But all that didn’t stop the Prince William (Va.) Board of County Supervisors from appointing him to a committee that will influence county decision making on human services policy and budget priorities. After a closed-door discussion, the board voted 5-3 on Sept. 16 to approve Duecaster’s nomination to the Human Services Strategic Goals Task Force, which will develop a roadmap for the next four years of human services planning.

Duecaster is secretary of Help Save Manassas, an anti-immigration group that has spawned other “Help Save” chapters in Virginia and Maryland. In 2007, he helped author a local ordinance aimed at denying county services to undocumented immigrants and empowering local police to enforce federal immigration law. County officials later softened the ordinance because of concerns that it could lead to racial profiling.

Duecaster is known for his inflammatory remarks. “This country is being invaded no less than if hordes of armed people came across its borders,” he said during an October 2007 county supervisors meeting. “This invasion is not armed, but they’ve got weapons. The weapons that they use are their anchor babies. … This invasion is being funded by foreign governments.” He offered another dire warning to the supervisors in April 2008: “You’re at an historic crossroad today. You can fund and continue to enforce the rule of law resolution or you can let it go by the wayside and watch this county and the rest of this region degenerate into a third world slum.”

Duecaster, a 57-year-old lawyer, was nominated to the human services task force by County Supervisor John T. Stirrup Jr., who said criticisms of Duecaster’s appointment amounted to “character assassination.” In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Duecaster didn’t retract any of his controversial past statements. “At the time the comments were made, we were living in a threatening and inflammatory environment,” he said, adding that he hoped to serve “the interest of legal residents of this county.”

Duecaster has been even more flagrant in his remarks under cover of a pseudonym, according to the Post, which reported that on Black Velvet Bruce Li, the blog of Help Save Manassas founder Greg Letiecq, Duecaster has posted blatantly bigoted comments using the screen name “Advocator.”

In January 2008, Advocator called for an investigation into “whether or not illegal aliens have a preferred breeding season.” In April, he responded to a comment someone had posted using the pseudonym “Truth” with this gem: “An’ thass right, Trufe, I am bitching about ESOL [English for Speakers of Other Languages] as classes. Those anchor babies be costing me money.”

Undocumented immigrants aren’t his only targets. “What’s even more ironic is the fact that el Pape [the Pope] will be here bemoaning how some jurisdictions have ‘treated’ the illegals,” he wrote in April. “He’ll be pandering to them to gather members to replace those who left the Church due to the institutionalized approval of his priests’ penchant for little boys’ behinds.” (In a subsequent post, Duecaster insisted that despite his words he wasn’t smearing Catholics, just criticizing the Catholic Church as an institution for its cover-up of sexual abuse by priests.)

In a 2005 post on the Muslim-bashing website danielpipes.org, he claimed that having many children was a strategy of “Islamists. … They have always emphasized overpopulation and irresponsible procreation as a weapon in the Culture War.”

Duecaster’s appointment prompted an outcry from some residents. An online petition now signed by some 80 people asked the five board members who supported his appointment to explain their vote. Only one board member did. Supervisor Wally Covington said Duecaster has a right to free speech.

But Alanna Almeda, a local pro-immigrant activist in Haymarket, Va., sees it differently. “I’m disappointed in the supervisors,” she told Hatewatch. “I don’t think it’s an issue of free speech. I think it’s holding people accountable for their speech. That’s what it boils down to: There’s no accountability.”

Two years after glorifying the border vigilante movement in Minutemen: Battle to Secure America’s Borders, a book he co-authored with Minuteman Project leader Jim Gilchrist, right-wing propagandist and conspiracy hound Jerome Corsi found himself being deported—from Kenya.

Immigration agents in Nairobi detained Corsi earlier today because, as one official told the New York Times, “His immigration forms were not in order.”

Corsi was on his way to a press conference when he was taken into custody and forced to surrender his passport.

It wasn’t the first time in recent months that Corsi’s attempts to generate publicity have gone awry. In mid-August, just as Corsi was in the midst of a blitz of media appearances to promote his latest bestseller, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, Hatewatch revealed that Corsi had recently been a guest on the Political Cesspool, an overtly anti-Semitic and white supremacist radio show, and that he was scheduled to appear on the show again. (Corsi subsequently backed out of the second Cesspool appearance).

According to WorldNetDaily, a far-right website to which he’s a prolific contributor, Corsi had been invited to Kenya by Christian missionaries who are concerned about the spread of Islam in the East African country. One of the principal, and thoroughly discredited, tenets of Corsi’s newest book is that Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama, whose father is Kenyan, is secretly a Muslim. (Corsi is hardly a Republican operative; earlier this year he just as spuriously attacked GOP presidential candidate John McCain for supposedly accepting funding from a group with ties to Al Qaeda).

Corsi was in Kenya to investigate and “expose details of secret deep ties” between Obama and certain Muslim politicians in Kenya, according to WorldNetDaily. No doubt Corsi’s failure to obtain a work permit in Kenya, which led to his detention, according to the Associated Press, is the result of dark forces at work.

Also according to the AP, Kenyan officials transported Corsi to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, where he was awaiting an evening flight to London.

The host of “Your World with Neil Cavuto” used his program to put the blame for the subprime mortgage meltdown squarely where he believes it belongs – on the shoulders of poor minorities who have dared try to own a home. In doing so, Cavuto has exemplified what it means to be a Dobbsy winner – a “mainstream” figure who makes utterly false or misleading statements that denigrate or defame an entire group of people.

Cavuto played Pin-the-Blame-on-the-Minority during a Sept. 18 interview with U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.).

“[W]hen you and many of your colleagues were pushing for more minority lending and more expanded lending to folks who heretofore couldn’t get mortgages, when you were pushing homeownership… . Are you totally without culpability here?” he asked. “Are you totally blameless? Are you totally irresponsible of anything that happened?”

And just in case the audience didn’t catch his drift, he later spelled it out.

“I’m just saying, I don’t remember a clarion call that said, ‘Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster,’” he said.

That’s right. In Cavuto’s world, the real problem isn’t Wall Street greed or lax federal regulation of reckless banking behemoths. No, it’s all a matter of those irresponsible minorities who were willing to destroy the country’s economy for a two-bedroom home in the ‘burbs.

Recent reports by The Washington Post and The New York Times suggest otherwise.

The Post offered up a story on Oct. 3 that included a look at the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977, which was created to extend loans to minorities. Citing defenders of the act, the article noted that only a “tiny fraction” of subprime loans made since 2000 were created to satisfy the requirements of the act. Blaming the CRA for the economic fallout is “on the level of Swift Boat advertisements, except they are even less factual,” John Taylor, president and chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, told the Post. “They are trying to blame the victim, which is an old strategy that moneyed corporate interests always employ.”

Also on Oct. 3, The New York Times published an article that chronicled how the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 relaxed a rule for investment banks that allowed their brokerage units to take on massive amounts of debt relative to their assets. That opened the door for more investment in the toxic mortgage-backed securities that have torpedoed the economy.

No matter how dubious Cavuto’s claim is, it has achieved widespread acceptance among conservative pundits and politicians. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) also blamed the mess on loans to minorities.

Congratulations, Neil. You’re our first Dobbsy winner!

The competition was keen. But you’re head and shoulders above the rest. Of course, it’s easy to stand out when you are standing on the backs of an entire group of people.

Somewhere, Lou Dobbs must be smiling.

The resolution was discussed during a Sept. 18 meeting whose unapproved minutes read, “Dr. Kevin MacDonald of the Department of Psychology has made public statements and produced publications with a highly prejudicial view of Jews and non whites. His ideas have been taken up by white separatists who use MacDonald’s academic credentials to legitimize their agenda. Dr. MacDonald has done little to distance himself from these groups.” The final resolution has yet to be posted to the CSULB Academic Senate website.

The Sept. 18 minutes also state that there “had been no recent evidence of [MacDonald teaching his controversial ideas in class] though another member of the Psychology Faculty said that a former student had reported that MacDonald had done so about ten years ago.”

