In light of these incidents, the Southern Poverty Law Center today releases a sweeping review of terrorism and other serious violence that has emanated from the domestic radical right since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The special report — “Terror From the Right: 75 Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages Since Oklahoma City” —shows that domestic right-wing terrorism is far more prevalent than most Americans realize. The report begins with a short introduction that is followed by summary descriptions of each of the 75 cases.

Coombs, 50, reputedly was a follower of the Sacerdotal Order of David Company, of which Joos, a white supremacist, was pastor. Coombs, also known as James Wilson and Cal Liberty, is accused of shooting and wounding a Missouri state trooper in September 1994 as he stood at his kitchen window. He is believed to have been enraged at the trooper’s role in arresting Joos earlier that year, after Joos had been a fugitive for several years. Coombs — who authorities say hides one pistol in an ankle holster and another in the center of his back — has now been a fugitive himself for nearly 15 years, despite a $100,000 reward offered by the FBI for information leading to his capture.

“It’s still an open and ongoing investigation for the FBI,” says Bridget Patton, a spokeswoman in the FBI’s Kansas City bureau.

The same is true for the Missouri State Highway Patrol. “We’re following all leads, worldwide,” Sgt. Curtis Wirth tells Hatewatch. But, he adds, there haven’t been many leads, and none has been substantiated.

Here’s the background: Joos was arrested on the same day last week as Dennis and Daniel Mahon, who were accused of sending a package bomb in 2004 to the diversity office in Scottsdale. Diversity Director Don Logan was the most seriously injured in the ensuing explosion, requiring extensive surgery on his hands and arms. Dennis Mahon is a former Klansman and skinhead recruiter, as well as a longtime member of Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance (WAR), authorities say. His twin brother, Daniel, also was involved in the Klan and in WAR. [ATF agents searched Metzger’s Indiana home the same day the Mahons and Joos were arrested, taking some items, but not charging Metzger with any crimes].

Joos was the first person Dennis Mahon called the day the package bomb was delivered, according to the indictment charging the Mahons. Undercover operatives were quoted in the indictment alleging that Joos is a longtime white supremacist associate and expert on weapons, explosives and bombmaking who taught an informant how to make napalm. Joos was charged with being a felon in possession of firearms when he was arrested last week.

In 1984, some of Joos’ followers shot at a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper. Joos was subsequently charged with serving a false restraining order on the trooper ordering him not to arrest one of the men charged with shooting at him. Joos then became a fugitive, hiding, he told undercover operatives, in caves on his 200-acre farm in rural Missouri.

Joos finally was arrested in 1994 and sentenced to two years. While Joos was in prison, Coombs allegedly shot, sniper-style, at Missouri State Trooper Bobbie J. Harper, one of Joos’ arresting officers, as he stood at his kitchen window. Harper survived the gunshot, but died two years later of apparently unrelated causes. As for Coombs, he fled rather than face criminal charges that include first-degree assault.

Investigators searched the caves on Joos’ property this past weekend for signs of Coombs. They found nothing but “old soda bottles and trash,” Wirths says. They also spoke to Joos. “He didn’t give us any information. I don’t have any reason to believe he’s hiding Timothy Coombs.”

“In my opinion, he’s dead,” Wirth adds. “We have a $100,000 reward. He was so vocal, so in your face … he would make somebody mad. Either he’d get arrested or [somebody] would turn him in. He was hated by a lot of people.”

In an E-mail, Chassaniol confirmed to Hatewatch that she is a member of the CCC, which she described as a “conservative organization.” She also wrote, “I do not consider myself racist,” adding that she believes “a person’s membership in any organization is a private matter.” She said that she had worked for years “with the children of the Mississippi Delta” and had spoken to the Greenwood Voters League even though, she said, it has “no members who are Caucasian.”

Gov. Barbour’s website shows that he has worked with Chassaniol in her capacity as chair of the Senate Tourism Committee. A May 12 press release from the governor’s office says Barbour “praised” Chassaniol for her contributions to a new slogan for the state’s highway signs, “Birthplace of America’s Music.” Ironically, the music the signs refer to — “from the blues, to country, to rock and roll, to gospel” — was largely produced by African Americans, who the CCC has described on its website as a “retrograde species of humanity.”

Calls to Barbour’s office for comment were not returned. The Mississippi state GOP office said it was unable to comment on the matter because their press officer was out of the office.

The CCC has been roundly condemned by prominent conservative organizations and the national GOP. The Conservative Political Action Committee called the group “racist” in 1998 and barred it from CPAC conferences. The Republican National Committee “forcefully” condemned the CCC in 1999, with its chairman urging Republicans not to join or attend its functions. Around the same time, then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) was embroiled in a national brouhaha over his purported membership in the CCC. Lott gave shifting explanations of his relationship to the group, but ultimately denied being a member.

Those actions are not surprising, given the guttural nature of the CCC’s racism and anti-Semitism. The CCC’s columnists have written that non-white immigration is turning the U.S. population into a “slimy brown mass of glop.” Its website has run photographic comparisons of pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee. It opposes “forced integration” and decries racial intermarriage for any reason. The CCC has lambasted black people as “genetically inferior,” complained about “Jewish power brokers,” called gay people “perverted sodomites,” and even named the late Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, “Patriot of the Century.”

Barbour had his own encounter with the CCC in 2003. As a gubernatorial candidate, he attended that year’s Black Hawk Barbecue in Carroll County, sponsored by the CCC to raise money for private academy school buses, where he was photographed with Bill Lord, the emcee for this past weekend’s event. Although he decried the group’s segregationist views as “indefensible” after that photo was posted on the CCC’s website, Barbour declined to ask to have it taken down. It was a matter of principle, Barbour explained. “Once you start down the slippery slope of saying, ‘That person can’t be for me,’ then where do you stop?” he asked. “Old segregationists? Former Ku Klux Klan?”

For her part, Chassaniol gave a rabble-rousing speech on “Cultural Heritage in Mississippi.” In a brief history of the state since 1540, Chassaniol complained that the U.S. was in decline, as evidenced by tributes to Michael Jackson, a “pedophile who’s being celebrated.” She indicated that the government wants to “take from those who have and give to those who don’t want to work for it.” And she worried that the 2010 national census might hand over government “to the radical left.”

