On this week’s podcast, Heidi Beirich and I discuss her story “The Tanton Files,” which was posted last week on Hatewatch. Heidi’s story takes a look at what she discovered while researching the papers of John Tanton, who founded the modern anti-immigration movement and is still on the board of the anti-immigrant hate group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Tanton’s correspondence, which is lodged at the Bentley Historical Library, reveals not only that Tanton is an unabashed racist, but that he has been enmeshed in the white nationalist movement for decades.

“Is it luck or am I a thief?”

That’s the question neo-Nazi April Gaede posed Sept. 10 on the forum of the Vanguard News Network website (motto: “No Jews. Just right.”). Gaede, whose teenage daughters form the racist pop-singing duo Prussian Blue, recently boasted in an online post that she regularly scores free merchandise through underhanded means. “My family seems to have this gift of confusing clerks at large chain stores,” she confessed. “We end up not getting charged for items all the time. I think this happens to me because I talk to them and distract them (not on purpose) by saying outrageous things.”

It’s not hard to imagine Gaede uttering something unsettling. The neo-Nazi stage mom propelled her twin daughters, Lynx and Lamb, to international stardom in white power circles. Fans watch the blond, blue-eyed girls sieg heil and sing odes to “white survival,” though a 2007 documentary about the pair showed them tiring of their mother’s overbearing ways.

Now Gaede, a prolific contributor to neo-Nazi web forums, has revealed that micro-managing her daughters’ musical act isn’t her only skill. In her post on the VNN site, she tallied the thousands of dollars she’d saved by walking out of stores without paying for merchandise. Shopping in Kmart one day for window coolers, Gaede wrote, she saw a sign asking shoppers to donate money for Iraq veterans. “I asked to speak to a manager about how much the CEOs of Kmart were personally giving and why should they ask poor Kmart shoppers for money when they are a multibillion dollar company?” She reported that the “riled up” employee failed to ring up one of the coolers in her cart, saving her $150.

Another time, according to Gaede, she picked out some pricey merchandise at Ikea, only to find that the store was unable to charge her credit card for more than $300. So Gaede decided to return the following day to buy the remaining items. “When they loaded up our car they included the $500 table we had not paid for,” she recounted. “Dumb Mexicans.”

But Gaede apparently doesn’t want readers to think she lacks ethics. “Now if this happens at a mom and pop store we always correct it and if a clerk gives me the wrong change I always correct it (if they are white) because I dont [sic] want them to get in trouble for their till to be wrong. But otherwise if it is some big store I go for it… What do you all think? Is that evil???”

Opinions varied. “McKinley” wrote, “I will never fill [sic] wrong about getting one over from an enemy. Morals do not count in a death match.”

But others thought Gaede was taking the wrong tack. “It’s stealing from white people,” wrote “cknott.” “Because of April’s stealing, companies raise their prices which makes honest white people pay even more at the store. If we want to beat the J*w, we have to stop acting like the J*w.”

To which Gaede promptly replied, “Oh spank me! Probably most here on this board has [sic] done this. I just have the guts to admit it.”

A year after the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report published allegations of physical abuse, statutory rape and polygamy inside Tony Alamo Christian Ministries, authorities raided the cult’s headquarters in Fouke, Ark. Some 100 state and federal agents entered the compound Saturday night, apparently searching for evidence of child abuse and child pornography.

The Report’s investigation details the sordid history of Alamo, who was released from federal prison in 1998 after completing a sentence for tax evasion. Alamo had also been charged with felony child abuse in 1989, but that charge was finally dropped in 1995. However, the family of the 11-year-old boy who allegedly was subjected to 140 blows on Alamo’s orders for minor academic infractions filed suit and won a $1.4 million judgment.

As detailed in the Fall 2007 issue of the Report, Alamo in recent years has argued that girls should marry once they start menstruating, even if they are as young as 10. In a 2006 radio broadcast, he said: “God impregnated Mary when she was about 11 years old. So the government idiots, the people that don’t know the Bible, what you’re going to have to do is get a hold of God now, you’re going to have to get up there and cuff him and send him to prison for statutory rape.”

In early 2007, Alamo cited the alleged promiscuity of 1st-graders as grounds for marrying them before the age of legal consent. “I’ve found out from people’s parents that their daughter started having sex when she was 6 years old and had sex every day of her life,” he said in another broadcast. “So right there, by the time she’s 15 years old, she’s had sex thousands of times. I mean, this is just reality.”

The Report’s story also explores the Alamo cult’s strange background and its leader’s raging hatred for Catholics and homosexuals. Alamo has blamed Catholics for “every filthy thing,” including communism, Nazism, the two world wars, the Jonestown massacre, drugs, prostitution and pornography. He has also attacked his many detractors in Fouke, saying that God would “destroy” what he characterized as his “Vaticanite” critics.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan is an unassuming place, more like a small-town library than a research institute. But hidden away in 17 cardboard boxes deep inside the simple facility are the papers of John Tanton, the retired Michigan ophthalmologist who has been the most important figure in the modern American anti-immigration movement for three decades. The papers, which include more than 20 years of letters from the founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and a batch of other nativist groups, contain explosive material about Tanton’s beliefs. They also show that FAIR, where Tanton still serves as a member of the board, has been well aware of Tanton’s views and activities for years.

