To hear San Diego Minutemen leader Jeff Schwilk’s crony and fellow nativist extremist Ray Carney tell it, Schwilk’s alleged defamation in December – for the second time – of a civil rights activist was no case of mistaken identity. In fact, Carney says, he warned Schwilk that a video in which a woman admitted she was a “prostitute” and a “hooker” was not in fact Joanne Yoon, a nemesis of both men. Schwilk sent a mass email with a link to the video anyway, Carney said.

“I researched the video and found that the girl in question was in fact not Yoon and was done by some girl who resides in Canada,” Carney wrote in a letter to Yoon’s attorney in San Diego, Daniel Gilleon. “I notified Jeff of my findings and told him not to use the video … he did not listen to my advise [sic].”

Schwilk did not immediately respond to a Hatewatch request for comment. ( continue to full post… )

This Thursday, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) — a Washington, D.C., think tank that describes itself as “pro-immigrant” but pumps out an endless stream of papers claiming that immigration is hurting America in a myriad of ways — plans to issue a “report” attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

According to CIS’ press announcement, the report will claim the SPLC “joined with the National Council of La Raza [a Latino civil rights organization] and others to launch a campaign to smear” three anti-immigration groups: CIS, NumbersUSA, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The press release charged that the key to this “smear” was SPLC’s listing of FAIR as a hate group. (The SPLC annually publishes a list of hate groups and a map with their locations.) The CIS and NumbersUSA were not listed, but CIS says SPLC intended to “taint” them, too.

The suggestion that the SPLC worked surreptitiously with La Raza and others to designate FAIR a hate group is false; the decision to list the organization was made by the SPLC alone, based on almost a decade of SPLC research. We make no apologies for sharing that research with others in the human rights community, including La Raza, which we consider an important ally.

FAIR, an organization that has been dominated for much of its life by its racist founder John Tanton, has probably done more to inject fear and bigotry into the national immigration debate than any other modern organization. Its demonizing propaganda, aimed primarily at Latinos, comes at a time when the number of hate groups continues a decade-long rise, fueled by anti-Latino hatred. At the same time, the FBI reported a 40% rise in anti-Latino hate crimes between 2003 and 2007. Those crimes decreased slightly in 2008, the latest year for which statistics are available.

What follows is a list of factors that resulted in the listing of FAIR as a hate group. More detailed information on FAIR and its founder may be found here and here.

•    The racism of FAIR’s founder. John Tanton, who founded FAIR in 1979 and remains a central player on its board today, has a decades-long history of making racist statements and pursuing his interest in eugenics (he once asked Michigan officials if forced sterilization was illegal, citing the case of “a local pair of sisters who have nine illegitimate children between them”). Tanton has said that unless U.S. borders are sealed, America will be overrun by people “defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.” He has warned of a “Latin onslaught,” complained of Latinos’ allegedly low “educability,” and said Latinos “bring with them the tradition of the mordida [bribe]].” He has a long record of friendly correspondence with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers, and leading white nationalist thinkers, including Jared Taylor. He wrote a major FAIR funder to suggest she 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 his theories about the Jews. At one point, Tanton wrote that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” In a letter to FAIR board member Donald Collins, Tanton enthused over the work of John Trevor Sr. — a key architect of the racially restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 and a man who distributed pro-Nazi propaganda and warned shrilly of “diabolical Jewish control” of America — and said it should serve FAIR as “a guidepost to what we must follow again this time.”
•    Taking money from racists. FAIR solicited and accepted a total of $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, a notorious organization set up by Nazi sympathizers in 1937 to fund studies of eugenics (selective breeding of humans to produce a “better” race) and race and intelligence. Saying it didn’t know about the fund’s background, FAIR stopped publicly seeking Pioneer money in 1994 after a barrage of embarrassing publicity. But that didn’t stop three FAIR board members from meeting privately three years later with the Pioneer Fund’s then-chairman, Harry Weyher, to discuss fundraising. Moreover, FAIR has apparently lost its shame about the Pioneer Fund, and now devotes two pages of its website to defending the foundation.
•    Views of FAIR’s president. Dan Stein, once the group’s executive director and now its president, has warned that immigrants are engaged in “competitive breeding” aimed at diminishing white power. He led efforts to win funding from the racist Pioneer Fund, saying in 1993 that his “job [was] to get every dime of Pioneer’s money.” Stein also served as editorial adviser to Tanton’s hate journal, The Social Contract, at a time when it ran its ugliest edition ever, “Europhobia: The Hostility Toward European-Descended Americans.” The issue’s lead article argued that multiculturalism was replacing “successful Euro-American culture” with “dysfunctional Third World cultures.” Stein has declined to offer any criticism of FAIR’s founder, instead characterizing Tanton last September as a “Renaissance man.”
•    Leading FAIR officials’ participation in racist groups. Rick Oltman, who for much of the 1990s was FAIR’s Western Regional Coordinator, spoke as part of a 1997 immigration panel put on by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a hate group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.” Council publications at the time listed Oltman as a member. Jim Staudenraus, FAIR’s Eastern Regional Coordinator, participated in an anti-immigration conference in 2002 with Jared Taylor, a “white nationalist” publisher who recently wrote, “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.” In 2007, a senior FAIR official met with leaders of Vlaams Belang, a Belgian political party that officials outlawed in a previous incarnation (Vlaams Blok) as a “criminal organization” because of its racist anti-immigrant views.
•    Bigotry on the board. FAIR board member Donald Collins writes frequently for the VDARE.com website, named after Virginia Dare, said to have been the first English child born in the New World. The site is dedicated to bashing immigrants and has published the work of a broad array of white nationalists and anti-Semites. Collins’ articles have focused on attacking the Catholic Church over its stance on immigration, one of them accusing Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony of selling out his country “in exchange for more temporal power and glory.” In another, Collins said bishops were “infiltrating and manipulating the American political process” to attack the separation of church and state. Another FAIR board member, Richard Lamm, once said that “new cultures” in America were “diluting what we are and who we are.”
•    FAIR programming. FAIR has produced television programming under the title “Borderline” that featured interviews with white nationalists like Jared Taylor, who later launched the racist American Renaissance magazine, according to the anti-racist Center for New Community. FAIR’s “Borderline” program also featured a televised interview with Sam Francis, who went on to become editor of the publication of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group prone to gutter racism like posting on its website photo comparisons of the late black pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee. ( continue to full post… )