A sponsor of two harsh anti-immigrant bills, Chassaniol encouraged CCC members to take part in upcoming anti-tax “Tea Parties,” which she praised in a recent editorial in her local Winona, Miss., newspaper. CCC members have crashed these events in the past.

Chassaniol ended her talk by encouraging her listeners to embrace their southern heritage. Describing the CCC as “lone voices crying in the wilderness,” Chassaniol ended on a positive note, “Seeing all of you here today gives me hope.”

Janet Smith contributed to this report.

One of two brothers indicted this week in connection with the bombing of a Scottsdale, Ariz., diversity office was a former Klansman and leading skinhead recruiter with a predilection for explosives.

As part of a sweeping undercover investigation that led to the indictment, federal agents also raided the Indiana home of longtime white separatist Tom Metzger on Thursday, removing computers and other items, but not arresting him.

In another related move, a man described as a white supremacist with expertise in weapons and the making of napalm was arrested on his rural property in Missouri and charged with being a felon in possession of firearms.

Dennis Mahon, 58, and his twin brother, Daniel, were arrested Thursday following the search of a home in Davis Junction, Ill. A federal grand jury indictment in Arizona charges them with conspiring to damage and destroy buildings and property. “The object of the conspiracy was to promote racial discord on behalf of the ‘White Aryan Resistance,’” the indictment states. WAR is a white supremacist organization founded by Metzger more than a quarter century ago.

The Mahons each face up to 40 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if they’re convicted of conspiring to damage buildings and property by means of an explosive. Dennis Mahon also has been charged with two additional violations: malicious damage of a building by means of an explosive, which carries up to 40 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and distribution of information related to explosives, which carries up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The charges against the Mahon brothers stem from an incident in February 2004 when a bomb was mailed to Scottsdale’s diversity office. Diversity Director Don Logan needed extensive surgery to repair injuries to his hands and arms. His secretary suffered injuries to her face and eyes. A third employee was treated on the site for her injuries.

The indictment maintains that in September 2003, Dennis Mahon called Logan’s office and left a message saying that “the White Aryan Resistance is growing in Scottsdale. There’s a few white people who are standing up.”

Dennis Mahon helped make the bomb, the indictment says. In 2005, both Mahons traveled to Catoosa, Okla., in an attempt to buy literature and components on bomb-making, and they discussed how to avoid detection by authorities, such as by splitting up and wearing disguises, the indictment alleges.

In October 2007, Dennis Mahon directed someone to go to Missouri to learn how to make improvised explosive devices – homemade bombs often placed on roadsides – and learn techniques for avoiding detection by police, the indictment says. The following year, he directed someone to “conduct violent action on behalf of the movement” and show him proof of the results with copies of newspaper articles, authorities say.

Dennis Mahon, who in 1988 was fired from TWA for his Klan involvement, is a veteran white supremacist organizer. He was active in Oklahoma’s White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan throughout the 1980s, even serving as imperial dragon until he stepped down in January 1991. That fall, he recruited neo-Nazis and skinheads in the former East Germany, reportedly helping to organize Klan groups. He also met and enlisted Ian Stuart Donaldson, the late leader of the British racist rock group Skrewdriver and the father of the skinhead movement in Europe. (He wasn’t always successful at recruiting skinheads in the United States, however. Several of them later stabbed and beat him at a Georgia gathering.)

During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Mahon organized a small rally in Tulsa in support of Saddam Hussein. He later claimed to have received a couple of hundred dollars in an unmarked envelope from the Iraqi government.

In 1992, Mahon parted ways with the Klan, disgusted by the way informants had infiltrated the groups and by the nonviolent image that some Klan leaders were trying to project. He joined Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, which by the late 1980s “appeared to be the primary racialist organization in the United States,” according to Jeffrey Kaplan’s Encyclopedia of White Power. Mahon expressed his frustration with the popular perception of Klansmen as “an uneducated hick half drunk, in bib overalls, with tobacco juice dripping down his chin, burning a cross on some poor Blacks [sic] lawn.”

He wrote: “…After 12 years of proudly wearing the robe of the Invisible Order, I feel that Tom Metzger’s leadership and personal strategies fit my personality and mind set better at this time of my life. Also, I just got tired of seeing so many mistakes in tactics and ideology of the leaders of the other 25 or so Klan groups in Zoglandia [referring to ZOG, the Zionist-Occupied Government]. So many of these mini-fuhrers of these other Klans have embarrassed me with these displays of weakness and idiotic statements of ‘Niggers are the cause of all our problems — we got to kill the niggers — nigger this, nigger that.’ It’s like a broken record.”

By August 1994, Mahon was calling himself the heartland director of WAR. That month, former debutante Carol Howe, an ardent racist who acquired a swastika tattoo on one arm, filed for a restraining order against Mahon after he allegedly raped her and threatened her. She agreed to become a paid informant for the ATF. Howe reported that Mahon wanted to bomb power lines in Oklahoma City to trigger a race war and that his group seemed to be amassing weapons, according to the Rocky Mountain News. Mahon boasted about his bomb-making prowess and said he once detonated an ammonium nitrate bomb beneath a truck. She also said that Mahon and Andreas Strassmeir, a German citizen who helped provide security at the white supremacist compound Elohim City in eastern Oklahoma, had mentioned a “Tim Tuttle” — the name Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh sometimes used as an alias.

Howe told the FBI two days after the Oklahoma City bombing that Mahon and Strassmeir had taken three trips to Oklahoma City in the months preceding the bombing, but that she doubted Mahon had been directly involved in the attack. Howe wasn’t allowed to testify during McVeigh’s trial. Mahon insisted he did not take part in the Oklahoma bombing.

But in 2001, Mahon announced his intention to move to Kingman, Ariz., where McVeigh lived while he plotted the Oklahoma City bombing. According to The Arizona Republic, Mahon liked Kingman because of the prevalence of anti-government types and wanted to develop links with white supremacist organizations in Phoenix. WAR would mainly go after undocumented immigrants from Mexico, he said.

