Editor’s Note: On Wednesday — a day after failing to respond to Hatewatch’s request for comment — former congressman Tom Tancredo’s Team America PAC wrote Hatewatch to say, “Tom Tancredo is not speaking at the Council of Conservative Citizens” (CCC). The unsigned email did not say if Tancredo had withdrawn from the speaking engagement after receiving widespread criticism or had never agreed to speak. Hatewatch has in its possession a hard copy of the CCC newsletter, The Council Reporter, dated Spring 2012. Its front page article, about the CCC’s upcoming national conference, says, “This year’s conference features former Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) as the Saturday luncheon speaker” and features a color photo of Tancredo.

Tom Tancredo has no more secrets.

The former Republican congressman from Colorado, known for his biting anti-immigration rhetoric and campaign ads suggesting Latino immigrants are rapists and drug dealers, is scheduled to be the luncheon speaker at next month’s annual conference for the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). The theme of the conference? “Multiculturalism – the Death of America.”

Sharing the dais with Tancredo will be a rogue’s gallery of the racist right, including James Edwards, who hosts the white nationalist Political Cesspool radio show; Don Black, the former Klansman best known for creating Stormfront.org, the first major Internet hate site; and Leonard Wilson, a longtime segregationist and Alabama commander for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-Confederate group that, like Tancredo, staunchly opposes immigration. ( continue to full post… )

In the end, a federal jury in Alaska didn’t believe militia leader Francis Schaeffer Cox’s claim that he was just a free-speech loudmouth — more like Gandhi than Rambo — and convicted him of heading a conspiracy to murder a judge and law enforcement officials.

The jury also convicted Lonnie Vernon, a member of Cox’s Alaska Peacemakers Militia, of conspiracy to commit murder. But it couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict on that same charge against a third defendant, Coleman Barney.

Cox, 28, of Fairbanks, and Vernon, 56, of Salcha, both face a term of up to life in prison when they are sentenced Sept. 14 in Anchorage by visiting U.S. District Judge Robert J. Bryan from Tacoma. Barney, 38, of North Pole, faces sentencing after being convicted of conspiring to possess unregistered silencers and destructive devices. ( continue to full post… )

Lord help us. Alabama Public Television (APT), a voice of reason in a state that often seems to have very little, is apparently succumbing to the crazies.

Last week, the two top executives of the network were summarily fired by the Alabama Educational Television Commission, APT’s governing body, after they resisted an effort by a new commissioner to air DVDs produced by a far-right theocrat who has been roundly condemned by historians. In the days that followed, three members of a foundation set up to raise money for APT also resigned.

The videos were produced by David Barton, an evangelical propagandist who claims falsely that America was founded as a Christian nation and has also become Glenn Beck’s unofficial — and completely untrained — “historian.” The DVDs were suggested by commissioner Rodney Herring, an Opelika-based chiropractor who was appointed to the panel last year and elected its secretary in January. ( continue to full post… )

Muslims in Dearborn, Mich., were once again targeted for their beliefs on Friday when a group of protesters calling themselves the “Bible Believers” confronted celebrants at the city’s annual Arab International Festival with a pig’s head on a spike and signs decrying Islam as a false religion, the Detroit Free Press reports.

In addition to the pig’s head – presumably intended to offend observant Muslims, who do not eat pork – Bible Believers reportedly carried signs calling Islam “a religion of blood and murder” and describing the Islamic prophet Muhammad as a “liar,” “false prophet,” “murderer” and “child molesting pervert.” ( continue to full post… )

An Idaho judge today sentenced a racist skinhead to up to five years in prison for maliciously harassing a black man who, it turned out, was a former boxer who defended himself last summer with a one-punch knockout.

Daren C. Abbey, who has been free on bond, appeared surprised as he was led from a courtroom in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in handcuffs after 1^st District Judge Benjamin Simpson imposed a three-year “fixed sentence” to be followed by a two-year indeterminate sentence. ( continue to full post… )

Michael Hill, we hardly knew ye.

Sure, we remember how, as early as 2000, you already were denigrating your black former students at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Ala., to your friends, mocking their “humorous” names and offering up sensitive jokes like this one: “A quote from a recent affirmative action hire: ‘Yesta-day I could not spell secretary.’ Today I is one.’” Ha! We know all about your 2007 essay, aimed at members of the League of the South hate group you started in 1994, saying that they should quit being afraid of being called “racist” and other, as you put it, “meaningless epithets.”

But, heck, we were still thinking you were just a garden-variety bigot, a rude jerk who’s too dumb to keep his diarrhea-spouting mouth shut. ( continue to full post… )

It seems there’s room for WorldNetDaily (WND) to have one more obsession related to President Obama’s birth certificate, though this time it has little to do with Obama himself.

This week, WND announced its plans to appeal a federal judge’s decision to dismiss its $250 million lawsuit against Esquire magazine. At issue is a satirical piece executive editor Mark Warren wrote that claimed, quite comically, that WND editor-in-chief Joseph Farah was pulping the first print run of Jerome Corsi’s Where’s the Birth Certificate? The case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President. The book, which WND had trumpeted as the definitive work on the question of Obama’s provenance, was about to go on sale when Obama released his long-form birth certificate last year – a fact that, for most, ended the “birther” debate. ( continue to full post… )

The head of a polygamous sect who killed a 4-year-old boy because he thought the child was gay has pleaded guilty to murder and will testify against others who were arrested as accessories.

Peter Lucas Moses, 27, the leader of a group that reportedly subscribed to Black Hebrew beliefs, pleaded guilty Monday in North Carolina to the 2010 murders of Jadan Higganbothan, 4 (some sources list him as 5 or 6), and Antoinetta Yvonne McKoy, 27. Moses faces two life sentences but will avoid the death penalty because he will testify against his mother, brother and sister.

Moses led a group of women and children who called him “Lord,” authorities have said. They all lived together in a home in southeast Durham. A woman who left the group told police that Moses had killed Higganbothan because he thought the child was gay and believed he had touched one of his own sons inappropriately. Higgenbothan allegedly slapped Moses’ son on the bottom. ( continue to full post… )

A 68-year-old antigovernment activist who is facing prison for minting his own currency is now seeking a new trial while opposing the federal government’s attempt to seek forfeiture of $7 million in coins and silver bars.

Bernard von NotHaus, convicted by a jury 15 months ago of violating federal counterfeiting laws, is successfully delaying his sentencing by claiming his 92-year-old mother owns some of the precious metals seized during the criminal investigation of his counterfeiting operation.

Von NotHaus faces up to 15 years in federal prison after being convicted in Statesville, N.C., in March 2011 of counterfeiting and passing counterfeit coins, making and passing coins resembling genuine U.S. coins, and conspiracy. ( continue to full post… )

The racist right has responded to a crackdown on the white supremacist American Front with vicious threats and demands for the immediate release of more than a dozen members picked up last month in Florida.

The threats, all of which have been anonymous, have so far targeted Orange-Osceola State Attorney Lawson Lamar and members of his family, Circuit Judge Walter Komanski and Kelly Boaz, an agent assigned to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. They were posted on the websites of the Anti-Defamation League, the website Virtual Jerusalem, white supremacist blogs and in the comments section of at least one Yahoo news article.

“We are at your houses, we are at your kids [sic] houses we are your grandkids [sic] houses and we are sitting outside their schools,” one threat that included what appeared to be unlisted addresses said. “Don’t believe me? Here you are pigs. … [W]e are going to CUT THEIR … HEADS OFF and leave them in A COOLER OUTSIDE YOUR OFFICE.” ( continue to full post… )