Hard to believe there’s a need for yet another far-right magazine or conference, but now there are both. Richard Spencer, who was editor at “Taki’s Magazine,” an online paleoconservative magazine, is now executive editor of a new online magazine called “Alternative Right.” He calls this venture “an online magazine of radical traditionalism” that hopes “to forge a new intellectual right-wing that is independent and outside the ‘conservative’ establishment.” It also is loaded with contributors who, like Spencer, have long lamented the white man’s decline.

Meanwhile, Joseph Farah, founder of the conspiracy-laden WorldNetDaily website, says he is organizing a conference to be held in September called “Taking America Back.” Farah says the conference is a response to what he describes as the shabby treatment accorded him by the director of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which was held last month. “This one is about the ultimate issues of God, the Constitution, the tea-party uprising, freedom and justice,” Farah wrote in a WorldNetDaily commentary.

At “Alternative Right,” Spencer’s senior contributing editors are Peter Brimelow and Paul Gottfried. Brimelow founded VDARE.com, an anti-immigrant website, and he has described “Alternative Right” as a project of the VDARE Foundation. Gottfried has been a contributor to “Taki’s Magazine” and has spoken at conferences of the white nationalist American Renaissance magazine, whose editor has written that black people are incapable of sustaining any kind of civilization. Gottfried gave a speech at the inaugural meeting of the H.L. Mencken Club in November 2008 titled, “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.” Brimelow was the keynote speaker at that event, and Spencer the master of ceremonies. Spencer and Gottfried also appeared together last October on “The Political Cesspool,” a racist and anti-Semitic radio program.

One of the bloggers at “Alternative Right” is Richard Hoste, who recently wrote that “low-IQ Mexican immigration is the greatest threat to America.” He also wrote: “Schools should stop wasting time trying to close achievement gaps. And not only do whites have nothing to feel guilty about, they are the best thing to ever happen to blacks. Even ignoring race, humanity will not move forward through equality or by raising up the really stupid to the level of just plain stupid.” Finally, Hoste had this pithy observation: “While there’s more miscegenation [interracial sex] than in the past … we should be heartened that white teenage girls aren’t passing themselves around in black neighborhoods.” ( continue to full post… )

Law-abiding U.S. citizens who express politically unpopular views are at risk of being rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps by a tyrannical government.

That’s according to a conspiracy theory that has long been popular within the antigovernment “Patriot” movement. Although recently debunked by Popular Mechanics, Newsweek (which called it “too silly to discuss”), CNN’s “American Morning,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report and even (after promoting it on several shows) FOX News host Glenn Beck, the myth that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is creating detention facilities for political dissidents is gaining traction on the far-right fringe.