At Aryanfest 2004, a gathering of skinheads near Scottsdale, he bragged about his connections to McVeigh. “Let’s just say he and I did some serious business together. And after Oklahoma City, the feds came after me big-time, boy, but they never proved a thing,” Mahon was quoted as saying in the Phoenix New Times.

Dennis Mahon also talked about destroying the nation’s capital. “You nuke D.C., you’re going to wipe out most of the politicians, plus a couple million crack head niggers,” he said.

“Terrorism works,” he added. “We did a lot of terrorism in Tulsa in the 1980s. We put heads in the road, and people paid attention. You have to give it to the Iraqis, they’re putting us to shame right now. I mean, I hate those cock-sucking towel heads, but they’re showing us how it’s done.”

Daniel Mahon, who was employed by American Airlines, was also involved in the movement, though not as prominently as his brother. He was also a member of WAR and in the early 90s served as grand kleagle (recruiter) of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

The same day the Mahons were being arrested, ATF agents served a search warrant on Metzger’s home in Warsaw, Ind. On his 24-hour hotline, Metzger said that three computers and an address book were among the items taken. Noting that he has been called before grand juries and jailed in the past, Metzger – sounding nonchalant, almost jovial — called the raid “a little speed bump in the road.” He acknowledged knowing the Mahons since the early 1980s. “They’re friends of mine,” he said. “I’m sure the Mahon brothers are smarter than to do something like that.”

Something of an elder statesman in the white separatist movement, Metzger, 71, is a former John Birch Society member and former Klansman who made inroads into the skinhead movement. The Southern Poverty Law Center sued Metzger and his son, John, in connection with the beating death of an Ethiopian college student by skinheads in Portland, Ore., in 1988. The SPLC argued that the Metzgers should be found liable for intentionally inciting the skinheads to engage in violent confrontations with minorities. In October 1990, a jury returned a $12.5 million verdict against the Metzgers and WAR, with Metzger personally responsible for $5.5 million. He now advocates a “lone wolf” philosophy, maintaining that individuals acting alone or in small cells are the best hope for achieving a white revolution.

On Stormfront, the leading white supremacist web forum, some posters blasted the Metzger raid as yet another example of stepped-up government prosecution of white nationalists. “When the Obama feds begin taking down our leaders like this and attacking all our individual rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, then how much longer do any of us have?” wrote one. “Will they come in the middle of the night and haul us all off to the camps as it was in Red Dawn? Were [sic] and when do we make our stand?”

Robert Joos, 56, the man arrested in Missouri, came to investigators’ attention when Dennis Mahon’s telephone records showed that the first call Mahon made the morning the package bomb was left in Scottsdale was to a cell phone in Joos’ name.

Joos has been identified as a pastor of the Sacerdotal Order of David Company. He has prior convictions of resisting arrest, carrying a concealed weapon and driving without a license. In 1984, some of his followers shot at a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper. Joos was later charged with serving a false restraining order on the trooper, ordering him not to arrest one of the men involved in the shooting. Joos was ordered to serve one year in jail but was a fugitive until his arrest in 1994. He was then sentenced to two years.

Undercover ATF agents and a “cooperating individual” met with both Mahons in Catoosa, Okla., in February 2005, and the brothers told them about Joos’ “retreat” on more than 200 acres in Missouri, where members of the “movement” would train. One of the Mahons described Joos “as a longtime white supremacist associate and expert on weapons, explosives, bomb making and general survival skills,” according to a sworn affidavit by ATF Special Agent Kevin Farnsworth.

The undercover team met with Joos several times in 2008 and in January and February of this year, the affidavit says. He allegedly taught the informant how to make napalm and agreed to train others in the informant’s group.

Joos also told the undercover agents and the informant that he hid from law enforcement in the late 1980s and early 1990s in 18 caves on his property, which he said he still stockpiled with food, water and weapons “to avoid capture or attack by the government or other adversaries.”

The undercover operatives said they saw several weapons on Joos’ property, and that he told them he had a friend with a connection with a firearms dealer and that they were working to buy a dozen Russian-made sniper rifles.

Sonia Scherr contributed to this report.

As if President Obama doesn’t have enough to deal with - what with civil unrest in Iran, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and economic malaise at home - now he’s also got a Southern Baptist minister praying for his death.

The Rev. Wiley Drake, pastor of the First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif., told Fox News Radio earlier this month that he was practicing “imprecatory prayer” – a divine curse – that would bring about Obama’s death.

“So you’re praying for his death?” asked the show’s host, Alan Colmes.

“Yes.”

“So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States?”

“Yes.”

The pugnacious pastor later elaborated: “If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death, that’s correct.”

A spokesman for the Southern Baptist Association, where Drake was second vice president in 2006-2007, responded to Drake’s comments by saying that he believes most Southern Baptists are praying for the president’s well-being.

Obama isn’t the first person for whom Drake has prayed for an untimely demise. In 2007, when Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed a formal complaint with the Internal Revenue Service maintaining that Drake’s endorsement of Mike Huckabee for president violated tax laws, Drake called on his followers to pray for the deaths of the nonprofit’s staff.

And after Kansas physician George Tiller, a prominent provider of abortions, was murdered in church on May 31, Drake said his death was the answer to his imprecatory prayers. He called Tiller “a brutal, murdering monster” on his radio program. “This man, George Tiller, was far greater in his atrocities than Adolf Hitler.”

Drake is none too fond of homosexuals, either. He wrote the resolution at the Southern Baptist Convention in 1996 calling for a boycott of the Walt Disney Corporation after it afforded health benefits to gay and lesbian partners of employees. He urged followers to join him last year in praying for rain to fall on the Democratic National Convention in Denver. “I too am still against killing babies and allowing sodomites to marry,” he explained. [The weather was beautiful when Obama made his acceptance speech before 84,000 people in a football stadium].

