Kevin MacDonald with racist skinheads

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Or perhaps descended is a better word.

Psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, a once-respectable instructor at California State University, Long Beach, who once may have inspired students to pursue the honorable path of examining and improving the human condition, now celebrates the imagined deaths of his enemies, including those of myself and a colleague. ( continue to full post… )

Over 150 white nationalists gathered yesterday at Montgomery Bell State Park outside Nashville, Tenn., for the American Renaissance conference. This year’s event featured new speakers and a noticeably younger audience, with half the crowd raising their hands after Jared Taylor, emcee of the event, opened it by asking, “How many of you are first time attendees?”

One first time speaker was “RamZPaul,” real name Paul Ray Ramsey, whose series of YouTube videos have racked up some 4.3 million views in the last four years (only former Klansman David Duke seems to have outpaced him among web-savvy racists, with more than 6.7 million YouTube views in the same time period). Posting what he calls “mostly satire that pokes fun at the establishment,” the 49-year-old Tulsa suburbanite’s sarcastic videos have become a weekly staple on major racist websites including Vanguard News Network and Stormfront. ( continue to full post… )

Editor’s Note: This lengthy story is slated for publication in a future issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, but is published early here because the group it focuses on, Youth for Western Civilization, is holding its first national conference this Friday through Sunday at an undisclosed location in the Washington, D.C., area. To read a summary of the report’s key findings, see here.

By Mark Potok and Evelyn Schlatter

Youth for Western Civilization (YWC) — a 5-year-old ultraconservative student group whose national conference in Washington, D.C., this Friday is being billed by its leader as the organization’s “real birth” — asserts that it is “not a racist group.” Its only purpose, says the group that claims a swelling presence on U.S. campuses and even abroad, is to defend “Western civilization.”

But what exactly does YWC mean by that?

The answer to that question was never clearer than this April, when racist ideologue Jared Taylor wrote a cover letter to his subscribers asking for support for YWC and its leader, Kevin DeAnna (pictured at right), who Taylor described as “an eloquent and distinguished young man who knows how important our cultural identity is.”

After reminding his backers that “race and race conflict” are at the core of the problems the West faces, Taylor said DeAnna “has agreed to continue our struggle on college campuses throughout the nation and dedicated himself to reaching our children and grandchildren.” For his part, DeAnna warned in an accompanying letter of the perils of “radical multiculturalism,” boasting that he had “defended western culture” against the “far left” that is trying to “destroy our people and culture.”

DeAnna’s fundraising partner, Jared Taylor, edits American Renaissance, a journal that specializes in issues of race, intelligence and the “psychopathology” of black people. In it, Taylor once mused: “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.” Taylor’s biannual conferences have featured a Who’s Who of radical-right leaders, including former Klan boss David Duke and an array of leading neo-Nazi activists.

YWC is not some tiny Klan group on the margins of society. It claims a presence at nearly a dozen American universities, along with others in Canada and the United Kingdom. It appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a key Washington political venue, in 2009 and 2011, when it sponsored a panel on immigration. In 2010, it launched its own Internet radio show, “Western Resistance Radio.” Its honorary chairman is former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, a well-known immigration opponent and Tea Party favorite. Perhaps most worrying of all are YWC’s close ties to The Leadership Institute, an organization with a budget of some $10 million that claims to have trained close to 100,000 “future conservative leaders” — people like top Bush advisor Karl Rove — and that now employs DeAnna as a leading official of its campus leadership program.

The key question, as YWC attempts to organize new campus chapters through this week’s national conference, is whether it will continue to grow. ( continue to full post… )

Fans of racist literature looking to get their hands on a copy of Kyle Bristow’s 2010 novel White Apocalypse need look no further than Amazon.com. Thanks to the online retail giant’s print-on-demand (POD) service, the bloodthirsty white nationalist fantasy – which Bristow self-published through Amazon subsidiary CreateSpace – is available for sale on Amazon for just $17.58.

And it’s eligible for super-saver shipping.