Now, however, a mainstream media source is providing an uncritical platform for FEMA camp lore: KBDI Colorado Public Television aired the video “Camp FEMA: American Lockdown” twice last weekend and has scheduled another showing for March 13. The 90-minute film opens with newsreel footage of Japanese-Americans being forced into internment camps during World War II and then trots out conspiracy die-hards who suggest that freethinking Americans today may face the same fate. Those featured include syndicated radio host Alex Jones, who frets about one-world government at Infowars.com; longtime Patriot broadcaster John Stadtmiller, who insisted after the Oklahoma City bombing that the U.S. government was behind the mass murder; and James Lane of the Patriot group We Are Change, which does not believe that al-Qaeda perpetrated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Not unreasonably, “Camp FEMA” producer Gary Franchi sees the recognition from a major PBS market as a coup for believers in the camps. “I think it definitely lends credence to the issue,” he told Hatewatch. (Though some Patriot movement beliefs have roots in white supremacy — including the FEMA camp story, whose early proponents included the anti-Jewish Posse Comitatus — Franchi said his group is not anti-Semitic, racist or antigovernment.)

Since its release last year, “Camp FEMA” has been available for purchase on its website (cost: $14.95). But during its March 6 public television debut as part of KBDI’s current fundraising campaign, the film had the potential to reach over 200,000 households, mostly in the Denver metropolitan area, according to KBDI Membership Director/Executive Producer Shari Bernson. In addition, Franchi, who heads the Illinois-based Patriot group RestoreTheRepublic.com, traveled to KBDI’s studios to discuss his film on air with Bernson and Denver-based talk show host Mike Zinna. “It was our most successful pledge program since we rolled out this pledge drive last Thursday,” Bernson said. “We were flooded with calls.” ( continue to full post… )

The federal trial of hate blogger Hal Turner ended in a mistrial late this afternoon — for the second time.

After deliberating for three days in Brooklyn’s U.S. District Court, jurors decided they would not be able to reach a verdict, according to The Associated Press. Judge Donald Walter declared a mistrial and scheduled a third trial for April 12. Turner’s first trial in December also resulted in a deadlocked jury. An Internet radio host from New Jersey, Turner was charged with threatening to assault and murder three federal judges in Chicago after he wrote on his blog in June that they “deserve to be killed” because they had upheld a local handgun ban.

As during the first trial, the proceedings this month focused on whether Turner’s blog entries constituted a criminal threat or merely heated rhetoric that’s protected under the First Amendment. However, the second trial differed from the first in key ways, according to news accounts. This time, for instance, the judges that Turner targeted on his blog testified. In addition, Turner took the stand to describe his past work as a confidential FBI informant, claiming that the agency had encouraged his online vitriol to give him credibility with the extremists the FBI was trying to apprehend. Turner, whose FBI code name was Valhalla, said the agency paid him more than $100,000 during the four years he worked intermittently as an informant. He also insisted he was not a white supremacist.

If convicted, Turner faces up to 10 years in prison.

Robert Stacy McCain, a former key Washington Times editor who has suggested that “perfectly rational people” react with “altogether natural revulsion” to interracial marriage, apparently has returned as a free-lancer to the newspaper he left in January 2008. In a “Special to The Washington Times” article published today, McCain covers a congressional race in upstate New York involving a candidate with connections to the Tea Party movement.

A casualty of the housecleaning that occurred at the Times three years ago, McCain left the paper on his own accord after managing editor Fran Coombs, with whom he was close, was terminated (Coombs had his own connections to white supremacy).

Once identified as a member of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South, McCain’s reporting while at the Times was always controversial. As editor of the “Culture Briefs” section of the paper, McCain used excerpts from racist publications including American Renaissance magazine and the anti-immigrant hate site VDARE.com. In fact, McCain may be the only mainstream newspaper reporter to have covered four American Renaissance conferences. Twice, he offered no description at all of the group he was covering, which is devoted to race science. Once, he said it was “critical of liberal positions on race and immigration.” Only in 2004 did he note that some viewed it as racist.

Breaching journalist ethics by reporting on causes he was personally involved in, McCain regularly quoted neo-Confederate activists favorably in his stories. In 2005, stories freelanced by McCain to the website of the conservative newspaper Human Events were scrubbed after that publication’s editor, Thomas Winter, was given information by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report about McCain’s racism. ( continue to full post… )

San Diego Minutemen leader Jeff Schwilk is the adult equivalent of a small child who burns his finger on a stove and – learning nothing from the experience – does it again.

Last May, Schwilk was ordered to pay $135,000 to Joanne Yoon, a Korean-American civil rights activist who had helped monitor Minutemen rallies for the ACLU. Yoon sued Schwilk and a former Minutemen spokesman for defamation after the men circulated photos of her accompanied by comments referring to “the Korean anoroxic ACLU slut.” The images were posted to a Yahoo group titled “Korean Kommie Kunt.”

