In recent years, globetrotting white supremacist financier and organizer Preston Wiginton has appeared at racist skinhead gatherings (he won a “strongest skinhead” contest at Hammerfest in 2005); co-sponsored lectures with hate groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom; rallied racist skinheads in Russia (where he lives part of the year in an apartment rented from ex-Klan boss David Duke); and been denied entry to the UK to address a festival put on by the neo-fascist British National Party. ( continue to full post… )

Godwin’s Law, an Internet adage started by lawyer and writer Mike Godwin in 1990, states, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

The law’s point, Godwin explained in a 1995 article for Wired magazine, was the Internet seems to lead to glib comparisons between various politicians’ behavior and Hitler and Nazis which “invariably … trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis”.

Godwin’s Law proved true once again on Friday, when TeaParty.org, a particularly vicious faction of the nebulous right-wing movement, treated subscribers to an E-mail blast titled “Stop America’s Hitler,” featuring a picture of President Obama sporting a Hitler moustache. If that wasn’t enough, the E-mail also included a photograph of two Nazis executing a victim with a pistol. ( continue to full post… )

Loudon County, Va., Board Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio has already been widely called out for his furious attacks on LGBT people — most notably in 2010, when he referred to transgender people as “it” during a public meeting. That brought an official rebuke from five of his colleagues on the county governing board for his comments, given as head of the gay-bashing Public Advocate of America, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed as a hate group since last year.

What’s far less known is Delgaudio’s anti-immigrant vitriol. In recent years, Delgaudio has attacked immigrants in a number of extremist venues. ( continue to full post… )

Kevin Alfred Strom, founder of the now-defunct neo-Nazi hate group National Vanguard, apparently is trying to shuck off his former identity following release from federal prison three years ago on a child pornography conviction.

Hatewatch spotted Strom, born again as “Julian Dene,” a squeaky-clean gentleman clad in buttoned-to-the-neck white shirt, in a phony Facebook (FB) page that violates FB rules barring the use of fake names.

Could Dene be for real? There is an apparently real Julian Dene on the Internet, a blogger from Northwest England who identifies himself as a “retired semi professional photographer with a love of Victorian architecture.” ( continue to full post… )

Notorious South African white supremacist Arthur Kemp has added a new project to his portfolio of transnational activism. In addition to writing for white supremacist publications and running a prominent website for British racists, he has opened an online bookstore featuring reprints of previously impossible-to-find racist tracts from times gone by.

According to its website, Ostara Publications (which Kemp founded in 1999 as a means of distributing his own white supremacist screeds) was “developed in response to anti-white discrimination the world over” and “intends to be the world’s primary Eurocentric resource.” ( continue to full post… )

Former Alaska governor and Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin this week tried to sell the bizarrely twisted story that the midnight ride of Paul Revere to warn colonists that the British were coming was actually a ride to warn the British not to mess with the colonies. “I know my American history,” Palin said, arguing that “part of [Revere’s] ride was to warn the British that were already there that ‘Hey, you’re not going to succeed. You’re not going to take American arms.’”

As odd as it might seem, offering up twisted versions of history based on a hodgepodge of distortions has become extremely fashionable among ultraconservatives and antigovernment “Patriot” groups. In fact, the Tea Party Patriots, a group based in Georgia, plans to celebrate Constitution Day on Sept. 17 by spreading the work of the Idaho-based National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS), a conspiracy-prone think tank founded by W. Cleon Skousen.

“Patriots across the country are concerned that students in the public schools are not being taught about our founding documents,” a flyer urging schools to adopt the program reads. “We want our children and grand children to be taught the meaning of the fundamental documents that created our incomparable nation.” The flyer encourages supporters to write letters to school boards, school superintendents and media to inform them of Constitution Day, as well as flooding schools and libraries with NCCS materials. ( continue to full post… )

And some folks still wonder why the Tea Party movement has a racial image problem.

In recent weeks, white separatists wrapped themselves in a Tea Party cloak and staged a rally in Orange County, Calif. An Ohio Tea Party group sued a city school district after officials canceled the appearance of a virulently anti-Muslim evangelist the group sponsored. And then, last week, a black Tea Party Nation commentator unleashed an acerbic verbal attack on “black race pimps” that would have made David Duke blush with pride. ( continue to full post… )

Saul Anuzis, leader of the Michigan GOP until last year, announced earlier this week that he would be challenging Michael Steele for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee (RNC). Anuzis had made a failed but significant run against Steele, the party’s first black leader, for the same post in 2009.

Writing about his hopes for the RNC, Anuzis, an avid Twitter user and blogger, especially emphasized his tech-savviness at online social networking as an asset for making electoral gains for the party. What Anuzis didn’t mention was the kind of contacts he cultivated offline in Michigan, in particular his vocal support of the right-wing extremist Kyle Bristow. Bristow led the Michigan State University campus branch of Young Americans For Freedom (MSU-YAF) and was so virulent in his politics that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) began listing it as a hate group in 2006. Bristow also served as a Republican precinct delegate.

Bristow, left, with Anuzis

Bristow’s MSU-YAF engaged in extensive racist activities. One of its first stunts was presenting a 13-point agenda that would have established a “Caucasian caucus” at MSU and, in turn, eliminated all student government representation for practically every other non-white, non-heterosexual, non-male or non-Christian student group at the university. Bristow was on record saying, “Homosexuality kills people almost to a degree worse than cigarettes. … these [pro-gay rights] groups are complicit with murder.” MSU-YAF sponsored a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day” contest, held a “Koran Desecration” competition, jokingly threatened to distribute smallpox-infested blankets to Native American students, and posted “Gays Spread AIDS” fliers across campus. Bristow’s YAF also brought several extremists to speak at the MSU campus, including Holocaust denier Nick Griffin, leader of the whites-only British National Party (for more on YAF, read here). ( continue to full post… )

A racist organization from Great Britain that once boasted a lively U.S. presence before it was routed eight years ago is back again.

The American Friends of the British National Party (AFBNP) was once a serious player in white nationalist circles. The group was created in the late 1990s to raise money from Americans for candidates of the racist British National Party. The AFBNP’s leader, Mark Cotterill, was a master networker who managed to entice right-wing American extremists of seemingly every stripe to address his rather frequent Washington, D.C., meetings.

Among the white nationalist luminaries who spoke to the AFBNP were former Klan leader David Duke, Internet hate guru Don Black, the neo-Nazi National Alliance’s military coordinator Steven Barry, and Richard Kelly Hoskins, a long-time ideologue of the anti-Semitic Christian Identity theology. Several BNP officials, including leader Nick Griffin, traveled to the United States for AFBNP meetings that solicited cash for the party.

All that came to an end in 2002 when the AFBNP collapsed after Cotterill was deported to Britain. ( continue to full post… )

It should surprise no one that former hate group leader Kyle Bristow has self-published a white nationalist novel that features the graphic assassination of a character based on a prominent Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) figure. After all, Bristow has an ax to grind with the SPLC and first attained notoriety for promoting a video game centered on killing Mexicans.

What is somewhat surprising are some of the names that appear among the dozen gushing blurbs praising the violently racist novel, White Apocalypse. ( continue to full post… )