Drake also is chaplain to the Minuteman Project, a group that President George W. Bush called “vigilantes.” He was Alan Keyes’ vice-presidential running mate on the America’s Independent Party ticket in 2008. They were plaintiffs in one of several unsuccessful lawsuits filed last year claiming that Obama could not be sworn in as president because he supposedly wasn’t born in the United States.

Hal Turner, a neo-Nazi talk radio host known for his threats against public
figures, was denied bail during an appearance in federal court Thursday
afternoon on charges of threatening to assault and murder three federal
judges. Also at the hearing, FBI officials revealed that they’d found 200
rounds of ammunition and 150 illegal hollow point bullets in Turner’s home during a search on Wednesday, according to the Jersey Journal.

Turner’s arrest comes three weeks after he was taken into custody in New Jersey on charges that he incited violence against two Connecticut legislators. He had been freed on $25,000 bond and wasn’t scheduled to return to court until July.

But the FBI — an agency for which he once may have worked as a paid informant — arrested Turner on Wednesday after going to his home in North Bergen, N.J., to execute a search warrant. The charges stem from Internet postings earlier this month in which he blasted a June 2 decision by the 7^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago that essentially upheld local handgun bans.

The blog posts named Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, who wrote the unanimous decision, along with Judges Richard Posner and William Bauer. “Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed,” Turner allegedly wrote on June 2. He later posted the photographs, phone numbers, work address and room numbers of the three judges, as well as a modified photo of the Dirksen Federal Courthouse where they work that reveals the locations of “anti-truck bomb barriers.” He also posted a map showing how to get to the building, according to the FBI.

In the June 2 blog post titled in part “OUTRAGE: Chicago Gun Ban UPHELD,” Turner states that the same federal appeals court that made the handgun decision also upheld the 2004 conviction of Matt Hale, a white supremacist now serving a 40-year sentence for soliciting the murder of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow. Turner also noted that a gunman killed Lefkow’s mother and husband in her home. “Apparently, the 7^th U.S. Circuit Court didn’t get the hint after those killings,” he allegedly wrote. “It appears another lesson is needed.”

Turner, 47, isn’t the only neo-Nazi whose cyberspace comments on the Hale case have helped lead to criminal charges in Chicago. Bill White of Roanoke, Va., the leader of the American National Socialist Workers Party, is scheduled for trial next month in federal court in Chicago on obstructing justice charges related to his alleged encouragement of violence against the foreman of the Chicago jury that convicted Hale. White posted the name, home address, phone numbers and other personal information of the “Gay, Jewish, anti-racist” juror last September. White wrote that the juror “played a key role in convicting Hale.”

If Turner is convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. “We take threats to federal judges very seriously. Period,” said Patrick J. Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

Turner has made numerous racist and violent threats. In 2007, he railed against President George W. Bush, saying that “a well-placed bullet can solve a lot of problems.” He has written that “we need to start SHOOTING AND KILLING Mexicans as they cross the border.” In 2006, he published an attack on New Jersey Supreme Court justices that included several of their home addresses. Just before President Obama’s inauguration, he suggested that the mass murder of those attending the event “would be a public service.” Most recently, he was charged on June 3 with inciting injury to persons or property after he posted a blog entry that encouraged readers to “take up arms” against two Connecticut lawmakers, Sen. Andrew McDonald and Rep. Michael Lawlor. Turner was upset about state legislation that would give more power to the laity in the Roman Catholic Church.

In January 2008, unidentified hackers posted E-mail correspondence between Turner and an FBI agent who appeared to be his handler in the forum of Turner’s website for his radio program, “The Hal Turner Show.” The FBI last year declined to comment about Turner’s relationship with the agency.

Larry Keller contributed to this report.

Less than two weeks after Holocaust denier James von Brunn was arrested and charged with killing a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., an online magazine has begun publishing a four-part story on two of the leading figures among Holocaust revisionists.

Mark Oppenheimer’s story based on his interviews with Holocaust revisionists Bradley R. Smith and Mark Weber began on Tuesday and will run through Friday in “Tablet Magazine,” a daily online magazine about Jewish life that debuted this month.

Smith, 79, founded an online magazine called Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, and he also blogs on the Holocaust and more mundane matters such as his medical travails. Weber, 57, is director of the Institute for Historical Review, which published the Holocaust-denying Journal of Historical Review until 2002. He incurred the wrath of fellow revisionists, including Smith, in January when he posted an article on his website arguing that Holocaust deniers have had little success in persuading people, and it was time to focus instead on the harmful impact of “Jewish-Zionist power” around the world.

Oppenheimer, who got a doctorate in religious studies at Yale, spoke several times in person and by telephone with Smith and Weber between February and May. He tracked down one man’s Jewish ex-lover and the other’s rumored Jewish sister. Both men “loved Jews,” Oppenheimer wrote. “They don’t love Jews generally, of course, but each man has a Jewish woman in his past with whom he had a close relationship.”

Weber “seems a good deal smarter than Smith but also a good deal less mirthful,” Oppenheimer concluded. In fact, Weber holds a master’s degree in European history from Indiana University. Oppenheimer marvels at Weber’s knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, Jewish holidays, the founding of the state of Israel and seemingly all things Jewish. “It became clear that he reads the Jewish press more closely than I do, and I write for the Jewish press,” Oppenheimer wrote in his story’s second installment.

Weber seemed especially dismayed that Smith and French Holocaust revisionist Robert Faurisson are interested in little more than questioning the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps. He says he’s interested in a wide array of questions regarding Jewish influence.

Smith rejects Weber’s assessment of him, telling Oppenheimer that he is a passionate libertarian concerned with protecting freedom of speech. Smith was jailed in Los Angeles in the early 1960s for selling Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer at the bookstore he owned at the time.

“Put simply, if we take these men at their words, Smith sees the gas chambers as a question of free speech; Faurisson as an underpinning of a fraudulent Jewish state; and Weber, as a distraction from the machinations of Jewish power in America,” Oppenheimer writes. “These distinctions may seem trivial to some, different facets of the same anti-Semitic menace; but for the men struggling for the soul of Holocaust revisionism, these differences are all that there is.”

Nativist leaders are scrambling to distance themselves from Minutemen American Defense (MAD) founder Shawna Forde, who has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of an Arizona man and his 9-year-old daughter.