Today, Yoon sued the perpetually peeved Schwilk again for defamation. ( continue to full post… )

It’s hard to say, based on the early reports coming out today, just what motivated the man who tried to murder several Pentagon police officers yesterday but was killed himself instead. Police in California had picked up John Patrick Bedell and treated him as mentally ill in years past. But at the same time, Bedell had bitterly described an evil cabal inside the government, “a tiny elite” that seeks “to control and dominate the world.”

That last statement could have come straight from the mouths of activists in the conspiracy-minded “Patriot” movement, which, as documented in a Southern Poverty Law Center report released this week, has come roaring back to life in the last year. Most Patriots believe the federal government is part of a conspiracy to impose martial law, herd Americans into concentration camps, and force liberty-loving Americans into a socialistic “New World Order.”

But Bedell also attacks the government for what he depicts as fiascos in Vietnam and Iraq — a position more closely associated with the left — and endorses the idea, also originating largely on the left, that the government was behind the 9/11 attacks in New York. He criticizes the military and the nation’s intelligence services as well, and says they and the government engage in “bribery, theft and murder.”

Based on the scant evidence available so far, Bedell may be best described as a kind of radical libertarian, a man who believed that government should be as small as possible, and that even public schools are not legitimate — education should be handled entirely privately, he wrote at one point. He was also a man with a strong bent toward conspiracy theories about events ranging from 9/11 to the disputed 1991 death of a U.S. Marine colonel.

It may be that Bedell was not primarily a would-be political killer; he may well have been a man with mental health issues who simply absorbed the overheated rhetoric that is so abundant in American political life today. What there can be little question of is that there is an enormous amount of angry rhetoric awash in our society, to the point where it’s not surprising that certain individuals feel they must act.

Longtime Hitler enthusiast and Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel was released from a German prison on Monday after serving five years for the crime of inciting racial hatred. Zundel, who turns 71 next month, said he would be heading to his home in the Black Forest to regain his health. “It’s kind of a sad situation,” he told The Associated Press as a small group of supporters greeted him outside a Mannheim prison.

Thus ends a long legal saga that began in 1977 when the German-born Zundel founded a small publishing house in Canada called Samisdat Publishers. He published books such as The Hitler We Loved and Why (which he co-authored under a pseudonym) and Did Six Million Really Die? and distributed Nazi and neo-Nazi posters, audiotapes and other items. Among the countries where Zundel sent his offerings was Germany, which has laws prohibiting Holocaust denial and dissemination of Nazi and neo-Nazi material.

It also was during the 1970s that Zundel was spokesman for Concerned Parents of German Descent, a group that contended that German Canadians and their children were discriminated against by anti-German stereotyping. Zundel even issued press releases protesting NBC’s “Holocaust” miniseries for its portrayal of Germans. And yet Toronto Sun columnist Mark Bonokoski reported that Zundel’s maternal grandparents were Jewish. Bonokoski also wrote that one of Zundel’s ex-wives told him that Zundel was concerned enough about his lineage that he returned to Germany in the 1960s in search of his family’s Nazi-era certificate of pure Aryan blood, but could find no such document. ( continue to full post… )

Mississippi lawmakers have short memories.

That, at least, may be the kindest explanation for their latest decision to laud an occasion organized by a staunch white supremacist. In what has become an absurd yearly tradition, the Mississippi House voted last month to approve a resolution honoring high school student athletes who took part in “The Spirit of America Day” on March 1. As in the past, the resolution does not mention that the day’s events — which have traditionally included an awards ceremony and other activities at the state Capitol — are hosted by Richard Barrett, a Learned, Miss., lawyer who leads a white supremacist organization.

“The thing that is so bizarre about embracing one of the most longstanding and notorious neo-Nazis for a civics lesson is that they keep doing it repeatedly,” Brian Levin of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at the California State University, San Bernardino, told Hatewatch. “To make a mistake of that nature once, I don’t know if it’s forgivable, but twice is downright reprehensible. It would be funny if it weren’t disgusting.”

House Rules Committee Chairman Joe Warren told The Associated Press that he had talked to some black legislators, who weren’t opposed to the resolution if it didn’t include Barrett’s name. “They didn’t seem to have any problems with it as long as it was geared just toward these young people, who evidently are great kids academically and athletically,” he said.

Now in its 40th year, “The Spirit of America Day” recognizes exceptional male athletes in Mississippi. It most recently was hailed by the Mississippi Legislature last year, when both the state House and Senate approved resolutions declaring March 2, 2009, “The Spirit of America Day.” However, the resolution later died in the House after some lawmakers argued it was unacceptable to promote an occasion sponsored by an avowed racist. ( continue to full post… )