There’s stupid, and then there’s really stupid. Finally, there’s blind, leaden stupidity, a quality personified in great detail by the loathsome Glenn Beck last week.

Beck has long been aware of his own ridiculous qualities, telling The New York Times for a major 2009 profile that he was a mere “rodeo clown,” not really a serious kind of a fellow. But that’s letting the one-time Fox News host off the reality hook a little too easily. The plain truth is that Beck has done as much as anyone to inject complete falsehoods, conspiracy theories and demonizing propaganda into American political discourse. Facts mean nothing to the rodeo clown.

Neither, it turns out, does any kind of taste or judgment. ( continue to full post… )

Talk about delusional. Terry Nichols continues to believe that he is a princess in a high castle, and not a Supermax prisoner serving multiple life sentences for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, including 19 children.

( continue to full post… )

Next Monday, Americans will mark the 15^th anniversary of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City — the worst single act of domestic terrorism in our nation’s history and a grim reminder of the fruits of right-wing radicalism.

Although Timothy McVeigh and confederates Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier were not card-carrying members of militias, they unquestionably were deeply influenced by the ideas of these paramilitary groups and the larger antigovernment “Patriot” movement. Their murder of 168 people, including 19 children in a day-care center, was in many ways the culmination of the movement’s blind anger and conspiracy theories about evil elitists in the government intent on suppressing American freedoms and forcing the nation into a socialistic “New World Order.” They also believed they were exacting vengeance on the government for its role in the deaths exactly two years earlier of nearly 80 Branch Davidian religious cultists.

The anniversary comes as the nation witnesses a dramatic resurgence of militias and other Patriot groups — a comeback driven by widespread populist anger at racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the Obama Administration that are seen as “socialist” or even “fascist.” The return of the Patriots was first documented last August in a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report entitled “The Second Wave: Return of the Militias” and quantified and analyzed in SPLC’s March report, “Rage on the Right.” Today, the SPLC is releasing another report profiling key leaders of the resurgent Patriot movement and their enablers — people like U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who has suggested that Obama is building political reeducation camps for our children, and Fox News host Glenn Beck, who helped refloat conspiracy theories about secret government concentration camps and has called Obama an anti-white racist who is comparable to Hitler. Along with these profiles, we are releasing a timeline of the Patriot movement detailing its origins, its heyday in the 1990s and current resurgence, and its long history of violence.

( continue to full post… )

It’s that time of the year again, and Hatewatch’s intrepid staff is just now climbing out of the protective moonsuits needed to trawl through the year’s worst from the filth-spewing hate-mongers and fellow travelers who populate the radical right in America. Once more, we’ve done our best to go beyond the merely off-putting or revolting — the workaday nastiness that regular readers of Hatewatch already know so well — in search of the truly grotesque lowlights of the last year. While it hasn’t been easy getting here, the Hatewatch 3rd Annual Smackdown Awards Committee (earlier editions are here and here) is pleased to officially unveil its annual year-end countdown of the worst of 2009.

10. Schlockiest Neo-Nazi ‘Art’ Award
It’s not like we didn’t know that former Klan chieftain David Duke is a cad, an egomaniac who rips off his followers and chases their womenfolk whenever he isn’t busy getting plastic surgery in hopes of taking in even more people. We knew all about his neo-Nazi pronouncements on “Jewish supremacist power,” his description of AIDS as “the only disease that turns fruits into vegetables,” and his opinion that black people (not the word Duke used) “are primitive animals.” But we were grievously undereducated on one key point — it turns out that “Dr.” Duke (the Ph.D. comes from a Ukrainian diploma mill) “has a wonderful photographic and artistic ability.” That is, at least, if you’re into picture postcard-type schlock photos of places like Moscow and Salzburg, Austria (both meccas for white people, apparently), snapped by the big man himself and then retouched “to make a truly beautiful photo-artwork that will captivate and inspire you,” in the words of Duke’s pitch. The cost to collectors for prints signed by the Dukester? Just $99 a pop, or six for $500.  Long live bad art for white people!

