, the FBI found that extremists are recruiting military veterans to their organizations and also encouraging their followers “to infiltrate the military as ‘ghost skins,’ in order to recruit and receive training for the benefit of the extremist movement.” ( continue to full post… )

Since its founding nearly 90 years ago, the American Legion has been a fixture of community life. It has hosted Memorial Day parades to remember those who died in America’s wars. It has held bingo nights and dances at its 14,000-plus posts worldwide. It has supported thousands of Boy Scout groups, sponsored a baseball program that’s produced numerous professional players, and helped children living in poverty or with special needs. From World War II to the war in Iraq, the legion has fought to improve benefits for veterans and their families.

Now, America’s largest veterans organization has launched another campaign — a hard-line attack on undocumented immigrants that’s at odds with the legion’s mainstream image. As part of this effort, the legion, which purports to speak for 2.7 million members, recently issued a booklet that regurgitates discredited and often completely false information about how “illegals” are bringing crime, disease, and terrorism to this country, even as they wreck the economy for natives.

The legion’s 34-page booklet, A Strategy to Address Illegal Immigration in the United States, asserts that “poverty, political instability, disease and war” are “on our back doorstep” because of porous borders and the failure of the government to stringently enforce immigration laws. But in making its case, the legion repeatedly cites dubious sources, ignores well-known facts and makes baseless claims — such as the false assertion that the undocumented infected more than 7,000 people in America with leprosy during a recent three-year period.

“They’re sort of trotting out old tropes to do with immigration,” said Richard Wright, a Dartmouth College geography professor who specializes in immigration. “These are hackneyed stereotypes that have no place in a policy document.” ( continue to full post… )

A new book details a formerly undisclosed 1999 plot to assassinate Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and possibly also to blow up the center. Written by FBI agent Tym Burkey and informant Dave Hall, Into the Devil’s Den describes how Hall, after penetrating the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations group in Ohio and Idaho, uncovered the plot shortly before the assassin was to head south to SPLC headquarters in Montgomery, Ala. The assassin was arrested on April 14, 1999, and had timed his attack to roughly coincide with the April 19-20 anniversaries of the fiery end of the 1993 Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the birthday of Adolf Hitler. The plot was apparently concocted by several men upset that Dees and the SPLC that year sued the Aryan Nations in an action that ultimately resulted in the sale of the group’s Idaho compound.

Remarkably, the book also identifies Ron Edwards, national leader of the Kentucky-based Imperial Klans of America (IKA), as a possible (but uncharged) conspirator. The SPLC is now preparing for a November trial against Edwards and IKA on behalf of a boy who was beaten by two of the group’s members. This February, when Dees went to Kentucky to take Edwards’ deposition, the Klan leader (above, right) showed up with a fresh tattoo on the side of his newly shaven head that read, “FUCK S.P.L.C.”

The 1999 plot, which was averted thanks to the work of Hall and Burkey, was only the latest attempt by extremists to assassinate Dees or attack the SPLC. More than 30 people have been sent to federal prison in connection with similar plots.

For more on this case, read an account of the plot here.

 

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Notorious white supremacist lawyer Kirk D. Lyons has thrown his hat in the ring again for a spot on the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) General Executive Council, the national governing board for a group representing male descendants of Confederate veterans. Lyons, who was married at the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations compound by that group’s now deceased leader Richard Butler and who has a lengthy personal history of racist activities that includes past membership in the neo-Nazi National Alliance, is running for the post of councilman for the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV), the largest of the SCV’s three geographical divisions. Lyons is a past commander of the I.N. Giffen Camp, located in his hometown of Black Mountain, N.C.

In his campaign platform, Lyons (above, with family, in photo released with his campaign announcement) aims to turn the 20,000-odd member organization into one with a million. Perhaps he will do so by loosening standards. In a 2004 E-mail to SCV members, Lyons wrote, “Mere Klan membership should not be sufficient to remove a member.” What he says explicitly in his campaign announcement is that he hopes to use his position to reverse the outcome of the Civil War: “I look forward to being part of a gathering of eagles at Elm Springs [the SCV’s Tennessee headquarters] to lead the SCV to the victory our ancestors were denied — a victory that with God’s help we can and must secure for our posterity.”

Since the late 1990s, Lyons’ plan has been to turn the SCV into an arm of the radical right, something he made clear during a speech to the racist American Friends of the British National Party in 2000. In a videotape obtained by the Intelligence Report, Lyons talked about how a group of “unreconstructed Southerners” or “white trash,” including himself, had helped to move the SCV increasingly towards a white “nationalist perspective.” “The civil rights movement I am trying to form seeks a revolution,” Lyons told his extremist colleagues that day. “We seek a return to a godly society with no Northernisms attached to it — a majority European-derived society.” ( continue to full post… )

This spring, a high-society New York magazine called Quest ran a short feature about Emilia Fanjul, the wife of sugar baron Jose “Pepe” Fanjul, and her remarkable efforts to help black and migrant worker children out of poverty. The story described how Fanjul, a major philanthropist, was helping to finance and build a sparkling new campus for Glades Academy, a charter school in the town of Pahokee, Fla., which suffers with a 32% poverty rate. “I call them the forgotten children,” Fanjul said. “My greatest wish is that they gain dignity and hope.”

At the end of the article, Quest added a practical note: “For more information about Glades Academy, call Chloe Black.” A telephone number followed.

What the magazine didn’t say — and, doubtless, didn’t know — was that Chloe Hardin Black (above, with David Duke, in a 1976 photo from Tyler Bridges’ The Rise of David Duke) is a long-time white supremacist and the wife of a notorious former Klan leader. Black’s husband is Don Black, a former Alabama Klan chieftain who is famous among white supremacists for his creation of Stormfront, the largest white supremacist Web forum in the world. Prior to Black, Chloe Hardin was married to Black’s former boss, neo-Nazi David Duke, who was the national leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. ( continue to full post… )