Veterans Today, a website that purports to be a “military veterans and foreign affairs journal” but is really a locus of the far right, is now squarely in neo-Nazi territory.

Oh, sure, Veterans Today (VT) has engaged in all kinds of conspiracy theorizing, most of it focusing on the alleged evils of Israel, for years. Senior editor and board chairman Gordon Duff has claimed that the 9/11 attacks were a joint U.S./Israel operation and that the U.S. government is totally controlled by Israel. The site has even claimed that the Holocaust never occurred or was greatly exaggerated.

But this December, VT seemed to be trying to outdo itself when its financial editor Mike Harris, who also sits on VT’s editorial board, went on Iranian government-backed Press TV to claim that the recent murders of 20 small children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary school was carried out by Israeli death squads. The reason, he said on Dec. 17, is that the Israelis were angry about the United Nations’ vote in November to grant the Palestinians non-member observer status. ( continue to full post… )

QUARTSZITE, Ariz. — In the heart of the Sonoran Desert, in a scruffy town populated by nomad retirees, inveterate rock hounds and a nearly 70-year-old nudist bookseller who claims to be the first male stripper in the country, the antigovernment “Patriot” group Oath Keepers has decided to take a stand.

Quartzsite has only 3,800 permanent residents in homes strung out along both sides of Interstate 10 as it cuts westward to California. But here, the Oath Keepers argue, the banner of tyranny has already been raised. “This is the start. We want to set an example here,” Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes said Saturday after a two-mile march scheduled as part of a “Liberty Festival” in Quartzsite. “If every community across the country simply did what’s being done right here – right here, right now – we would restore our republic.”

What’s being done in Quartzsite is a response to a complicated tale of alleged small-town corruption that pits the town’s police chief against many of his officers and a number of citizens — complicated enough that it’s hard to say at this stage who’s right. But the Oath Keepers says on its website that it “considers the Quartzsite saga to be a vital pivot point on which small-town America shall awaken to the encroachment of corruption and violation of rights from Federal levels downward into our local communities and our daily lives.” ( continue to full post… )

It’s official: The “big tent” of conservatism is big enough to include gay men and lesbians – just as long as they don’t support same-sex marriage, gays in the military or other gay rights.

“It’s got nothing to do with the orientation, it’s got to do with the principles that you advocate,” American Conservative Union (ACU) Chairman Al Cardenas said Wednesday, spinning madly on C-SPAN’s American Journal. “There are a number of gays in America who don’t advocate the gays in the military issue or gay marriage, and so they’ll fit within the tent of what we stand for.”

That pretty much assures the gay conservative group GOProud, which supports letting gays serve openly in the military, will no longer be welcome at the ACU’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

( continue to full post… )

Editor’s Note: After publishing a professor’s article Friday about the effect of heated rhetoric on political violence, Hatewatch was contacted by another professor who similarly argued that the toxic political environment was a factor in the attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Pierre Atlas, an associate professor of political science and director of the Richard G. Lugar Franciscan Center for Global Studies at Marian University in Indianapolis, offered us his own thoughts on the matter in the article below. His column was first published by the Indianapolis Star on Jan. 12.

By Pierre Atlas

Words don’t kill. But reckless language can create an environment of hate, fear and hysteria that incites deadly acts of violence. ( continue to full post… )

Editor’s Note: In a Jan. 19 letter published in The New York Times, Arizona political scientist James W. Clarke argued that it would be wrong to dismiss the idea that the toxic political environment was a factor in Jared L. Loughner‘s attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an attack that left six people dead and 13 others injured. Clarke is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, where he has taught courses in race and public policy, and violent crime and political order. He is the author of Defining Danger: American Assassins and the New Domestic Terrorists and five other books on criminal violence.

Hatewatch asked the professor to elaborate on his letter. Here are his comments: ( continue to full post… )

It’s one thing to falsely accuse an organization of connections that haven’t been verified. It’s another thing altogether to claim that an organization isn’t what it is.

In the immediate wake of the Jan. 9 Tucson shooting — in which six people died and 13, including Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, were injured — Fox News ran with a document supposedly leaked from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security suggesting that the presumed shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, had ties to the white nationalist journal American Renaissance (AR).

That report turned out to be erroneous; the document didn’t come from DHS but the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, a local law enforcement agency. The document’s contents, meant only for internal consumption, were speculative and, ultimately, almost certainly inaccurate. Fox News later had to refute its own scoop.

Right-wing propagandist extraordinaire Cliff Kincaid, principal of the ironically named Accuracy in Media website, quickly seized on Fox’s gaffe. But it wasn’t to criticize weak journalism or to refute the idea that Loughner might have been a racially motivated killer. It was to take up the American Renaissance banner. ( continue to full post… )

Is Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged mass murderer who shot U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, a right-wing extremist?

It’s hard to say. When you look at the Internet material he purportedly produced, the first impression you get is that the 22-year-old now in custody for the shooting of 20 people in Tucson was completely out of his mind, or at least mildly deranged. His writings will be virtually impossible for most people to understand, what with his runs of unexplained numbers, his fondness for weird syllogisms, his mysterious references and his apparent semi-literacy.

That said, there are some clues.

At one point, Loughner refers disparagingly to “currency that’s not backed by gold or silver.” The idea that silver and gold are the only “constitutional” money is widespread in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement that produced so much violence in the 1990s. It’s linked to the core Patriot theory that the Federal Reserve is actually a private corporation run for the benefit of unnamed international bankers. So-called Patriots say paper money — what they refer to with a sneer as “Federal Reserve notes” — is not lawful. ( continue to full post… )