Tanton has long claimed that he is no racist — that, in fact, he came to his immigration restrictionism through progressive concerns for population control and the environment, not disdain for the foreign born. He characterizes himself as a “fair person,” and on his website he condemns the “unsavory characters whose views can easily be characterized as anti-American, anti-Semitic and outright racist.”

Fair enough. But what do Tanton’s letters have to say?

As it turns out, quite a lot. Although Tanton has been linked to racist ideas in the past — fretting about the “educability” of Latinos, warning of whites being out-bred by others, and publishing a number of white nationalist authors — the papers in the Bentley Library show that Tanton has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene. He has corresponded with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers and the leading white nationalist thinkers of the era. He introduced key FAIR leaders to the president of the Pioneer Fund, a white supremacist group set up to encourage “race betterment,” at a 1997 meeting at a private club. He wrote a major funder to encourage her to read the work of a radical anti-Semitic professor — to “give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life” — and suggested that the entire FAIR board discuss the professor’s theories on the Jews. He practically worshipped a principal architect of the Immigration Act of 1924 (instituting a national origin quota system and barring Asian immigration), a rabid anti-Semite whose pro-Nazi American Coalition of Patriotic Societies was indicted for sedition in 1942.

As early as 1969, Tanton showed a sharp interest in eugenics, the “science” of breeding a better human race that was utterly discredited by the Nazis, trying to find out if Michigan had laws allowing forced sterilization. His interest stemmed, he wrote in a letter of inquiry that year, from “a local pair of sisters who have nine illegitimate children between them.” Some 30 years later, he was still worrying about “less intelligent” people being allowed children, saying that “modern medicine and social programs are eroding the human gene pool.”

Throughout, FAIR — which, along with Tanton, refused repeated requests for comment for this story — has stood by its man. Its 2004 annual report praised him for “visionary qualities that have not waned one bit.” Around the same time, Dan Stein, who has led FAIR since 1988 as executive director or president and who was copied on scores of Tanton’s letters, insisted FAIR’s founder had “never asserted the inferiority or superiority of any racial, ethnic, or religious group. Never.” ( continue to full post… )

Principals of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), including FAIR founder John Tanton and FAIR President Dan Stein, have been attacking immigrants for 20 years. The quotations below of statements made by FAIR officials reveal their anti-immigrant views. ( continue to full post… )

The leader of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a hate group descended from the segregationist White Citizens Councils, says that his group did not host an infamous Holocaust denier’s speech in Alabama, although one of its officials promoted it. Hatewatch had reported on Sept. 2 that the CCC hosted the Aug. 26 event in the Montgomery area.

“The Council of Conservative Citizens has never hosted, held, sponsored or promoted any event or meeting at which David Irving has been the speaker,” wrote CCC head Gordon Lee Baum in a letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Nonetheless, Larry Darby, chairman of the Alabama Capital Region chapter of the CCC, promoted Irving’s lecture. While there, Darby handed out copies of the CCC’s racist publication, the Citizens Informer.

It wasn’t the first time that Darby — a Montgomery lawyer who has stated publicly that the Holocaust “never happened” — attended an event with the world’s most notorious Holocaust denier. Darby hosted Irving’s 2005 appearance at a Holiday Inn just north of Montgomery. (That was back before Darby, the father of two biracial girls, began hanging around with neo-Nazi leaders and assorted other white supremacists.) ( continue to full post… )

Neo-Nazi boss Bill White, long given to swaggering threats and proposals for violence, this week went even further than normal — announcing plans for a magazine cover headlined “Kill This NIGGER?” with a photo of Barack Obama and, two days later, publishing the home address of a juror who helped convict another neo-Nazi leader in a federal conspiracy case.

White, who heads the Virginia-based American National Socialist Workers Party, has issued a series of Internet calls for violence in recent years, including his infamous September 2007 suggestion that followers “Lynch the Jena 6,” a reference to black high school students in Jena, La. But of late, his postings have become even more violent, possibly as a result of White’s deliberate attempts to be provocative in the face of waning public attention.

On Tuesday, White posted on his Overthrow.com website a request for money to pay for a special issue of his National Socialist magazine. The mocked-up cover, with a huge “Kill This NIGGER?” headline, shows Obama speaking to a crowd with a rifle’s crosshairs superimposed on his head. White said that the accompanying article would explain the Democratic presidential nominee’s “radical Communist politics and Jewish backers … and how he plans genocide against white working people.”

Then, on Thursday, White posted the name, home address and several phone numbers for an allegedly “Gay Jewish anti-racist” juror who helped convict Matt Hale, then-leader of the neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator, of soliciting the murder of a federal judge. Hale was sentenced in 2005 to 40 years in prison.

White does not directly propose violence against the juror. But he told his readers that the man “played a leading role in inciting both the conviction and the harsh sentence that followed.” He also described the conviction as wrongful and said that the prison term handed Hale was a “criminally long sentence.”