“We knew there was something very wrong with Shawna Forde and did all in our power to forewarn groups and leaders, as well as press and law enforcement, regarding our concerns,” wrote William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), in a news release. “Shawna Forde does not reflect the immigration enforcement movement or the millions of Americans concerned about illegal immigration and border security.”

Among those releasing similar statements were Chris Simcox, former president of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, Jeff Schwilk, leader of the San Diego Minutemen, and Chelene Nightingale, managing director of Save Our State. Police say Forde and two associates used a ruse to enter the home of 29-year-old Raul Flores on May 30 with the intent of killing his family and stealing cash to finance her group’s border operations. Flores and his daughter, Brisenia, were shot and killed. His wife was wounded when she returned fire.

Anti-immigration activists are just as forcefully repudiating Minuteman Project president Jim Gilchrist, who was allied with Forde. Gheen called for Gilchrist’s resignation both in his news release and — much less politely — in an E-mail to Gilchrist that’s posted in the “Hate Mail” section of the Minuteman Project’s website. “Jim, you [sic] and Shawna’s close and vibrant relationship is well documented in many different places,” he wrote. “Do the movement and yourself a favor and announce your resignation …”

Gilchrist’s response, also posted on his website, is addressed to the “self-acclaimed [sic] Messiah William Gheen of ALIPAC.” “As much as you would like me to resign from the movement to bring law enforcement back to our immigration laws, I must politely decline,” he wrote. “If I were to abandon the movement to encourage our political governors to enforce our immigration laws, then that task might be left for unstable and socially-challenged idiots like you. And then what kind of mess would we be in?”

In an E-mail titled “Jim Gilchrist Exposed!!!!” on the Minuteman Project’s website, Nightingale, the Save Our State official, wrote that “patriots” were incensed at Gilchrist’s group because it supported Forde. “As a mother I am sick to death that a little child was murdered!” she wrote. “Murdered at the hands of people that were endorsed on the Jim Gilchrist MMP site. Wasn’t it bad enough that your forum is a sewer full of lies and bashing of patriots? Or are each of you being paid by say the SPLC, La Raza to destroy the movement with your filth and personal connections?”

In his response, Gilchrist asserted that Save Our State’s allies included the Mountain Minutemen, whose leader in 2007 produced a faked video that appeared to show an undocumented immigrant being shot at the border. “Your unwarranted wrath is all about sour grapes, Ms. Nightingale,” Gilchrist wrote. “If you are going to be a crackpot, Ms. Nightingale, please be thorough about it.”

Gilchrist defended Forde this winter after other nativist leaders expressed doubt about her claims that she’d been raped, beaten and shot in a bizarre series of incidents in and near her Everett, Wash., home. The Everett Herald reported that police have dropped the investigation of the reported rape, citing a lack of evidence.

Now WBC has turned its ire on the Jewish community, targeting synagogues and Jewish community centers with a new hate-filled taunt, “God Hates Jews.”

The Topeka, Kan., based church began picketing Jewish religious and cultural institutions in April of this year when they issued a press release that read, “Yes, the Jews killed the Lord Jesus…Now they’re carrying water for the fags; that’s what they do best: sin in God’s face every day, with unprecedented and disproportionate amounts of sodomy, fornication, adultery, abortion and idolatry!”

After years of bizarre, publicity-craving pickets of funerals aimed at gays and lesbians, why has the WBC begun to target Jews? Phelps’ daughter Margie told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Jewish community, and particularly its religious leaders, are “one of the loudest voices” in favor of homosexuality and abortion.

According to the group’s picket schedule, the WBC plans to protest Chicago and New York Jewish institutions this weekend. To one synagogue in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood WBC warns, “Men, take the covering off your heads. While you are doing that, you need to repent of the FACT that you Killed Christ!” This coming Sunday, in New York City’s Central Park, the Phelps clan plans to visit an Israeli tourism event, with a calendar entry that reads, “All the remainder can sit and stew in your own filth, remain filthy until the day God spews you out of the land and punishes you for never repenting from having killed Jesus. You will be destroyed at the hand of Antichrist Obama, and you will eat your little cute, chubby, Kosher babies.”

The WBC’s recent turn to rabid anti-Semitism is not something totally out of character for the group. The Anti-Defamation League notes that as far back as 1996, Fred Phelps wrote in a flier, “Fag Jew Nazis are worse than ordinary Nazis… .The First Holocaust was a Jewish Holocaust against Christians. The latest Holocaust is by Topeka Jews against WBC…”

What set Throckmorton off was Lively’s March appearance at an anti-gay rights conference in Uganda, where homosexuality is already a crime punishable by life in prison. In the capital city of Kampala, Lively rehashed his gay Nazi stump speech and called for Ugandan gays and lesbians to be forced into so-called “conversion therapy.”  Since then, as Throckmorton notes, “lists of people suspected to be gay have been included in tabloids, various ministers have accused other ministers of being homosexual, and Christian groups are calling for the government to create a commission to eliminate homosexuality — all supported by American Christian ministries.”

“[T]here is a disturbing parallel with the Nazis, but it is not with the homosexuals,” Throckmorton writes in the Christian web magazine Crosswalk. “In Uganda among Christian groups and government leaders, and encouraged by Mr. Lively, homosexuality is considered the root of society’s evils.” In response, Throckmorton has launched an ambitious project to discredit Lively’s books and analyze how the anti-gay rights leader came to formulate his idea that “the Nazi Party was entirely controlled by militaristic male homosexuals throughout its short history.”

Throckmorton says Lively’s obsession with linking gay men to Nazi fascism began in 1992 with Oregon’s Ballot Measure 9, which would have mandated that public schools teach that homosexuality is “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.” The ballot measure was drafted and supported by the Oregon Citizens Alliance, whose communications director was Scott Lively. As gay rights activists drew comparisons between Measure 9 and the Nazi treatment of homosexuals, Lively and his Pink Swastika co-author Scott Abrams sought to make, in Throckmorton’s words, the “massive leaps of logic and fact required to make National Socialism an invention of a cohesive homosexual plot.”