MacDonald, who is beloved by major American anti-Semites including former Klan leader David Duke, believes that Jews are impelled by genetic factors to undermine the majority populations of the societies they live in. In fact, MacDonald put it like this in journalist Jon Entine’s recent book, Abraham’s Children: “Jews do not act in the best interest of society. We need to systematically put in place some controls, call it discrimination if you will, to restore parity with other groups.” Since the turn of the millennium, MacDonald has also become a white supremacist activist. He has held leadership positions in several white supremacist groups, and in 2004 he was honored with a $10,000 prize for his work on the Jews by The Occidental Quarterly, a white supremacist publication on whose editorial advisory board he sits.

Regardless of these resolutions, MacDonald continues to crank out more anti-Semitic research. In April, his new book, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilization, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism, was published by the Occidental Press, the white nationalist hate group that also publishes The Occidental Quarterly. In one indication of the work’s extremism, the book’s forward was written by Virginia Abernethy, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University who is a self-described “white separatist.”

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that prosecutors decided to add a hate crime enhancement to the premeditated murder charge against 14-year-old Brandon McInerney, who allegedly gunned down gay junior high school classmate Lawrence “Larry” King, 15, after investigators discovered a “trove” of neo-Nazi literature and drawings in McInerney’s bedroom.

According to a court document filed by Senior District Attorney Maeve Fox earlier this week, the materials seized from McInerney’s room included white supremacist literature and drawings concerning “a racist skinhead philosophy of the variety espoused by Tom Metzger, David Lane and others.”

McInerney is awaiting trial as an adult for the Feb. 12 murder of King, who was shot in the head in a classroom full of students at E.O. Green Junior High School. McInerney fled the scene after the shooting and was apprehended a few blocks away.  Witnesses said that King, who had recently revealed that he was gay and started to wear make-up and jewelry, had a verbal confrontation with McInerney regarding King’s sexual orientation the day before the killing.

McInerney’s public defender explained that his client had the items only because he was researching a term paper on Adolf Hitler.

The accused killer turned 14, the legal cutoff for charging a juvenile as an adult in California, less than a month before the murder. He could face 50 years to life if convicted, plus one to three years for the hate crime enhancement.

“Is it luck or am I a thief?”

That’s the question neo-Nazi April Gaede posed Sept. 10 on the forum of the Vanguard News Network website (motto: “No Jews. Just right.”). Gaede, whose teenage daughters form the racist pop-singing duo Prussian Blue, recently boasted in an online post that she regularly scores free merchandise through underhanded means. “My family seems to have this gift of confusing clerks at large chain stores,” she confessed. “We end up not getting charged for items all the time. I think this happens to me because I talk to them and distract them (not on purpose) by saying outrageous things.”

It’s not hard to imagine Gaede uttering something unsettling. The neo-Nazi stage mom propelled her twin daughters, Lynx and Lamb, to international stardom in white power circles. Fans watch the blond, blue-eyed girls sieg heil and sing odes to “white survival,” though a 2007 documentary about the pair showed them tiring of their mother’s overbearing ways.

Now Gaede, a prolific contributor to neo-Nazi web forums, has revealed that micro-managing her daughters’ musical act isn’t her only skill. In her post on the VNN site, she tallied the thousands of dollars she’d saved by walking out of stores without paying for merchandise. Shopping in Kmart one day for window coolers, Gaede wrote, she saw a sign asking shoppers to donate money for Iraq veterans. “I asked to speak to a manager about how much the CEOs of Kmart were personally giving and why should they ask poor Kmart shoppers for money when they are a multibillion dollar company?” She reported that the “riled up” employee failed to ring up one of the coolers in her cart, saving her $150.

Another time, according to Gaede, she picked out some pricey merchandise at Ikea, only to find that the store was unable to charge her credit card for more than $300. So Gaede decided to return the following day to buy the remaining items. “When they loaded up our car they included the $500 table we had not paid for,” she recounted. “Dumb Mexicans.”

But Gaede apparently doesn’t want readers to think she lacks ethics. “Now if this happens at a mom and pop store we always correct it and if a clerk gives me the wrong change I always correct it (if they are white) because I dont [sic] want them to get in trouble for their till to be wrong. But otherwise if it is some big store I go for it… What do you all think? Is that evil???”

Opinions varied. “McKinley” wrote, “I will never fill [sic] wrong about getting one over from an enemy. Morals do not count in a death match.”

But others thought Gaede was taking the wrong tack. “It’s stealing from white people,” wrote “cknott.” “Because of April’s stealing, companies raise their prices which makes honest white people pay even more at the store. If we want to beat the J*w, we have to stop acting like the J*w.”

To which Gaede promptly replied, “Oh spank me! Probably most here on this board has [sic] done this. I just have the guts to admit it.”

The Report’s investigation details the sordid history of Alamo, who was released from federal prison in 1998 after completing a sentence for tax evasion. Alamo had also been charged with felony child abuse in 1989, but that charge was finally dropped in 1995. However, the family of the 11-year-old boy who allegedly was subjected to 140 blows on Alamo’s orders for minor academic infractions filed suit and won a $1.4 million judgment.

As detailed in the Fall 2007 issue of the Report, Alamo in recent years has argued that girls should marry once they start menstruating, even if they are as young as 10. In a 2006 radio broadcast, he said: “God impregnated Mary when she was about 11 years old. So the government idiots, the people that don’t know the Bible, what you’re going to have to do is get a hold of God now, you’re going to have to get up there and cuff him and send him to prison for statutory rape.”

In early 2007, Alamo cited the alleged promiscuity of 1st-graders as grounds for marrying them before the age of legal consent. “I’ve found out from people’s parents that their daughter started having sex when she was 6 years old and had sex every day of her life,” he said in another broadcast. “So right there, by the time she’s 15 years old, she’s had sex thousands of times. I mean, this is just reality.”

The Report’s story also explores the Alamo cult’s strange background and its leader’s raging hatred for Catholics and homosexuals. Alamo has blamed Catholics for “every filthy thing,” including communism, Nazism, the two world wars, the Jonestown massacre, drugs, prostitution and pornography. He has also attacked his many detractors in Fouke, saying that God would “destroy” what he characterized as his “Vaticanite” critics.

Tanton has long claimed that he is no racist — that, in fact, he came to his immigration restrictionism through progressive concerns for population control and the environment, not disdain for the foreign born. He characterizes himself as a “fair person,” and on his website he condemns the “unsavory characters whose views can easily be characterized as anti-American, anti-Semitic and outright racist.”

Fair enough. But what do Tanton’s letters have to say?

As it turns out, quite a lot. Although Tanton has been linked to racist ideas in the past — fretting about the “educability” of Latinos, warning of whites being out-bred by others, and publishing a number of white nationalist authors — the papers in the Bentley Library show that Tanton has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene. He has corresponded with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers and the leading white nationalist thinkers of the era. He introduced key FAIR leaders to the president of the Pioneer Fund, a white supremacist group set up to encourage “race betterment,” at a 1997 meeting at a private club. He wrote a major funder to encourage her to read the work of a radical anti-Semitic professor — to “give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life” — and suggested that the entire FAIR board discuss the professor’s theories on the Jews. He practically worshipped a principal architect of the Immigration Act of 1924 (instituting a national origin quota system and barring Asian immigration), a rabid anti-Semite whose pro-Nazi American Coalition of Patriotic Societies was indicted for sedition in 1942.

As early as 1969, Tanton showed a sharp interest in eugenics, the “science” of breeding a better human race that was utterly discredited by the Nazis, trying to find out if Michigan had laws allowing forced sterilization. His interest stemmed, he wrote in a letter of inquiry that year, from “a local pair of sisters who have nine illegitimate children between them.” Some 30 years later, he was still worrying about “less intelligent” people being allowed children, saying that “modern medicine and social programs are eroding the human gene pool.”