White, who lives in Roanoke, Va., has a long history of issuing sneering threats and vulgar, racist attacks. Earlier this summer, on July 22, he verbally attacked what he called “‘respectable’ niggers” in the NAACP and elsewhere in American society. “I am convinced, more and more each day, that the only solution to this problem is to kill all of the niggers involved, preferably with state sponsorship,” he wrote. “When the death squads come, line me up as volunteer number one.”

The Rizoli twins have dropped the charade when it comes to their Holocaust denial.

The latest issue of the Intelligence Report, released Aug. 28, contains a story detailing allegations that Framingham, Mass., anti-immigration extremists Jim and Joe Rizoli have promoted Holocaust denial online using the handles of “jjrizo” and “JoRiz” since at least 2001.

The Rizolis, who spend most of their time these days attacking and demonizing Brazilian immigrants, in the past have vehemently denied these allegations. Contacted by the Intelligence Report for comment earlier this summer, Jim Rizoli, speaking for his brother and himself, claimed he was an innocent victim of online identity theft. “Let me set you straight. My identity was stolen. People were posting things using my name,” he said. Asked his opinion of Holocaust denial, Jim Rizoli said, “I have no interest in that. Nothing. I’m not going to get into that.”

But just two days after the Intelligence Report story was published, Jim Rizoli E-mailed the Report a response that seemed to abandon his earlier denials.

“Great article about my brother and I. You will bring much attention to the Holocaust and people will hopefully see that there are a lot of ‘loose ends’ that need fixin [sic].” Rizoli then suggested that the Intelligence Report should “check out” the website nazigassings.com.

We know the site all too well. Created by longtime Holocaust denier Friedrich Paul Berg, it refers to the Holocaust as a hoax and claims that “No one was ever killed in gas chambers, and there was NO program to physically exterminate all the Jews.” “Hitler had superb, cyanide gas chambers, but they were used ONLY to keep people alive,” Rizoli’s recommended reading continues. “Those gas chambers were used in many strategic locations throughout eastern Europe to fumigate entire railroad trains, for example, with cyanide gas from Zyklon-B.” Nazigassings.com also links to Hitler worship websites like AdolftheGreat.com, the subject of a previous Intelligence Report story. ( continue to full post… )

Today on CNN, Lou Dobbs kicks off his “Independent Convention” — his answer to the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions of the past two weeks.

We figured this would be a great time to introduce a new tongue-in-cheek award, to be given to “mainstream” figures — politicians, pundits, preachers and pedants — who make utterly false or misleading statements that have the effect of denigrating or defaming an entire group of people.

Naturally, we’re calling it the Dobbsy.

After all, who has made this kind of mainstream defamation more infamous than the man who insisted, despite a huge mountain of evidence to the contrary, that 7,000 new cases of leprosy had appeared in a recent three-year span, thanks largely to immigrants? Dobbs, of course. He even told Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes”: “If we reported it, it’s a fact.”

Dobbs did report it. But it wasn’t a fact.

Even though “60 Minutes,” The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Columbia Journalism Review, Media Matters for America, and others showed that his numbers were inflated (by a factor of about 17), he declined to retract the claim. Demonstrating that his source was an extreme-right migrant-hater with no expertise in immigration or disease failed to budge the host of “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” either. In round after media round, Dobbs refused to admit he had been wrong.

Dobbs isn’t alone, of course, in spreading misinformation in the media. That’s why we are launching the Dobbsy — because some exaggerations and falsehoods uttered by mainstream figures are simply so outrageous that they demand special recognition.

We’d like to ask our readers to join us in the search for these propagandists. Please send us your nominations, along with any links or other supporting evidence for what they said and why they’re factually wrong. We will occasionally select one of these for a Dobbsy citation and write-up, and at some point, we’ll have a grand competition in which we’ll ask readers for their help in selecting a “winner.”

To get us into the spirit of things, we reprint here a short but unforgettable extract of Dobbs’ interview with Lesley Stahl (full disclosure: I criticized Dobbs in that same “60 Minutes” segment), which aired on May 6, 2007:

STAHL: We checked and found a report issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, saying 7,000 is the number of leprosy cases over the last 30 years, not the past three, and nobody knows how many of those cases involved immigrants. Now we went to try and check that number, 7,000. We can’t. Just so you know…

DOBBS: Well, I can tell you this. If we reported it, it’s a fact.

STAHL: You can’t tell me that. You did report it…

DOBBS: Well, no, I just did.

STAHL: How can you guarantee that to me?

DOBBS: Because I’m the managing editor, and that’s the way we do business. We don’t make up numbers, Lesley. Do we?

I think that gives our intrepid readers an idea of what we’re looking for. Go out, be fruitful, and send us your findings. It won’t be long before we award the first Dobbsy. They say they don’t make up numbers. But do they?

Submit your own Dobbsy Award nomination

On this week’s podcast, Mark Potok and I talk about our new Intelligence Report cover story, “Ready for War,” which is about the black supremacist wing of the Hebrew Israelite movement. With an increasingly militant leadership, this movement has been spreading across the country, preaching a frightening, racist theology that says Jesus Christ is returning soon to kill or enslave white people, Jews, homosexuals, and others.