With last weekend’s mass killing at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin fresh in the public’s memory, the usual players on the conspiracy scene have begun crafting wild, alternative narratives of what really happened.

The theory has started to spread that the attack was orchestrated by some dark sector of the federal government in order to justify rolling back gun rights. This idea, of course, has long been used by the antigovernment right to explain acts of domestic terrorism: Oklahoma City, for example, and even the jihadist attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. The Wisconsin version has appeared on dozens of right-wing blogs and appears to be gaining traction.

Infowars, the conspiracist website maintained by Alex Jones, seems to have led the charge. In an article published earlier this week after neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page killed six people in Oak Creek, Wis., writer Kurt Nimmo accused the federal government – and, ludicrously, the Southern Poverty Law Center – of somehow being tied to the shootings. The proof? Only dubious claims pulled from Page’s life story. The alleged skinhead gunman was in a psychological operations unit in the Army during the 1990s. ( continue to full post… )

Two antigovernment “sovereign citizens” who refused to get out of their truck – only to be surrounded by SWAT teams near Spokane, Wash. –  ultimately were arrested Wednesday by the only authority they truly recognize: the county sheriff.

Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich told Hatewatch today that he excused himself from an afternoon meeting at the Public Safety Building after being informed of a potentially violent standoff involving his deputies and two self-proclaimed sovereign citizens.

The truck, stopped by detectives and uniformed deputies in Otis Orchards, had invalid license plates and “was covered in sovereign citizen signs, including one that said it was a ‘noncommercial private vehicle’ and ‘no trespassing,’” The Spokesman-Review reported in Thursday’s editions. ( continue to full post… )

Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association (AFA) spokesman whose ultraconservative worldview is so extreme that he makes Pat Buchanan look like Rachel Maddow, seems never to have met a fact that he couldn’t improve upon.

He has declared that gays were responsible for the Holocaust and opined that American Indians lost their land to European settlers because they (the natives) weren’t Christian. He has claimed that states have the right to impose religious tests on elected officials and said that HIV is not linked to AIDS – a dangerous and utterly false theory that has led to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in South Africa and elsewhere. ( continue to full post… )

Wade Michael Page, the racist skinhead who killed six people last weekend at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin before turning the gun on himself, was a “patched” member of the Northern Hammerskins, a regional chapter of the larger Hammerskin Nation, the Southern Poverty Law Center has learned.

Page became a full, or patched, member of the Hammerskin chapter last October and appeared to be rising quickly in the organization, according to postings on Crew 38, the online forum for Hammerskin Nation (HSN). This year, in fact, his girlfriend, using the name “LuluRoman” on the forum, directed all regional inquiries regarding Northern Hammerskin events to Page. ( continue to full post… )

A Virginia judge has ordered Bill White, the Virginia neo-Nazi and convicted felon who faces federal charges for violating the terms of his supervised release, to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, The Roanoke Times reports.

White, 35, is a notorious Internet gossip who was released in April 2011 after spending more than two years in prison on multiple charges of threatening enemies through phone calls and Internet postings. But he missed a scheduled check-in with his probation officer the next month and disappeared from his Lynchburg home. In May, he wrote on Facebook that he had accepted “an offer of asylum from a foreign nation that shares my view that the United States government is not legitimate. I shall not be returning.” ( continue to full post… )

The man who allegedly murdered six people at a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee yesterday, identified in media reports as Wade Michael Page, was a frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band.

In 2010, Page, then the leader of the band End Apathy, gave an interview to the white supremacist website Label 56. He said that when he started the band in 2005, its name reflected his wish to “figure out how to end people’s apathetic ways” and start “moving forward.” “I was willing to point out some of my faults on how I was holding myself back,” Page said. Later, he added, “The inspiration was based on frustration that we have the potential to accomplish so much more as individuals and a society in whole.” He did not discuss violence in the interview. ( continue to full post… )

The small North Dakota town of Cooperstown has been forever changed by its first murder in 80 years – a brutal decapitation-killing carried out by a racist, a state’s attorney says.

“There are doors locked now that weren’t locked before, said Marina Spahr, the assistant state’s attorney for Griggs County, the Jamestown Sun reported Thursday.

The 984 residents of Cooperstown “look at strangers twice now, before they invite them into their lives in some way,” the prosecutor said at the sentencing of Daniel Evan Wacht, a 31-year-old from California with a lengthy criminal record. ( continue to full post… )

For most Americans, the recent mass murder in Aurora, Colo., was an unspeakable human tragedy; if the story had any political dimension at all, it was guns and gun control (or the lack thereof). But for a vocal few in the misogynistic online world of “men’s rights” — and no, not all men’s rights activists are woman-haters — the takeaway was the evil of “male disposability.” ( continue to full post… )

Pamela Geller, American Islamophobia’s shrillest voice, is planning yet another demonstration of anti-Muslim hate – this time, in Europe.

According to her blog, Atlas Shrugs, “the world’s leading freedom action organizations” (read: anti-Muslim hate groups) will rally in Stockholm, Sweden, tomorrow to launch a “worldwide counter jihad alliance.” ( continue to full post… )

In the smoke-and-mirrors world of the deranged political right, there are plenty of reasons to conclude that President Obama is a “communist.” His father wrote about socialism. His mother was white and only Marxists slept with black men in her era — plus, she met Obama’s father in a Russian language class! The future president’s teenage mentor may have been a communist. Former members of the extreme-left Weather Underground held a fundraiser for his Illinois State Senate run.

And then, just revealed to the ignorant masses by the geniuses who run the BuzzFeed website, there is Obama’s new typeface: “Revolution Gothic.” ( continue to full post… )