Engaging Lively in his own shaky logic, Throckmorton posed this question to Lively: “If homosexuality was so associated with National Socialist ideals and aims, then shouldn’t the current Nazis be dominated by homosexuals?” Throckmorton then digs up several websites from the National Socialist Movement, the largest and most high-profile neo-Nazi group in the U.S. He finds that all NSM chapters ban non-white and non-heterosexual members; one of the chapters, in fact, puts it explicitly: “Homosexuality is a social degeneracy that must be expunged from our society.”

Taking it a further step, Throckmorton invited Grove City College history professor Jon David Wyneken to analyze the claims of The Pink Swastika. Wyneken, a scholar of German history between 1933 and 1955, picks apart Lively’s distorted and cherry-picked quotes to conclude that “Lively’s book is simply not good history and is, in fact, not really history at all.” The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexual men were forced into Nazi concentration camps where they were beaten, castrated and killed.

Throckmorton may seem like an unlikely person to confront Lively’s ideas. In 2004, he produced the video “I Do Exist,” profiling teens and young adults who claim to have become “ex-gay” — a “conversion” idea that is also embraced by Lively. (Most medical and psychological professional associations say that homosexuality is not a pathology and cannot, in any event, be “cured.”) But Throckmorton has also been a vocal critic of several therapies pushed by the ex-gay movement and has an audience among conservative and evangelical Christians. He has also called on schools to prevent bullying of gay students. Throckmorton cautions that his video should not be purchased by anyone “looking for a way to express to gay people that they should change their sexual feelings to be acceptable to God.”

As for Lively and those who believe his revisionist allegations, Throckmorton warns fellow believers: “When Christians make spurious comparisons to the Nazis, they should not be surprised when the targets of those comparisons lash back and consider them hateful. There should be little wonder why they don’t feel the Love.”

(UPDATE: On Tuesday, June 16, FAIR denied it ever had any association with Forde, writing in a press release that “the SPLC and organizations advocating mass amnesty and open borders” were engaging in a “smear campaign.” Forde’s claims of a link to FAIR were also written up in several major blogs other than Hatewatch.)

Since late 2007, the Southern Poverty Law Center (which publishes this blog) has listed FAIR as a hate group. Among the reasons: Key staff members of FAIR have ties to white supremacist groups, including writing for their publications and speaking at their functions; the group accepted more than $1 million from a racist foundation dedicated to the study of racial differences in intelligence; its founder’s ties to racists and the racist movement; and other matters detailed here and here.

Earlier today, the Immigrant Rights blog was the first to notice Forde’s appearance on the Nov. 14, 2006, KYVE-TV show. Taped in Yakima, Wash., a city with a large number of Mexican immigrants, the show profiles local immigration advocates and opponents. When the camera rolls on Forde, the host describes her as “a member of the Minutemen and a representative for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national group concerned about border security, illegal immigrants and our immigration policies.” In the video, Forde wears glasses and long black hair, noticeably different from her current look of short blond hair and contacts.  She appears just after the five-minute mark, with an identifier that reads, “Minuteman & Activist, FAIR.”

Contacted by Hatewatch, Enrique Cerna, the host of the show and an executive producer, said it’s difficult to remember all the production details of a segment produced three years ago. Still, he said his producers had contacted FAIR, asking for a representative to appear on the show. That representative cancelled at the last minute and was replaced by Forde, who identified herself as a FAIR official. “We wouldn’t have identified her with that organization if she hadn’t said she was speaking on their behalf,” said Cerna. On the show, Forde claims that the state of Washington spends $500 million on illegal immigration. “It’s pretty easy … if you hire somebody who is illegal, it’s a crime,” Forde replied when asked what is to be done about illegal immigration. “What makes this a wonderful nation and one of the greatest nations on earth is we are a nation of laws.”

Forde’s June 12 arrest on two counts of first-degree murder stems from a May 30 home invasion robbery in Arivaca, Ariz., which she allegedly carried out to get drugs and cash to fund her group’s operations. (It’s not known whether the invaders found either cash or drugs.) Shot and killed in the invasion were resident Raul Flores, 29, and his 9-year old daughter Brisenia. Flores’ wife was also shot, but returned fire, wounding Albert Robert Gaxiola, 42, a member of MAD, Forde’s organization. Also arrested on Friday was MAD operations director Jason Eugene “Gunny” Bush, 34, who has been accused by law enforcement of being the alleged triggerman in the murders. Bush was additionally charged today with the 1997 murder of a Latino man in Wenatchee, Wash. According to the Wenatchee, Wash., police, Bush, “had long standing ties to Aryan Nations groups that commonly believe in white superiority over other races and have been known to be violent towards non-white races.”

MAD Executive Director Shawna Forde, 41, allegedly orchestrated a home invasion robbery of a suspected narcotics trafficker because she was seeking drugs and cash to fund her group’s vigilante operations, law enforcement authorities said. The murders, including the killing of the child, were part of the plan, said Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. “She’s, at best, a psychopath,” Dupnik said of Forde in comments quoted by the Green Valley News & Sun.

Also arrested were MAD Operations Director Jason Eugene “Gunny” Bush, 34, the alleged triggerman in the murders, and Albert Robert Gaxiola, 42, a local member of MAD. Along with the two murder counts, Forde and her two associates were charged with one count of first-degree burglary and one count of aggravated assault.

MAD has been conducting vigilante patrols in southern Arizona since mid-May. Sheriff Dupnik reportedly said that between the time of the killings and her arrest, Forde remained in the area “still trying … to get together a large amount of money to further sophisticate the type of operation she’s interested in.”

Forde denied the charges against her. “No, I did not do it,” she told reporters as she was led out of the Pima County Sheriff’s Office.

According to investigators, Forde and at least two armed men broke into a trailer occupied by Arivaca, Ariz., resident Raul Flores, his wife, and their daughter Brisenia. Bush allegedly shot and killed Raul Flores and Brisenia before Flores’ wife, who was also shot in the incident, returned fire, wounding Gaxiola. It’s unclear whether the alleged killers found any money or drugs.

