The media watchdog Media Matters for America today released audio of an interview conducted with Byron Williams, the would-be terrorist who last July was arrested after a shootout with cops on his way to San Francisco, where he allegedly planned to kill employees at the offices of the ACLU and the Tides Foundation.

The interview and the accompanying article, by Pacifica Radio producer John Hamilton, illuminates the role Fox News and specifically Fox host Glenn Beck played in turning Williams’ attention toward the groups and convincing him that they were at the center of a vast plot to destroy the country.

“I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there,” Williams tells Hamilton. “And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.” ( continue to full post… )

Progressives For Immigration Reform (PFIR) held its inaugural conference Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The small, invitation-only, one-day conference was entitled, “The First National Conference on Immigration, Conservation, and the Environment.” The conclave is just another example of PFIR’s cynical greenwashing campaign to recruit environmentalists to the anti-immigrant cause by blaming them for urban sprawl, overconsumption and a host of other environmental problems.

Many speakers at PFIR’s event had links to John Tanton, the racist founder of the modern anti-immigration movement. Representatives from NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies—groups founded by Tanton—participated. The incestuous nature of the Tanton network was embodied in the person of PFIR Executive Director Leah Durant, who formerly was employed by the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute. FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a hate group, was founded by Tanton, who still serves on the group’s board. For a time, Durant also was part of Choose Black America, a FAIR front group supposedly representing the interests of African Americans concerned with high levels of immigration. The group disintegrated not long after its first press conference, which was paid for and stage-managed by FAIR.

According to the Center for New Community, Tuesday’s conference discussions addressed the topics that have long consumed Tanton-linked pseudo-environmental front groups: “the population taboo;” “the impact of immigration on population size;” and “how U.S. immigration policy impedes the economic progress of developing nations and sustainability of other species.” The conclusions reached were, of course, preordained by the bigotry that has always guided Tanton’s 30-year project to inject race hate into environmental politics. Conference participants blamed immigrants for being responsible for everything from increased traffic to high gas prices to looming resource scarcity.

( continue to full post… )

The violence never seems to end. This past month has been downright horrifying, with at least five teenagers nationwide committing suicide as a result of anti-gay bullying. There were also two attacks against gay victims in New York City communities normally considered LGBT-friendly.

A patron was gay-bashed in the restroom of Manhattan’s legendary Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village – a site considered the very birthplace of the gay-rights movement – on October 3. Police say Matthew Francis, 21, and Christopher Orlando, 17, both of Staten Island, accosted Ben Carver, 34, in the restroom of the Stonewall about 2:30 that morning. According to Carver’s account – which he posted on his blog – Francis asked him if he was gay. Thinking Francis was joking, Carver responded, “Where are you, buddy?” Francis answered by saying “In a gay bar. Don’t pee next to me, faggot.” The men then demanded money, but Carver refused. Francis subsequently punched Carver in the face and Orlando tackled him and pinned his arms, Carver said. Carver, however, fought back, freeing an arm and striking one attacker several times with his elbow. “It was a pretty intense fight,” Carver told the New York Post.

Francis and Orlando fled, but were pursued by bar employees and patrons. The suspects were quickly caught by police and arrested.

Earlier the same weekend, a group of gay men were confronted and assaulted in the nearby Chelsea neighborhood. Six men allegedly confronted the group using anti-gay epithets, and one – later identified as Andrew Jackson, 20 – allegedly threw a trashcan into one victim’s head. Jackson was arrested; the five suspects remain at large.

These incidents highlight a distressing, on-going problem of violence directed against the LGBT community. To address the issue, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance program has just released a new film, Bullied: A Student, a School and a Case that Made History, that highlights the destructive power and the tragic consequences of anti-gay bullying. ( continue to full post… )

The trial of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge begins its sixth day of testimony in a Salem, Ore., courtroom today, where the father and son face nearly 20 counts ranging from aggravated murder to assault stemming from a December 2008 bank bombing that killed two police officers and seriously injured two others.

According to prosecutors, at least one of the two men – who have turned on each other as the trial has unfolded – began planning the bombing shortly after the election of Barack Obama, fearing the new president would restrict their gun rights upon taking office.

On the opening day of the trial last week, Marion County deputy district attorney Katie Suver told the jury that the election served as a “catalyst” for the bombing. She stated further that the father, Bruce, 59, attempted to start his own militia following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, fearing a similar crackdown on guns.

( continue to full post… )

Ray McBerry, the longtime head of the Georgia chapter of the racist and secessionist League of the South (LOS), turned in his resignation this past Friday after being asked to quit the group’s board. In a long letter where he described loyally serving the league for 15 years, McBerry, sounding hurt, wrote that he had “willingly given thousands of hours” and “thousands of [his] own dollars” to the cause. Then he offered a few stinging criticisms of the group whose praises he once sang.

The spat apparently broke out after McBerry, a two-time failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate, set up his own far right outfit, Tenth Amendment Solutions (TAS), this past year to educate the public, as McBerry had it, on the importance of state’s rights. That mission is remarkably similar to the LOS’s, where state’s rights are a main emphasis, and TAS events regularly featured LOS speakers and distributed speeches by LOS leaders. Also, McBerry runs DixieBroadcasting, which features programs by prominent neo-Confederates, including many who serve in LOS leadership positions.

McBerry called the decision to ask him to quit the board, which he said was made without consulting him, “indicative of the kind of paranoia that will forever prevent the success of the League.” (His letter suggested that he had been booted off gthe board because LOS leaders saw TAS as directly competing with the LOS.) McBerry also accused the LOS’s president, Michael Hill, of being power- and money-hungry — ironic charges, given that the LOS incessantly attacks the so-called “Northern Leviathan” for exactly the same kind of “materialism,” to use Hill’s word. ( continue to full post… )

The latest fairy tale to emerge from the paranoid right is the idea that the United States legal system is haunted by the specter of Shariah law. Although strict Islamic legal codes are the rare exception even among Muslim-majority nations, anti-Muslim groups and individuals — including well-known politicians like Newt Gingrich — are now warning with straight faces that mullahs could soon be caning American schoolchildren if they get caught chewing gum.

Among the groups decrying this make-believe threat, a relatively new organization called Veterans Against Jihad (VAJ) seems particularly well positioned to benefit from the current Shariah hysteria. Founded last spring by two retired Marine Corps veterans, the goal of VAJ is to “to encourage Veterans to more actively respond to challenges threatening our Constitution [and] awaken American Citizens to Islam’s Jihadist religious mandate, which dictates the teaching of Shari’ah law, and how Shari’ah Law will impact our way of life.” ( continue to full post… )