Throughout, FAIR — which, along with Tanton, refused repeated requests for comment for this story — has stood by its man. Its 2004 annual report praised him for “visionary qualities that have not waned one bit.” Around the same time, Dan Stein, who has led FAIR since 1988 as executive director or president and who was copied on scores of Tanton’s letters, insisted FAIR’s founder had “never asserted the inferiority or superiority of any racial, ethnic, or religious group. Never.”

Blood and Soil

In the world view of John Tanton, successful societies are not based on a mere sharing of territory, values and political systems. Nations and their cultures, he has suggested on numerous occasions, are largely determined by biology — race.

In a Nov. 13, 1994, letter to white nationalist columnist Lawrence Auster, a regular correspondent, Tanton suggested that the Declaration of Independence was actually a document based on the “bond of blood and ethnicity — nationhood.” Almost a year earlier, in a Dec. 10, 1993, letter to Garrett Hardin, a controversial ecology professor, he said: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” On Jan. 26, 1996, he wrote Roy Beck, head of the immigration restrictionist group NumbersUSA (and then an employee of Tanton’s foundation U.S. Inc.), questioning whether Latinos were capable of governing California.

“I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society,” Tanton said in his letter to Beck, “but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin America to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America.” Referring to the changing California public schools, Tanton wondered “whether the minorities who are going to inherit California (85% of the lower-grade school children are now ‘minorities’ — demography is destiny) can run an advanced society?”

For Tanton, the question was entirely rhetorical.

“The situation then is that the people who have been the carriers of Western Civilization are well on the way toward resigning their commission to carry the culture into the future,” he wrote in an Aug. 8, 1997, letter to Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, a fellow immigration critic. “When this decline in numbers is coupled with an aging of the core population … it begins to look as if the chances of Western Civilization passing into the history books are very good indeed.”

This kind of thinking led Tanton to defend racial quotas imposed on immigrants. In a Nov. 3, 1995, memo to FAIR boss Dan Stein and the entire FAIR board of advisers, Tanton defended the infamous “White Australia” policy that restricted non-white immigration into that country from 1901 to 1973, saying it was not racist, but intended to protect native-born labor (the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act outlawed racial quotas in Australia). Tanton also mocked the idea that the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, banning Chinese immigration to the U.S., was racist.

Similarly, Tanton has defended America’s Immigration Act of 1924, which formalized a racial quota system that was only dismantled in 1965. In fact, as shown in his correspondence, Tanton has long lionized a principal architect of the act, John B. Trevor Sr. (In addition to founding the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, Trevor was an adviser to the extreme-right, anti-Catholic Christian Crusade of Billy James Hargis, who regularly referred to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as Communist documents.) Tanton arranged for the Bentley Library to house the papers of both Trevor and his son, long a Pioneer Fund board member and a close friend of Tanton’s until his 2006 death.

Despite the elder Trevor’s extremely unsavory past, Tanton has sent his unpublished autobiography to numerous friends, including, on Nov. 21, 2001, FAIR board member Donald Collins. In a cover letter, Tanton told Collins that the work of Trevor — who distributed pro-Nazi propaganda, drew up plans to crush uprisings of “Jewish subversives,” and warned shrilly of “diabolical Jewish control” of America — should serve FAIR as “a guidepost to what we must follow again this time.”

Communing with the Movement

John Tanton has not merely flirted with and adopted many of the core ideas of white nationalism over the past three decades. He has carried on correspondences with some of the key leaders of the white nationalist movement, meeting and even vacationing with some of them, and pushing many of their central ideas.

Over the years, his closest friend on the white nationalist scene seems to have been Jared Taylor, the man who began publishing American Renaissance, a racist, pseudo-scientific magazine focusing on race, intelligence and eugenics, in 1990. (“When blacks are left entirely to their own devices,” Taylor wrote in its pages a few years ago, “Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”)

Tanton, who met Taylor shortly after American Renaissance began publication, seems to have been particularly taken with Taylor’s angry opposition to affirmative action, spelled out in Taylor’s 1992 book, Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. On Nov. 12, 1993, Tanton wrote Taylor and three of his American Renaissance colleagues — Wayne Lutton, who would later work for Tanton; Sam Francis, a white nationalist ideologue then working as a Washington Times columnist; and Jerry Woodruff, who wrote for the nativist publication Middle American News — suggesting that their new journal take on literary critic Stanley Fish, who had defended affirmative action in an article for The Atlantic. Tanton enclosed “a little something” for Taylor’s “start-up costs.”

Tanton promoted Taylor’s efforts repeatedly. On Dec. 15, 1994, he wrote a friend to suggest that he read Taylor’s 1992 book. More remarkably, on Jan. 24, 1991, he wrote to the then-president of the Pioneer Fund, Harry Weyher, about Taylor’s American Renaissance effort. And as recently as April 20, 1998, Tanton wrote to several FAIR employees, including Dan Stein, to ensure that they were receiving American Renaissance mailings: “I write to encourage keeping track of those on our same side of the issue, but who are nonetheless our competitors for dollars and members.” (The bolded words were underlined in Tanton’s original letter.)

Tanton also corresponded for years with the late Sam Francis, a one-time Washington Times columnist who was fired after details of a racist speech he gave at an American Renaissance conference became public. From 1999 until his death in 2005, Francis edited the crudely racist and nativist Citizens Informer, the tabloid published by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), an organization that says it “oppose[s] all efforts to mix the races of mankind.”

What may have been most remarkable of all was Tanton’s endorsement of a proposal from another friend — Peter Brimelow, who would later start a racist anti-immigration website — that FAIR hire Sam Francis to edit its newsletter. That proposal, which Tanton sent to FAIR’s Dan Stein on Nov. 3, 1995, was made two months after The Washingon Times fired Francis for racism.

Tanton’s contacts with other white nationalists also are instructive:

• Beginning in the late 1980s, Tanton corresponded regularly with Virginia Abernethy, now a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University. Abernethy is a member of the CCC and recently described herself as a “white separatist.”
• On June 26, 1996, Tanton wrote to Sam Dickson — a Georgia lawyer who has represented the Ku Klux Klan, written for and been on the editorial advisory board of Holocaust denial publications, and spoken at several of the biannual conferences put on by American Renaissance — to thank him for a good time during a visit by Tanton and his wife. “The next time I’m in Atlanta,” Tanton wrote Dickson, “I hope to take one of your ‘politically incorrect’ tours.”

• In a Dec. 23, 1996, letter, Tanton complained that it was hard to write checks for Theodore O’Keefe, who was involved for years in the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, because O’Keefe would only use a pen name. It was not clear from the letter what O’Keefe had written for Tanton.

• On June 17, 1998, Tanton wrote to Stan Hess, who was then a member of the CCC, about Hess’ proposal to open a FAIR office in California (the letter was copied to Stein). The letter recounted how Tanton had “presented” Hess’ idea to the FAIR board. Hess was arrested later that year for burning a Mexican flag at an Alabama CCC rally that was attended by an unrobed Klansman. Hess would go on in 1999 to help form the neofascist American Friends of the British National Party and, later, to become California state leader of a group headed by neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke.

Tanton on ‘the Jews’

In some ways, given his ideas, it’s not surprising that John Tanton would cozy up to white nationalists and their fellow travelers. What is unexpected, even among long-time observers of the FAIR founder, is his attitude toward “the Jews.”

In the late 1990s, Kevin MacDonald, a California State University, Long Beach, professor, was finishing up a trilogy of books that purported to show that Jews collectively work to undermine the dominant majorities in the host countries in which they live, including the United States. MacDonald said that Jews pursue these tactics — including promoting non-white immigration into white-dominated nations — in order to weaken the majority culture in a bid to enhance their own standing. He would later go on to speak and write for white nationalist groups across America.

Tanton liked what he read. On Dec. 28, 1998 — the same year that the last two books of MacDonald’s trilogy were published — he wrote MacDonald, saying, “I hope we can meet some day.” On that same date, Tanton sent a memo to Dan Stein and the FAIR board of directors about a MacDonald paper “on the segment of the Jewish community that has an open borders mentality.” The paper, Tanton said, “would be fertile for group discussion at the forthcoming board meeting.”