Sheriff Dupnik called the alleged crime a “home invasion where the plan was to kill all the people inside this trailer because they might be witnesses, and rob them.”

Forde’s arrest for double murder comes not long after her involvement in a bizarre series of violent incidents in her hometown of Everett, Wash. They began last December when Forde’s estranged husband was mysteriously shot in their home. About a week later, on Dec. 29, Forde reported that she’d been the victim of a home invasion attack perpetrated by a trio of Spanish-speaking men who ambushed her in her kitchen, beat her unconscious, sexually assaulted her, and slashed the back of her neck with a knife. (Forde posted a set of photos showing what she claimed were injuries she suffered during the attack.) The following month, on Jan. 15, Forde suffered a gunshot wound to her arm. She told police that a strange man shot her in an alley two blocks from her home.

The Everett violence is still under investigation.

But it’s not because they feel sorry for the security guard who died or take issue with the virulent anti-Semitism of James von Brunn, the 88-year-old white supremacist who’s been charged with his murder. Rather, they’re concerned that the violent act could hurt their movement.

“The responsible white separatist community condemns this,” John de Nugent, a self-described white separatist, told the Washington Post. “It makes us look bad.”

Anonymous posts on the neo-Nazi website Vanguard News Network were less polite. “The entire episode is a gift to the International Jew and a Knife in the back [of] the Cause we are fighting for,” wrote a poster using the online moniker “The Red Skull.” “We are in for BIG trouble because of ONE senile old man. … The Jewsmedia will beat this horse until its [sic] no longer even recognizable. Incredibly STUPID, and hurtful to the entire movement!”

Added “Parsifal:” “The major problem I have with this incident is that there were White children in that god damn Holohoax indoctrination center at the time of the shooting. … I cannot support what Von Brunn did, although it will be a pleasure to see that evil temple of lies demolished after the Revolution.”

The administrator of Vanguard News Network, neo-Nazi Alex Linder, had a different take on the shooting: “Von Brunn sacrificed his life to show his people that the Holocaust is a Big Lie: a deliberately concocted atrocity myth being used by jews and their running dogs at Fox News and CNN to browbeat whites into submission to the Jewish Tyranny known as the New World Order.”

While saying he condemned von Brunn’s actions, Edgar J. Steele, the attorney who represented neo-Nazi Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, drew a similar conclusion. “Why did Von Brunn choose to unload at the National Holocaust Museum?” he asked. “Because it is an edifice to one of the most stupendous lies of modern times, paid for and maintained with taxpayer dollars, that’s why.”

He added: “Make no mistake. Today’s was no isolated incident. You will see more and more shootouts like what took place in Washington, DC, this morning, until America begins to listen to all her citizens and accords all her children an equal voice in her affairs.”

Meanwhile, columnist Debbie Schlussel blamed the attacks on her usual scapegoat: Muslims. “It’s guys with names like Mohammed and Ahmed on our own American streets who make Mr. Von Brunn far more at ease in 2009 than he was even in 1999 to attack places associated with the Jews,” she said. “They created the comfort zone for James W. Brunn to engage in today’s shooting.”

Others spun wild conspiracy theories about government involvement in the attack. “Does anyone else here have a (more than) sneaking suspicion that this guy was paid off to do this so that the government would have yet another reason to crack down on us right-wing nutjobs? [sic]” asked “CoffeehouseGirl25” on Stormfront, the leading white supremacist forum.

And on the website of the Political Cesspool, a racist radio program, host James Edwards decried what he called a double standard in media coverage of the Holocaust Museum shooting.

“The media deliberately buries this epidemic of hate and violence, because the vast majority of murderers are non-white, and many of their victims are white. … [But] the local, regional, and national media are trumpeting the holocaust museum murder non stop [sic] and in huge fonts.”

Larry Keller contributed to this report.

Reimink’s E-mail address, “steveo1488@hotmail.com” includes the symbolic number 1488. In white supremacist circles, 14 refers to the very popular 14-word slogan coined by the late neo-Nazi David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The letter H is the eighth letter in the alphabet, and 88 often stands for “Heil Hitler.” Reimink’s cell phone was not accepting messages, and he did not respond to an E-mail request for comment.

Relinquishing the domain name may have signaled von Brunn’s intent to soon “go out with his boots on,” as he once told his former wife. He was about to give away his computer and was living hand to mouth, The Washington Post reported.

Von Brunn is said by police to have entered the Holocaust Museum Wednesday afternoon, where he shot the security guard, and then was shot and critically wounded by other guards. Police say they found a notebook in von Brunn’s car with a list of possible other targets, including the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the National Cathedral and The Washington Post. According to myfoxdc.com, witnesses said he was wearing a confederate soldier’s cap and a long coat, which he may have worn to conceal what police describe as an early-1900s rifle.

Von Brunn wrote racist and anti-Semitic screeds for many years. He worked over the years as an ad agency copywriter and business owner, an artist and a real estate agent, according to his website. He has lived in New Hampshire, California, Florida and most recently, Annapolis, Md. He worked at the anti-Semitic publisher Noontide Press in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Noontide Press was founded by Willis Carto, who also started the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby and the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust denial outfit.

Von Brunn also lived in Hayden, Idaho, a few years ago with a racist named Stan Hess, who has claimed that the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were orchestrated by a rogue faction of the federal government. Hess also started a group called the European-American Human Rights Task Force and wanted to designate October as “European-American Heritage Month,” the Spokane Spokesman-Review reported.

Conservatives were all talk and no action, according to von Brunn. On his website he complained, “The American Right-wing with few exceptions is totally Pacifist. The [right wing] does NOTHING BUT TALK. MORAL: America dies for want of men.”

Von Brunn runs the website holywesternempire.org, which was listed in 2008 as a hate site by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Von Brunn has a long history of associations with prominent neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. In the 1980s or early 1990s, von Brunn was employed by Noontide Press, a part of the Holocaust denying Institute of Historical Review, which was then run by Willis Carto, one of America’s most prominent anti-Semites.

