A SWAT team captured escaped inmate John McCluskey and his fiancée Casslyn Welch in an Arizona national forest this morning, peacefully ending a three-week manhunt. Aided solely by Welch and a pair of wire cutters, McCluskey and two other inmates escaped from a private prison in Arizona on July 30. Authorities apprehended McCluskey’s fellow escapees in early August.

Following a tip from a forest ranger who discovered the couple yesterday, a SWAT team swarmed the woods and apprehended them this morning in Arizona’s Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, 300 miles away from the prison from which they escaped. The ranger, who spoke with McCluskey yesterday afternoon while investigating an untended campfire, became suspicious when the fugitive acted nervous during their conversation.  ( continue to full post… )

The Forces of Freedom are ready for war.

Last week, about 100 self-described “Patriots” and “strict Constitutionalists” gathered in a hotel ballroom in Valley Forge, Pa., for the American Policy Center’s Freedom Action National Conference. United by rage at a federal government they believe is undermining state sovereignty in collusion with the “New World Order,” they are determined to take back the country for the people.

The conference, organized by APC founder and president Tom DeWeese, featured a parade of Patriot movement heroes. Each outlined a theory on the roots of the alleged sovereignty crisis, offered a solution, and encouraged the audience to take action before time ran out.

Most proposed nominally peaceful options such as jury nullification, local government coordination, or outreach through alternative media. But none dismissed the possibility – even the probability – of violence. ( continue to full post… )

White racial extremists are certain that “their” culture is under attack and has to be defended with guns. “If there is going to be any salvation of our culture, white European culture, violence is guaranteed because they’re not listening,” says long-time neo-Nazi and White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger. I am not quite sure what Metzger is talking about — salvation for European culture in the United States? What exactly is “white culture”? But as Mariah Wilson’s new documentary “Revealing Hate” shows, racial extremists are typically better at advocating and committing violence than coherently explaining their irrational views.

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Conservative columnist and author Ann Coulter’s decision to be the featured speaker next month at a “Homocon” gathering of homosexual conservatives has gotten her axed as a keynote speaker at a meeting of prominent far-right personalities. Joseph Farah’s decision to cut Coulter from his Taking America Back National Conference in Miami next month is only the latest pushback by some on the far right who are incensed and worried by recent gains made by the gay rights movement.

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Bruce Carroll Pierce, the gunman in the 1984 murder in Denver of Jewish talk show host Alan Berg, died Monday afternoon of natural causes. He was 56 years old and serving the 23^rd year of a 252-year sentence at the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex in Pennsylvania.

Pierce was a founding member of the right-wing terrorist group The Order, which went on a crime spree in 1983 and 1984. The Order’s goals included the assassination of racial enemies and the creation of a guerilla army to resist and overthrow the U.S. government. The group funded its activities by counterfeiting money and by committing a string of armed robberies, culminating in the July 1984 theft of $3.6 million from an armored car on a highway in Ukiah, Calif.

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Last Thursday morning, the contents of the Fall 2010 issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report were posted online at splcenter.org. By four o’clock that afternoon, an online magazine called The New American had responded with a critical appraisal of the issue’s feature exploring 10 popular conspiracy theories animating the antigovernment “Patriot” movement. Clearly, The New American is a publication that takes conspiracy theories and their critics seriously.

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After two attempts to convict Hal Turner of threatening federal judges ended in mistrials, the government last Friday finally made it stick — despite the fact that the neo-Nazi blogger had served as an FBI informant for years. A sentencing date was not set, but Turner faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

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Former Democratic U.S. senator and presidential candidate John Edwards is a “faggot,” according to conservative provocateur and author Ann Coulter some years back. Nobel Prize winner, former vice president and one-time Democratic candidate for president Al Gore, she said on a separate occasion, is a “total fag.”

So when an organization that bills itself as representing “gay conservatives and their allies” was looking for a speaker at its first annual “Homocon” party in New York City this September, who did they hire?

Why, Ann Coulter, of course.

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Today, we’re releasing a major report on “sovereign citizens,” a radical-right movement that has grown to include as many as 300,000 adherents who believe that the government has no right to tax or impose laws on most Americans. Adherents can be incredibly dangerous, especially to police officers, and our new report is pegged to the murders of two West Memphis, Ark., officers who were murdered by a father-son team during a May traffic stop. Like most sovereign citizens, Jerry and Joe Kane did not believe police have any authority to regulate travel on the roads, in particular by requiring driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations.

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There’s an old jest in the news business: Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Some anti-illegal immigrant zealots in the blogosphere are taking the joke to heart. Two-and-a-half weeks after reporting with no factual basis that members of a dangerous Mexican drug gang had seized two Americans’ ranches near Laredo, Texas, the bloggers still insist their fairy tale is true.

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