Earlier that month, on Dec. 10, 1998, Tanton also sent MacDonald’s work to Cordelia Scaife May, a now-deceased millionaire philanthropist who gave regularly to far-right causes and was a close Tanton friend. “I’m sure [MacDonald’s article] will give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life, which explains a large part of the Jewish opposition to immigration reform,” he wrote.

Tanton’s criticism of religious groups wasn’t limited to Jews, however. Over the years, he — like some principals of FAIR — lashed out at a variety of religious denominations, especially Catholics, for their welcoming attitude toward immigrants coming to America from the Third World. In his letter to the FAIR board suggesting a discussion of Kevin MacDonald’s theories, for instance, he described “the Roman Catholic Church [and] several of the Protestant denominations, the Lutheran Church in particular,” as being among “our opponents.” In an earlier, May 24, 1994, letter to Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, he said that “one of the problems with churches is that they see themselves as universal, and as transcending national boundaries.”

Endorsing Eugenics

For years, FAIR President Dan Stein has hotly denied that his organization had anything to do with eugenics. “Eugenics,” he wrote in a 2004 op-ed in the Kansas City Star, “is pure junk science, and it is utterly unrelated to FAIR’s efforts to bring order to immigration in America.” Two months later, in a press release attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for suggesting otherwise, the group called SPLC’s reporting “utterly specious” and “McCarthyist.”

The press release went on to accuse the SPLC of unfairly linking FAIR to “a long discredited pseudo-science of eugenics” by noting the group had accepted $1.2 million from the eugenicist Pioneer Fund, ending in 1994. The release also claimed that the idea that FAIR had an interest in eugenics had been disproven.

Apparently, John Tanton failed to get that message.

On Dec. 30, 1994 — at the end of the year that FAIR finally stopped soliciting Pioneer donations (after negative publicity) and issued its denunciation of eugenics — Tanton wrote to German academic Wolfgang Bosswick to defend the Pioneer Fund, saying its critics were the “hard (Marxist) left in the United States.”

On Sept. 18, 1996, he wrote to now-deceased California multimillionaire Robert K. Graham, a eugenicist who started a sperm bank to collect the semen of Nobel Prize-winning scientists: “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news [to less intelligent individuals], and how will it be implemented?”

On May 21, 1997, Tanton wrote to Richard Lynn — a race “scientist” who claims that black people “are more psychopathic than whites” and suffer from a “personality disorder” characterized by a poverty of feeling and lack of shame — to congratulate Lynn on his book, Dysgenics, on how less intelligent individuals are outbreeding the intelligent. The next year, on Feb. 9, 1998, he wrote to Pioneer Fund President Harry Weyher to propose that Weyher hire Lynn to write “a study of Barry Mehler.” Mehler, the Ferris State University professor who founded the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism, is a harsh critic of race science and eugenics.

FAIR officials may not have known of these contacts, but they certainly knew of others. On Oct. 29, 1998, for instance, Tanton wrote a memo for his file on Harry Weyher discussing the Pioneer Fund’s new website and a paper on “sub-replacement fertility” by Roger Pearson, a notorious race scientist who heads the Institute for the Study of Man. The memo was copied to FAIR’s Dan Stein and K.C. McAlpin, the executive director of ProEnglish, a group on whose board Tanton now sits.

Most remarkable of all, however, was the Feb. 13, 1997, gathering organized by Tanton at the New York Racquet and Tennis Club. Three years after FAIR had stopped taking Pioneer Fund money, Tanton brought FAIR board members Henry Buhl, Sharon Barnes and Alan Weeden — along with Peter Brimelow, future founder of the VDARE.com hate site — to a meeting with Pioneer Fund President Harry Weyher. The meeting, held expressly to discuss fundraising efforts to benefit FAIR, was memorialized in a Feb. 17, 1997, memo that Tanton wrote for his “FAIR Fund-Raising File.” A year later, on Jan. 5, 1998, Tanton wrote to John Trevor, a Pioneer Fund board member and the son of the notorious pro-Nazi eugenicist John Trevor Sr., to thank him for his personal “handsome contribution” to FAIR.

It’s not that Tanton didn’t understand, just as well as Stein and the other leaders of FAIR, exactly how controversial eugenics was. After starting his own eugenicist group, the Society for Genetic Education, in 1996, he wrote to Graham, the California eugenicist, to discuss public relations strategies. In a Sept. 18, 1996, letter, Tanton explained how his new group’s website “emphasized mankind’s use of eugenic principles on plants and the lower animals as a way to condition the public to the idea of genetic manipulation, and raise the question of its application to the human race.” Elaborating, he added: “We report ways [eugenics] is currently being done, but under the term genetics rather than eugenics.”

Immigration and Race

Throughout its history, the United States has been subjected to periodic outbreaks of xenophobic nativism, angry reactions to waves of immigrants who are seen as somehow different than “real” Americans. These movements, directed at different times at Germans, Catholics, Jews, Asians, southern Europeans, blacks and others, have typically been undergirded by racist stereotyping. Again and again, the new immigrants are described as stupid, ugly, disloyal, diseased and more.

Today, no one disputes the vulgar racism of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, which grew to nearly 4 million members on the strength of hating Catholics and Jews. And much the same can be said of nativist movements from the Know-Nothings of the 1840s, who saw German Catholics as dangerous subverters of American democracy, to the racist demonization of Mexican “wetbacks” during the 20th century.

But John Tanton and his Federation for American Immigration Reform have repeatedly claimed that they are different, that FAIR and its founder are not linked to the irrational fears and hatreds of the past. Their critics, they say angrily, are simply tarring them with the brush of racism to unfairly denigrate their arguments.

As the Bentley Library files show, that is far from true.

“We’re building in a deadly disunity. All great empires disintegrate, we want stability.” — John Tanton, 1986, FAIR founder and now board of directors member

“Gobernar es poblar translates ‘to govern is to populate’… In this society where the majority rules, does this hold? Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile?” — John Tanton, 1986

“Is apartheid in Southern California’s future? The demographic picture in South Africa now is startlingly similar to what we’ll see in California in 2030. In Southern Africa, a White minority owns the property, has the best jobs and education, has the political power, and speaks one language. A non-White majority has poor education, jobs and income, owns little property, is on its way to political power and speaks a different language.” — John Tanton, 1986

“The new immigration will not work the same as the old. For some reason, Mexican immigrants are not succeeding as well as other groups.” — Roger Conner, 1986, then FAIR executive director

“Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida [bribe], the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.? What in fact are the characteristics of Latin American culture, versus that of the United States?” — John Tanton, 1986

“Can homo contraceptivus compete with homo progenitiva if borders aren’t controlled? Or is advice to limit one’s family simply advice to move over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space?” — John Tanton, 1986

“Not everyone thinks that replacing strawberry fields with dim-sum restaurants and noodle houses is necessarily an enhancement in their quality of life.” — Dan Stein, 1989, then FAIR spokesman, now FAIR president

“I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires an European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” — John Tanton, 1993 letter to Garrett Hardin, a controversial ecologist

“I think [Pioneer Fund officials] support our work because the[ir] trustees agree with what we’re doing. But we pitched the funding proposal to them. They give us money because we asked for it.” — Dan Stein, 1994, on donations to FAIR from the racist Pioneer Fund

“I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society, but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin American to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America.” — John Tanton, 1996 letter to NumbersUSA head, Roy Beck

“Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news [to less intelligent individuals], and how will it be implemented?” — John Tanton, 1996 letter to California multimillionaire Robert K. Graham, a eugenicist who started a sperm bank to collect the semen of Nobel Prize-winning scientists

“The situation then is that the people who have been the carriers of Western Civilization are well on the way toward resigning their commission to carry the culture into the future. When this decline in numbers is coupled with an aging of the core population…it begins to look as if the chances of Western Civilization passing into the history books are very good indeed.” — John Tanton, 1997 letter to Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, a fellow immigration critic.