Amazon will even help novice white nationalists get their library going. For $50.14 – a slight discount – interested readers can buy Bristow’s book together with Racism Schmacism by James Edwards, host of the unabashedly racist radio program “The Political Cesspool,” and A Mighty Fortress by dedicated neo-Nazi Harold Covington, described by one enthusiastic reviewer as “unabashedly pro-white and anti-jew [sic] and non-white.” ( continue to full post… )

University of Toledo law student Kyle Bristow discusses his book White Apocalypse and controversy over his leadership of Michigan State University’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter, which the SPLC listed as a hate group while he was chairman.
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Editor’s Note: The Southern Poverty Law Center is today releasing its annual count of groups on the American radical right and analysis. What follows is the main essay from the new issue of the Intelligence Report, the SPLC’s investigative magazine. In the story, you’ll find links to our new hate group map and additional lists of antigovernment “Patriot” groups and nativist vigilante organizations. The issue also contains my editorial and stories on Cliff Kincaid, a homophobic propagandist at the far-right Accuracy in Media group; the adoption of an Oklahoma law forbidding the use of Shariah law; a racist group’s funding of two Mississippi private academies; a white supremacist’s new novel targeting the SPLC; the National Center for Constitutional Studies and its extremist version of American history; candidates with extreme-right ideas who ran in last year’s elections; an interview with a former “esoteric Nazi,” and more. The new issue’s table of contents is here.

For the second year in a row, the radical right in America expanded explosively in 2010, driven by resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government’s handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities. For many on the radical right, anger is focusing on President Obama, who is seen as embodying everything that’s wrong with the country.

Hate groups topped 1,000 for the first time since the Southern Poverty Law Center began counting such groups in the 1980s. Anti-immigrant vigilante groups, despite having some of the political wind taken out of their sails by the adoption of hard-line anti-immigration laws around the country, continued to rise slowly. But by far the most dramatic growth came in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement ­— conspiracy-minded organizations that see the federal government as their primary enemy — which gained more than 300 new groups, a jump of over 60%.

Taken together, these three strands of the radical right — the hatemongers, the nativists and the antigovernment zealots — increased from 1,753 groups in 2009 to 2,145 in 2010, a 22% rise. That followed a 2008-2009 increase of 40%. ( 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… )

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… )

Kyle Bristow, der Führer of the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, or MSU-YAF, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a hate group, announced last Saturday that he planned to take the organization’s notoriously bigoted and mean-spirited blog, The Spartan Spectator, permanently offline “in a few days time.”

“I have decided that I will not blog anymore after I graduate from the communist-infested hellhole of Michigan State University,” stated Bristow, a senior international relations major. “I am moving on to bigger and better things, and I unfortunately will not have the time to continue blogging about the decline of Western civilization.”

As of this morning, the Spartan Spectator remained online.

Bristow’s announcement came just six days after YAF-Watch, a blog that tracks the activities (“antics” might be a better word) of MSU-YAF, reported that Bristow had updated the blog’s homepage banner with a red-white-and-blue Othala rune, a popular symbol with neo-Nazis, racist skinheads and practitioners of Wotanism, a racist variant of the neo-pagan Odinist religion.

The Spartan Specator’s most recent “poll” offered readers the option of selecting “Untermenschen” as the word that “best describes leftists.” Literally translated as “sub-human,” Untermenschen is a term from Nazi ideology used to describe Jews, Gypsies and any other persons who didn’t meet Hitler’s standards of Aryan purity.

In Bristow’s latest survey of the Spartan Spectator faithful, Untermenschen beat out “stupid,” “evil” and “degenerate” with 54 percent of the vote.

For the most part, members of the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom are equal opportunity haters, spewing bigotry in the direction of anyone who isn’t white, heterosexual and Christian with more or less equal zeal — except for the Jews. Although MSU-YAF dabbled in anti-Semitism last fall by hosting British National Party chairman and Holocaust denier Nick Griffin, the student hate group has never blatantly targeted Jews.

Until now.

Last week, MSU student Kyle Bristow (right), who resigned his post as chairman of MSU-YAF earlier this year, posted a poll to MSU-YAF’s blog, the Spartan Spectator, that posed the question, “Which is Worse?” It offered respondents two options: “Judeo-Bolshevism” and “Islamofascism.”

“Keep the following in mind when you vote,” Bristow wrote. “Judeo-Bolsheviks contributed two-thirds to three-quarters of the money for civil rights groups during the 1960s. … Despite representing only 2.5 percent of the population, Judeo-Bolsheviks provided over half of the funding of the Democratic party, and in the 2000 election, 80 percent of American Jews being Judeo-Bolsheviks voted for Al Gore.” ( continue to full post… )