9. Whiniest Mass Murderer Award
Terry Nichols always was a complainer. Well, yes, he did help Timothy McVeigh build a bomb that left 168 people, including 19 small children, dead in the 1995 attack on the Oklahoma City federal building — but he really wasn’t all that into the bombing, he didn’t actually accompany McVeigh that day, and he only helped out because his old Army pal just wouldn’t quit hassling him. He did also help buy the bomb’s components and rob weapons from a gun dealer to finance it, but, hey, he was just trying to be agreeable and not cause a stir. Now comes Nichols, a man who failed in his Army career, his marriages and just about everything else, to tell a court that the food he’s fed in Supermax, where he’s serving a life sentence on 161 counts of premeditated murder, is constipating him. And he wants it stopped. From now on, he insisted after a cringe-inducing description of his problematic bowel movements, he requires a high-fiber daily diet of whole grains, fresh vegetables and fruit (oh, and $4.5 million for his suffering, too). But a federal judge — apparently a pawn not only of the evil government but also of the evil refined food industry — disagreed, noting that Nichols faces no immediate danger and, anyway, only objected to white bread after four years of eating it.

8. Most Intrepid Researcher Award
This category had a crowded field of contenders — especially among the host of mendacious Christian Right groups that claim homosexuals routinely rape children, “recruit” in schools, and push a hate crimes law that they say will result in pastors being sent to prison — but in the end all votes went to Ann Coulter. Sure, we all knew that Coulter had called Al Gore a “total fag,” labeled Muslims “ragheads” and said that Americans should “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” But Coulter went one better last January in her latest bestselling hissy fit, Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, where she reported the results of her research into the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). Most of us knew the CCC as a group that has written that blacks are “a retrograde species of humanity,” run photographic comparisons of pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee, and whined about “Jewish power brokers” and “perverted sodomites.” Gosh, they even say right in their “Statement of Principles” that they “oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind.” But Intrepid Annie set us straight, revealing that despite its bad rep, the CCC has been defamed and is merely “a conservative group.” ( continue to full post… )

A key figure of the 1990s antigovernment “Patriot” movement who largely dropped from public view in 2002 has resurfaced in Alaska, where he’s recruiting for his newly formed Alaska Militia.

Norm Olson, who founded the Michigan Militia in 1994, held an organizational meeting last Thursday at a community center in Nikiski, a small town in the Kenai Peninsula region about 170 road miles from Anchorage.

Olson’s message: “Something very evil this way comes.”

“We’re looking at catastrophe just a couple months away — economic collapse, food shortages around the world, prices in stores are gonna go skyrocketing with this inflation,” Olson told the roughly 20 attendees, according to The Redoubt Reporter, a Kenai Peninsula newspaper.
( continue to full post… )

Terry Nichols is distressed about his sins against God.

And no, he’s not talking about his role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, including 19 children. Rather, Nichols is referring to his diet at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., where he’s serving a life sentence for conspiring with Timothy McVeigh to carry out the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

“The forced consumption of numerous refined foods daily is abhorrent to Mr. Nichols’ sincerely held religious beliefs, for it forces him to sin against God in that it (refined foods) destroys His holy temple (i.e. my body),” wrote Nichols, 54, in the handwritten lawsuit filed last month in U.S. District Court in Denver.

Among other culinary demands, Nichols wants 100% whole wheat breads, cereals and pastas, more raw vegetables (with peels intact), a variety of fresh fruits, no deep-fried foods, and brown or wild rice instead of white rice. Nichols, who’s asking for more than $4.5 million in damages, claims that the highly processed meals he’s served are adversely affecting his health — and he doesn’t shy away from the details. “Medically, Plaintiff can easily take in all those refined foods, but the problem lies in getting it out,” he explained in court documents.

Several other inmates concurred in affidavits filed with the court, including another antigovernment terrorist who’s imprisoned for life. “According to my sincerely held religious beliefs God has made us in his image and likeness,” wrote Eric Rudolph, who was responsible for four major bombings, including an explosion at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that killed a woman and a 1998 Birmingham, Ala., attack on an abortion clinic that left a moonlighting police officer dead. “Our bodies are, therefore, sacred and should be treated as such. This includes eating whole foods and avoiding pollutants such as refined over-processed foods.” ( continue to full post… )

Convicted co-conspirator Terry Nichols has named another accomplice in the 1995 truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, raising more questions about investigative loose ends.
Read full article

Responding to a tip, the FBI searched the former home of convicted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols and found explosive materials apparently related to the 1995 attack.
Read full article

Terry Nichols, now serving two life sentences for his part in the 1995 Oklahoma City tragedy, told prosecutors during plea negotiations that he helped to build the weapon that left 168 people dead.
Read full article

Convicted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols claims his views were not the same as executed bomber Timothy McVeigh in a letter filed with the court.
Read full article