“[Millions of immigrants coming to America will be] defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.” — John Tanton, 1997

“In the bacteriology lab, we have culture plates. You put a bug in there and it starts growing and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it grows until it finally fills the whole plate. And it crashes and dies.” — John Tanton, 1997, comparing immigrants to bacteria

“How many computer whiz kids cancel out one Sirhan Sirhan, a Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman or … a Charles Ponzi?” — John Tanton, 1997, criticizing visas for immigrants with high-tech skills

“Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?” — Dan Stein, 1997

“Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing. Some of them firmly believe in socialist or redistributist [sic] ideas. Many of them hate America, hate everything the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.” — Dan Stein, 1997

“I’m sure [anti-Semitic Professor Kevin MacDonald's article] will give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life, which explains a large part of the Jewish opposition to immigration reform.”— John Tanton, 1998 letter to Cordelia May Scaife, an heiress who financially backed Tanton’s work

“I have a secret plan to destroy America. … We must first make America a bilingual-bicultural country. … I would then invent ‘multiculturalism’ and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. … Having made America a bilingual-bicultural country, having established multiculturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of ‘victimology,’ I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws.” — Richard Lamm, 2000, speech at FAIR conference, now FAIR board of advisers co-chair

“American secessions have rarely been viewed with alarm [but] in the 1990s … we are more inclined to consider them a serious threat to national unity, especially since that unity is being stretched to the breaking point by ethnic revanchiste movements fueled by Third World immigration. … In any major city, the peace is disturbed by Latino, black, and Asian nationalist gangs, which in some cases are only the shock troops of ethnic movements seeking the racial dismemberment of the United States. In refusing to control immigration, the Federal Government is writing a script for ethnic civil war. Why?” — FAIR website, 2002, quoting paleoconservative author Thomas Fleming, a member of the neo-Confederate hate group, League of the South

“[Muslims] are not coming here to become Americans. … [They are] promoting colonization of their own religion, of their own culture in towns and taking them over.” — Susan Tully, 2004, FAIR national field director

“New cultures … [in the U.S. are] diluting what we are and who we are.” — Richard Lamm, 2004

“I am sick and tired of all the white bashing that goes on through the use of political correctness as an indoctrinating tool.” — Joe Turner, 2005, then FAIR western field representative

“I am sick and tired of multiculturalism, meaning, let’s celebrate every culture as long as it isn’t a European/white culture. … [J]ust because one believes in white separatism that does not make them a racist.” — Joe Turner, 2005

“It is clear that there is a ‘fifth column’ movement in the United States that professes greater allegiance to a greater Mexico or a breakaway, separatist movement based on a Latino homeland, despite the efforts of Latino politicians to dismiss it as a quixotic idea of rambunctious Latino youth, largely on university campuses.” — FAIR website, 2005

“The large influx of immigrants from Mexico … differs in important ways from the traditional immigration model… . [T]he United States has no historic precedent of large numbers of people coming to this country who could argue that they were returning to a country that was once theirs. … Further complicating the picture is the fact that due to many social factors — particularly low educational achievement — this unprecedented group of immigrants is entering American society at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder… . This reality breeds the kind of resentment and alienation that makes them susceptible to the siren songs of radical activists.” — FAIR website, 2005

“The hierarchy from the Pope down has from time to time acknowledged the right of sovereign states to control their borders. But the numerous conditions the churchmen have invoked would seriously vitiate this right. … [Catholic bishops apparently] would like to condition this sovereign prerogative of states right out of existence.” — FAIR website, 2006

“Far from being the agenda of a kooky fringe element, the idea of reconquest of the American Southwest and the creation of an Aztlan nation, was prominently displayed by millions of illegal aliens all across the United States as they marched earlier this year to demand amnesty.” — FAIR’s website, 2006

“Last week, President Bush met with Mexican President Calderón and Canadian Prime Minister Harper … to hone their plan for a North American Union that would merge the U.S. with Canada and Mexico. … FAIR has been exposing the short-sighted Bush plan to eventually erase the border between the U.S. and Mexico … and American sovereignty since 2000.” — FAIR E-mail to supporters, 2007

“The SPLC’s characterization of the Pioneer Fund is fraudulent. The Fund’s mission statement clearly states that it supports equal opportunity for all Americans, regardless of race, religion, national origin or ethnicity.” — Dan Stein, 2007 press release

“The Council of Conservative Citizens has never hosted, held, sponsored or promoted any event or meeting at which David Irving has been the speaker,” wrote CCC head Gordon Lee Baum in a letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Nonetheless, the chairman of one of the CCC’s chapters was instrumental in bringing Irving to the Montgomery area late last month. Larry Darby, who heads the Alabama Capital Region chapter of the CCC, promoted Irving’s lecture to members of the CCC and hosted the event. While there, Darby handed out copies of the CCC’s racist publication, the Citizens Informer.

It wasn’t the first time that Darby — a Montgomery lawyer who has stated publicly that the Holocaust “never happened” —hosted the world’s most notorious Holocaust denier. Darby also was responsible for Irving’s 2005 appearance at a Holiday Inn just north of Montgomery. (That was back before Darby, the father of two biracial girls, began hanging around with neo-Nazi leaders and assorted other white supremacists.)

Irving’s most recent appearance in Prattville, Ala., was part of a U.S. speaking tour that includes stops in 60-plus cities nationwide. For $20 at the door ($15 advance registration online), those in the know could attend the private after-dinner talk at the same hotel where Irving spoke three years ago.

The 19 people who showed up at the Holiday Inn heard Irving’s rambling remarks on the theme of his persecution, including the dramatic tale of his arrest in Austria in 2005 on charges related to disputing the Holocaust. The British citizen, who famously sued American Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier (he lost), also repeated his familiar refrain that Hitler wasn’t to blame for whatever happened to the Jews during World War II. “Hitler was being deliberately kept out of the loop,” he told the all-white, mostly male audience.

During an intermission, Irving signed his books to the soundtrack of a Nazi rally. (Leni Riefenstahl’s 1933 propaganda film “Victory of Faith,” depicting a huge rally in Nuremburg, was playing on a TV screen.) Those who hadn’t yet acquired a collection of Irving’s oeuvres could purchase his books for a $10 dollar discount.

“History’s amazing when you hear a little truth,” said a clean-cut, blond-haired man as he approached the book table. “Not the government-censored version like we’ve been brainwashed with since childhood.”

But attendees hoping to hear Irving’s version of what happened to the Jews during World War II may have come away disappointed. Irving, who once said that more people died in the backseat of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, generally stayed away from hard-core Holocaust denial. “I’m not going to talk about that,” Irving brusquely told a man seeking validation for his belief that “the Holocaust was not possible to have taken place the way they make it sound.”

Still, no one left the talk unsure of Irving’s feelings toward Jews.

When the same man asked whether there was “a major conspiracy against the common people of the world” and gave Irving’s treatment in Austria as an example, Irving offered the following anecdote:

“I think that just proves they’re under the sway of a certain group of people,” he said. “In fact, as I was being conveyed from the court of appeal after our victory back to the prison to pick up my possessions [the Austrian court released Irving before he had completed his three-year sentence for Holocaust denial], the police officers in the van with me, no longer handcuffed to me, they said: ‘Mr. Irving, you do realize of course that you’ve been a victim of a certain religious group here in Austria.’ I didn’t say a thing. I thought when you’re in this position about to be set free, you don’t start talking about that kind of subject. But they knew.”

White, who heads the Virginia-based American National Socialist Workers Party, has issued a series of Internet calls for violence in recent years, including his infamous September 2007 suggestion that followers “Lynch the Jena 6,” a reference to black high school students in Jena, La. But of late, his postings have become even more violent, possibly as a result of White’s deliberate attempts to be provocative in the face of waning public attention.

On Tuesday, White posted on his Overthrow.com website a request for money to pay for a special issue of his National Socialist magazine. The mocked-up cover, with a huge “Kill This NIGGER?” headline, shows Obama speaking to a crowd with a rifle’s crosshairs superimposed on his head. White said that the accompanying article would explain the Democratic presidential nominee’s “radical Communist politics and Jewish backers … and how he plans genocide against white working people.”

Then, on Thursday, White posted the name, home address and several phone numbers for an allegedly “Gay Jewish anti-racist” juror who helped convict Matt Hale, then-leader of the neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator, of soliciting the murder of a federal judge. Hale was sentenced in 2005 to 40 years in prison.

White does not directly propose violence against the juror. But he told his readers that the man “played a leading role in inciting both the conviction and the harsh sentence that followed.” He also described the conviction as wrongful and said that the prison term handed Hale was a “criminally long sentence.”

White, who lives in Roanoke, Va., has a long history of issuing sneering threats and vulgar, racist attacks. Earlier this summer, on July 22, he verbally attacked what he called “‘respectable’ niggers” in the NAACP and elsewhere in American society. “I am convinced, more and more each day, that the only solution to this problem is to kill all of the niggers involved, preferably with state sponsorship,” he wrote. “When the death squads come, line me up as volunteer number one.”

The latest issue of the Intelligence Report, released Aug. 28, contains a story detailing allegations that Framingham, Mass., anti-immigration extremists Jim and Joe Rizoli have promoted Holocaust denial online using the handles of “jjrizo” and “JoRiz” since at least 2001.

The Rizolis, who spend most of their time these days attacking and demonizing Brazilian immigrants, in the past have vehemently denied these allegations. Contacted by the Intelligence Report for comment earlier this summer, Jim Rizoli, speaking for his brother and himself, claimed he was an innocent victim of online identity theft. “Let me set you straight. My identity was stolen. People were posting things using my name,” he said. Asked his opinion of Holocaust denial, Jim Rizoli said, “I have no interest in that. Nothing. I’m not going to get into that.”

But just two days after the Intelligence Report story was published, Jim Rizoli E-mailed the Report a response that seemed to abandon his earlier denials.

“Great article about my brother and I. You will bring much attention to the Holocaust and people will hopefully see that there are a lot of ‘loose ends’ that need fixin [sic].” Rizoli then suggested that the Intelligence Report should “check out” the website nazigassings.com.

We know the site all too well. Created by longtime Holocaust denier Friedrich Paul Berg, it refers to the Holocaust as a hoax and claims that “No one was ever killed in gas chambers, and there was NO program to physically exterminate all the Jews.” “Hitler had superb, cyanide gas chambers, but they were used ONLY to keep people alive,” Rizoli’s recommended reading continues. “Those gas chambers were used in many strategic locations throughout eastern Europe to fumigate entire railroad trains, for example, with cyanide gas from Zyklon-B.” Nazigassings.com also links to Hitler worship websites like AdolftheGreat.com, the subject of a previous Intelligence Report story.

Not long after we received Jim Rizoli’s response, his brother E-mailed us a somewhat calmer missive, in which he prompted us to read and consider a news story on Misha Defonseca, the writer who, it was recently revealed, faked her Holocaust memoir about escaping the Nazis during World War II. (Note to Joe Rizoli: It’s a logical non sequitur to assume that because an individual’s account of her experience in the Holocaust is false that the entire Holocaust is fabricated.) Joe Rizoli also included a helpful link to the Institute of Historical Review, the world’s leading Holocaust denial organization, founded by Willis Carto, a long-time anti-Semite, in 1978.

“Is this information true? Who knows, Joe Rizoli wrote. “But it is called FREEDOM of Speech, which is something you try to stop.”

Actually, here at Hatewatch we’re all about freedom of speech, especially when extremists like the Rizolis use it to reveal their true colors.

Thanks, guys.

We figured this would be a great time to introduce a new tongue-in-cheek award, to be given to “mainstream” figures — politicians, pundits, preachers and pedants — who make utterly false or misleading statements that have the effect of denigrating or defaming an entire group of people.

Naturally, we’re calling it the Dobbsy.

After all, who has made this kind of mainstream defamation more infamous than the man who insisted, despite a huge mountain of evidence to the contrary, that 7,000 new cases of leprosy had appeared in a recent three-year span, thanks largely to immigrants? Dobbs, of course. He even told Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes”: “If we reported it, it’s a fact.”

Dobbs did report it. But it wasn’t a fact.

Even though “60 Minutes,” The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Columbia Journalism Review, Media Matters for America, and others showed that his numbers were inflated (by a factor of about 17), he declined to retract the claim. Demonstrating that his source was an extreme-right migrant-hater with no expertise in immigration or disease failed to budge the host of “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” either. In round after media round, Dobbs refused to admit he had been wrong.

Dobbs isn’t alone, of course, in spreading misinformation in the media. That’s why we are launching the Dobbsy — because some exaggerations and falsehoods uttered by mainstream figures are simply so outrageous that they demand special recognition.

We’d like to ask our readers to join us in the search for these propagandists. Please send us your nominations, along with any links or other supporting evidence for what they said and why they’re factually wrong. We will occasionally select one of these for a Dobbsy citation and write-up, and at some point, we’ll have a grand competition in which we’ll ask readers for their help in selecting a “winner.”

To get us into the spirit of things, we reprint here a short but unforgettable extract of Dobbs’ interview with Lesley Stahl (full disclosure: I criticized Dobbs in that same “60 Minutes” segment), which aired on May 6, 2007:

STAHL: We checked and found a report issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, saying 7,000 is the number of leprosy cases over the last 30 years, not the past three, and nobody knows how many of those cases involved immigrants. Now we went to try and check that number, 7,000. We can’t. Just so you know…

DOBBS: Well, I can tell you this. If we reported it, it’s a fact.

STAHL: You can’t tell me that. You did report it…

DOBBS: Well, no, I just did.

STAHL: How can you guarantee that to me?

DOBBS: Because I’m the managing editor, and that’s the way we do business. We don’t make up numbers, Lesley. Do we?

I think that gives our intrepid readers an idea of what we’re looking for. Go out, be fruitful, and send us your findings. It won’t be long before we award the first Dobbsy. They say they don’t make up numbers. But do they?

That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of the book The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal by Mark Krikorian, who heads the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates sharply reducing immigration. Krikorian argues that, while the immigrants coming here now are similar to those that arrived a century ago, the United States has undergone profound changes that make it much less able to absorb newcomers.

But at a recent discussion of Krikorian’s book that aired on C-SPAN, a young academic offered a different twist on Krikorian’s argument — one that’s far more appealing to white nationalists. Jason Richwine, a doctoral student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, essentially asserted, “It’s partly me, but there’s no question it’s you, too.”

Or, as he actually said: “The argument that immigrants themselves are no different from the ones that came 100 years ago I think is quite wrong, and I think that the major difference here is ethnicity — or race, if you will.” Not only do people of the same race tend to stick together, Richwine said, but “races differ in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ.”

Not surprisingly, Richwine’s remarks were warmly received on white nationalist blogs. “Definitely someone we want to keep our eye on,” wrote Marcus Epstein on the blog of the anti-immigration hate site VDARE.com.

“[His] name sounds Jewish, which makes what follows even more remarkable,” crowed Larry Auster, who runs the blog View from the Right.

Richwine joined Krikorian and Fred Siegal, a professor at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, for the July 1 discussion at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential, conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. Richwine, who is completing a dissertation on immigration and IQ, is a National Research Initiative fellow at AEI and will remain there after finishing his degree this fall. He joins AEI-sponsored scholar Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, the highly controversial 1994 book that argues that blacks and Latinos have lower IQs than whites and that most social welfare and affirmative action programs are doomed to failure as a result.

For those who thought that ranking immigrant groups based on IQ was a relic of the early 20th century, Richwine’s remarks were instructive. He said that in America there’s an IQ hierarchy, with Jews at the top, followed in descending order by East Asians, non-Jewish whites, Hispanics and blacks. “Group differences in ability, combined with a natural tribal disposition, is going to create, usually, parallel cultures within a multiracial society rather than an assimilated culture,” he said. “I think that is a major, major obstacle to the assimilation of today’s immigrants, because they are not from Europe which is, I think, a major difference.”

Never mind that East Asians, a so-called high IQ group, aren’t European, or that many Latinos trace their ancestry to the European country of Spain. Richwine said it doesn’t matter that some immigrant groups not considered white when they came to the United States are considered white today, such as the Irish and Sicilians. Just because some groups that were thought unable to assimilate defied expectations doesn’t mean that’ll be true of all groups, he said.

To bolster his case, he named three groups that have been in the United States a long time — blacks, American Indians and early Mexican Americans — and “have not assimilated to the cultural mainstream as typified by white Americans.” He failed to mention that those groups were subject to decades of institutionalized prejudice that European immigrants did not face to the same degree when they arrived in the United States. Nor did he address the fact that, unlike European immigrants, the groups he cited were either conquered on North American soil or brought unwillingly here from Africa. And he did not discuss any research on how well contemporary immigrants are assimilating; if he had, listeners might have learned about a recent Manhattan Institute study that found that today’s newcomers, while currently less assimilated than their counterparts of 100 years ago, are in fact assimilating at a faster rate than those earlier immigrants.

Richwine declined to answer a detailed list of questions E-mailed him by the Hatewatch, saying he didn’t think that the Southern Poverty Law Center would give him “a fair hearing.”

Concern about the intelligence of newcomers to this country is nothing new. The discriminatory immigration quotas adopted in 1924 were aimed at excluding immigrant groups that had supposedly scored low on IQ tests: Italians, Poles, Jews and Russians. (Richwine said he does not support a race-based immigration policy.)

But the “research” on IQs of early 20th century immigrants has not held up — and the racial IQ differences that Richwine posits are likewise disputed. The prominent social scientist James Flynn, who debated Murray in 2006 at AEI, believes that the cause of the black-white IQ gap is environmental, rather than genetic, and can be further reduced by improving the conditions in which black children grow up.

“First, traits other than IQ are very significant to achievement,” he told Hatewatch in an E-mailed response to Richwine’s remarks. “Second, there is no convincing evidence that IQ differences are not environmentally caused. Third, are Hispanics non-European? In any event, they are doing quite well in America compared to many earlier immigrant groups.”

• “‘Arming’ for Armageddon” examines the apocalyptic movement Joel’s Army. Numbering in the tens of thousands, members of this movement are breaking away in droves from mainline Pentecostal churches and embracing an ideology of theocratic takeover. The approach is so militant that one Christian ministry worries it may soon produce “real warfare with actual warriors.”
• “Anti-Semitism Goes to School” reports on anti-Semitism on university campuses, including strains that originate on the political left. Two examples — extremist Muslims at a California campus and a once-“progressive” forum in Oregon — serve to illustrate this phenomenon.
• “From Brazil to Auschwitz” describes how twin brothers in Massachusetts who have led a nativist crusade against Brazilian immigrants also may be Holocaust deniers.

Here’s a link to the rest of the issue, which includes an array of other features and short news items. We hope you’ll find it interesting and important.

“Sieg Heil, I will do us proud,” he wrote. It was a June 3 post to AryanWear Forum 14, a neo-Nazi online forum to which “Sobibor’s SS,” who identified himself as a skinhead living in Plantersville, Ala., had belonged since early 2004. (Sobibor was a Nazi death camp in Poland during World War II).

About a month after he announced his enlistment, Sobibor’s SS bragged in another post to Forum 14 that he’d specifically requested and been assigned to MOS, or Military Occupational Specialty, 98D. MOS98D soldiers are in high demand right now. That’s because they’re specially trained in disarming Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) like the infamous roadside bombs that are killing and maiming so many U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Presumably, a part of learning how to disarm an IED is learning how to make one.

“I have my own reasons for wanting this training but in fear of the government tracing me and me loosing [sic] my clearance I can’t share them here,” Sobibor’s SS informed his fellow neo-Nazis.

One of his earlier posts indicated his reasons serve a darker purpose than defending America: “Once all the Jews are gone the world will start fixing itself.”

Sobibor’s SS included enough biographical details in his various posts to Forum 14 over the years, including that he’s a single father from the small town in southern Alabama, that a military investigator with access to enlistment records for recent months should have little trouble discerning whether the Army is actually teaching a skinhead with genocide on his mind how to be a tactical bomb maker.

But there’s little reason to expect that will happen.

Two years ago, the Intelligence Report revealed that alarming numbers of neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacist extremists were taking advantage of lowered armed services recruiting standards and lax enforcement of anti-extremist military regulations by infiltrating the U.S. armed forces in order to receive combat training and gain access to weapons and explosives.

Forty members of Congress urged then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to launch a full-scale investigation and implement a zero-tolerance policy toward white supremacists in the military. “Military extremists present an elevated threat to both their fellow service members and the public,” U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, wrote in a separate open letter to Rumsfeld. “We witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today’s racist extremist may become tomorrow’s domestic terrorist.”

But neither Rumsfeld nor his successor, Robert Gates, enacted any sort of systemic investigation or crackdown. Military and Defense Department officials seem to have made no sustained effort to prevent active white supremacists from joining the armed forces, or to weed out those already in uniform.

Furthermore, new evidence is emerging that not only supports the Intelligence Report’s findings, but also indicates the problem may have worsened since the summer of 2006, as enlistment rates continued to plummet, and the military accepted an ever-lower quality of soldier in a time of unpopular war.

First of all, a new FBI report (PDF) confirms that white supremacist leaders are making a concerted effort to recruit active-duty soldiers and recent combat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the unclassified FBI Intelligence Assessment, “White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel Since 9/11,” which was released to law enforcement agencies nationwide: “Sensitive and reliable source reporting indicates supremacist leaders are encouraging followers who lack documented histories of neo-Nazi activity and overt racist insignia such as tattoos to infiltrate the military as ‘ghost skins,’ in order to recruit and receive training for the benefit of the extremist movement.”

The FBI report details more than a dozen investigative findings and criminal cases involving Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as well as active-duty personnel engaging in extremist activity in recent years. For example, in September 2006, the leader of the Celtic Knights, a central Texas splinter faction of the Hammerskins, a national racist skinhead organization, planned to obtain firearms and explosives from an active duty Army soldier in Fort Hood, Texas. That soldier, who served in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, was a member of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group.

“Looking ahead, current and former military personnel belonging to white supremacist extremist organizations who experience frustration at the inability of these organizations to achieve their goals may choose to found new, more operationally minded and operationally capable groups,” the report concludes. “The military training veterans bring to the movement and their potential to pass this training on to others can increase the ability of lone offenders to carry out violence from the movement’s fringes.”

Currently, 46 members of the white supremacist social networking website Newsaxon.com identity themselves as active-duty military personnel. Six of these individuals are members of “White Military Men,” a New Saxon sub-group.

Earlier this year, the founder of White Military Men identified himself in his New Saxon account as “Lance Corporal Burton” of the 2nd Battalion Fox Company Pit 2097, from Florida, according to a master’s thesis by graduate student Matthew Kennard. Under his “About Me” section, Burton writes: “Love to shoot my M16A2 service rifle effectively at the Hachies (Iraqis),” and, “Love to watch things blow up (Hachies House).”

As part of his thesis research, Kennard, at the time a student at Columbia University’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, also monitored claims of active-duty military service earlier this year on the neo-Nazi online forum Blood and Honour, where “88Soldier88” posted this message on Feb. 18: “I am in the ARMY right now. I work in the Detainee Holding Area [in Iraq]. … I am in this until 2013. I am in the infantry but want to go to SF [Special Forces]. Hopefully the training will prepare me for what I hope is to come.”

One of the Blood and Honour members claiming to be an active-duty soldier taking part in combat operations in Iraq identified himself to Kennard as Jacob Berg. He did not disclose his rank or branch of service. “There are actually a lot more ‘skinheads,’ ‘nazis,’ white supremacists now [in the military] than there has been in a long time,” Berg wrote in an E-mail exchange with Kennard. “Us racists are actually getting into the military a lot now because if we don’t every one who already is [in the military] will take pity on killing sand niggers. Yes I have killed women, yes I have killed children and yes I have killed older people. But the biggest reason I’m so proud of my kills is because by killing a brown many white people will live to see a new dawn.”

The Army is currently investigating war crimes allegations leveled against Iraq combat veteran and active-duty Army soldier Kenneth Eastridge, 24, who is facing trial for the December 2007 murder of a fellow serviceman. After Eastridge was arrested for that killing, National Public Radio publicized his MySpace page, which showed Eastridge displaying a tattoo of SS lightning bolts, a common neo-Nazi insignia.

Another member of Eastridge’s company recently told Army investigators that Eastridge used a stolen AK-47 to fire indiscriminately at Iraqi civilians from his moving Humvee on the streets of Baghdad. “The military is to some extent desperate to get people to fight, soldiers who are not fit, mentally and physically sick, but they continue to send them,” Eastridge’s attorney told Kennard. “Having a tattoo was the least [Eastridge’s] concerns.”

As part of the research for his thesis, “The New Nazi Army: How the U.S. military is allowing the far right to join its ranks,” Kennard used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain from the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division investigative reports concerning white supremacist activity in 2006 and 2007. They show that Army commanders repeatedly terminated investigations of suspected extremist activity in the military despite strong evidence it was occurring. This evidence was often provided by regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which are made up of FBI and state and local law enforcement officials.

For example, one CID report details a 2006 investigation of a suspected member of the Hammerskins, a multi-state racist skinhead gang, who was stationed at Fort Hood, a large Army base in central Texas. According to the report, there was “probable cause” to believe that the soldier “had participated in a white extremist meeting and also provided a military technical manual 31-210, Improvised Munitions Handbook, to the leader of a white extremist group in order to assist in the planning and execution of future attacks on various targets.”

The report shows that agents only interviewed the subject once, in November 2006, before Fort Hood higher-ups called off the investigation that December.

Another report, also from 2006, covers an investigation of another Fort Hood soldier who was posting messages on Stormfront.org, a major white supremacist website. One CID investigator expresses his frustration at the muddled process for dealing with extremists. “We need to discuss the review process,” he writes. “I’m not doing my job here. Needs to get fixed.”

A third CID report, regarding a 2007 investigation, notes the termination of an investigation of a soldier at Fort Richardson, Alaska, who was reportedly the leader and chief recruiter for the Alaska Front, a white supremacist group. According to the report, the investigation was halted because the solider was “mobilized to Camp Shelby, MS in preparation for deployment to Iraq.”

Reports from Denver indicate that the three men arrested in the supposed plot on Sunday — Tharin Gartrell, Nathan D. Johnson and Shawn Adolf — may have been linked to a “white supremacy group,” possibly racist skinheads. One of the men was reportedly wearing a swastika ring when arrested, and one was said to be linked to a motorcycle gang called the Sons of Silence. The Southern Poverty Law Center has no evidence linking the gang or any of the three men to white supremacism.

“Seems more like an attempt by ZOG to assassinate us,” wrote “DAglaff Wolfing” on Stormfront.org, the most important white supremacist Web forum, referring to the “Zionist Occupation Government” — white supremacist lingo for the federal government. Added “Ravening Wolf” in the same thread: “It wouldn’t surprise me if these people are jews [sic], or dumb patsies, involved in yet another false-flag Mossad operation … in order to conjure up yet more anti-gun legislation.”

“I completely predicted that they would do this,” “AZDane” wrote on Stormfront. “If Obama IS assassinated, it will be the gov’t doing it and we’ll take the blame. Like always.”

Many of those posting derided those arrested because police also found quantities of methamphetamine. (“Besides,” wrote one, “real white men wouldn’t have been stopped from completing their mission, whatever it may be. These people were fools.”) But they kept coming back to the idea of a government plot.

“It sounds like concocted BS,” wrote “General1812.” “Seriously, plots that are this serious don’t come to the surface so easily. The government law enforcement [agencies] may be expecting Obama to win, and so are getting ready to conduct a preemptive strike against WNist [white nationalist] organizations.”

Or, as “Alida302” put it in the Stormfront thread: “Sound like a bunch of wannabe small timers to me. They need to make sure that [Obama’s] black ass is protected. His death would bring down a s**tstorm of hell upon all of us.”

Earlier, long before the Democratic convention opened in Denver, many white supremacists were arguing that an Obama victory could actually be good for their movement. They predicted that such a victory would shock white Americans, drive millions of them into white supremacist groups and, ultimately, lead to a race war that would finally result in the much hoped-for final Aryan victory.

American Legion Post 1111 in Bloomfield, Colo., joined with two nativist groups to sponsor the Aug. 21-23 convention that featured hard-line anti-immigration rabble-rousers Glenn Spencer and Frosty Wooldridge. Although the convention involved an individual legion post, the national legion this spring launched a campaign against illegal immigration that featured a booklet filled with inaccuracies about undocumented immigrants. After Hispanic groups expressed concerns, a message appeared on the legion’s website stating that the booklet was being “updated.”

At last week’s convention, attendees got to watch the premiere of a video called “Border Truth USA,” which took viewers on “a high-definition video tour of the border narrated live by Glenn Spencer,” according to Spencer’s American Patrol website. He also demonstrated the “Virtual Vigilance camera system.”

But Spencer, who leads the vitriolic hate groups American Patrol and American Border Patrol, has done more than show off gadgets designed to catch “illegal aliens.” He’s also spouted anti-Latino comments, proclaiming in a 1996 letter to The Los Angeles Times that “Mexican culture is based on deceit” and “Chicanos and Mexicanos lie as a means of survival.” Local retiree Francis McWilliams, who was introduced as American Border Patrol’s director in September 2002, quickly resigned after concluding that Spencer was “borderline xenophobic.” Spencer also sent every member of Congress a copy of his video, “Bonds of our Nation,” which promotes the myth that the Mexican government and Mexican-Americans are plotting to take over the American Southwest and create the nation of Aztlan. Betina McCann, then the fiancée of neo-Nazi Steven Barry, hand-delivered the videos. In 2003, Spencer was charged with four felonies after repeatedly firing a .357 rifle into the night and hitting, among other things, a neighbor’s garage. He said he had heard “suspicious noises” in his backyard. After pleading to a single misdemeanor count of endangerment, he was fined $2,500 and sentenced to a year’s probation.

Although Spencer toned down the racist rhetoric after moving from California to Cochise County, Ariz., in 2002, he recently posted a Washington Times story about whites losing their hold on the majority amid rising Hispanic immigration, along with a cartoon showing Uncle Sam with the gun of “liberalism” in his mouth as “Mexico” pulls the trigger. Above the article and cartoon is Spencer’s heading: “White America Commits Suicide: The Coming Disunited States of America.”

Listeners at the Colorado American Legion post also were treated to remarks from Frosty Wooldridge, an Army veteran with an eclectic career that included writing a 2004 book titled Immigration’s Unarmed Invasion: Deadly Consequences. In it, he alleges that illegal non-European immigrants are bringing female genital mutilation to America. “What if your daughter married a man who insisted your granddaughter undergo this operation?” he asked. He also cautions that people going to Wal-Mart and the movies are “breathing air that may be carrying hepatitis.” (Never mind that hepatitis isn’t transmitted through the air.) Hepatitis, along with head lice and tuberculosis, are showing up in classrooms because of what Wooldridge calls immigrants’ “disease jihad.” In case that’s not enough, Wooldridge adds that Mexicans “do not wash their hands after using bathroom facilities.”

Also scheduled to speak at the Legion post last week was Peter Wagner, author of