Von Brunn is the author of the 1999 book, “Kill the Best Gentiles,” a racist and anti-Semitic tome that argues that whites are seeing “today on the world stage a tragedy of enormous proportions: the calculated destruction of the White Race and the incomparable culture it represents. Europe, former fortress of the West, is now over-run by hordes of non-Whites and mongrels.” A raging anti-Semite, von Brunn blames “The Jews” for the destruction of the West. The book is dedicated to prominent neo-Nazis and racists including Revilo Oliver and Wilmot Robertson.

In 2003, AP reported that von Brunn had painted a portrait of Rear Adm. John Crommelin, a raging anti-Semite who was a close associate of neo-Nazi William Pierce, whose book The Turner Diaries inspired Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

On his website, von Brunn also claims that in 1981, while wearing a “London Fog raincoat to conceal his weapons,” he attempted to put the whole Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve under “legal, non-violent citizens-arrest.” He wanted “to bind their hands and persuade them to appear on television.” The website says he was sentenced to 11 years for his actions.

A raging anti-Semitic and racist posting on the website arsenalofhypocrisy.com attributed to “James Von Brunn” says that “the Federal Reserve Act (1913) gave JEWS control of America’s Money.” It also says that “America is a Third-World racial garbage dump–stupid, ignorant, dead-broke, and terminal.” It ends with, “Prepare to die, Whitey.”

Wilson’s now found a new friend in Chuck Colson, recipient of the 2008 Presidential Citizens Medal and a revered Christian Right leader for decades, dating back to 1975 when he founded the Prison Fellowship ministry after serving time for obstruction of justice after being caught up in the Watergate scandal. Later this month in Atlanta, Colson will be the featured speaker at Wilson’s annual conference of classical Christian educators and homeschoolers, known as the Association of Classical and Christian Schools. It’s a leap off the deep end for Colson, or as the Americans United for Separation of Church and State put it,  “So let’s get this straight: Colson is happily speaking at a conference whose founder and guiding light celebrates theocracy, defends slavery as biblical and expresses regret that the Confederacy lost the Civil War.”

Over the past three years however, Colson has given speeches that suggest a move from conservative evangelical Christianity into the far ends of Christian dominionism, a belief that America, along with the rest of the world, should be governed by conservative Christians using a conservative Christian interpretation of biblical law. In a 2007 column for Christianity Today, Colson ripped into Christian parents who are unable to “defend Christian truth … because we worship at the altar of the bitch goddess of tolerance.”

Still, Colson’s flirtation with dominionism is one thing. The antebellum slavery-defending “paleo-confederacy” advocated by Wilson, his conference host, is quite another.  Wilson’s booklet Southern Slavery, As It Was, is an outrageous apologia for the enslavement of black Americans in the Old South. “Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” wrote Wilson and his co-author Wilkins. “There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.”  Wilson is also a promoter of some of the more draconian tenets of Christian Reconstructionism, a theocratic movement that seeks to demolish American democracy and replace it with the legal code of the Old Testament, which calls for stoning to death adulterers, homosexuals and in some cases, wayward children. In an April 2009 interview with Christianity Today, Wilson distanced himself only ever so slightly from the most hardline reconstructionists.  “You can’t apply Scripture woodenly,” said Wilson. “I’m not proposing legislation. All I’m doing is refusing to apologize for certain parts of the Bible.”

Despite these extremist views, Wilson hopes to fashion himself as a mainstream Christian evangelical. Last year, he sparred with outspoken atheist writer Christopher Hitchens in a filmed six-part debate entitled “Is Christianity Good for the World?” The text of the debate arguments were widely reprinted in the evangelical Christian press. When Hitchens was asked about his debate opponent Wilson, he replied “He has a ministry on the Washington-Idaho border, I believe,” Hitchens said. “I don’t know of what Christian denomination he precisely describes himself … I try not to do too much homework on people.” It’s unlikely that Colson, who is now featured in the same publications as Wilson, has the same excuse.

According to a bulletin on its homepage, Vdare.com owner Peter Brimelow is now scheduled to speak at The American’s Cause’s  “Building A New Majority Conference” in McLean, Va., on June 20.

The conference plans to ponder the question, “Has the culture, economy, and demographics of our country passed a tipping point where Conservatives can no longer rule with a mandate?”

Although Brimelow’s name does not appear on The American Cause’s website, the keynote speaker for the conference is not identified, and Brimelow was a panelist at a symposium hosted by TAC last January.

Other speakers scheduled to appear at the upcoming conference, according to TAC’s website, include Hazleton, Pa., Mayor Lou Barletta, who has worked closely with the legal arm of the hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform to enact anti-immigrant policies in a region suffering from escalating racial tensions and where a Latino immigrant was beaten to death last summer; and former Congressman Tom Tancredo, a longtime nativist firebrand who earlier this year argued in a speech at American University that Latinos and Muslims represent “problem cultures,” and that immigrants who fail to “become American” by adopting “white Anglo-Saxon culture” are a destructive force in America.

Conspicuously absent from the speaker list for the June conference is TAC Executive Director Marcus Epstein, a frequent speaker at the group’s events. Epstein may be keeping a lower profile this time around because he’s scheduled to be sentenced on July 8 for drunkenly calling an African-American passerby a “nigger” at a major intersection in Washington, D.C., before attempting to strike her with a karate chop.

Despite the hate crime assault conviction, it seems unlikely Buchanan will distance himself from Epstein. On June 7, Buchanan’s sister, Angela “Bay” Buchanan, defended Epstein on Vdare.com from what she termed an “Internet lynching” (Bay Buchanan, who has been a CNN commentator, helps her brother run TAC and another anti-immigrant outfit, Team America PAC, which also employs Epstein).

“I am telling his story because Marcus Epstein deserves to have his good name returned to him,” Bay Buchanan wrote.

According to her post, Epstein committed the assault after a night of heavy drinking in the midst of serious bouts of depression in 2007. She wrote that after he was released from jail, Epstein attempted to commit suicide by alcohol poisoning and was hospitalized for a week. Buchanan said he was allowed to keep his job at TAC because he sought professional help and is now sober.

“Marcus Epstein is one of the bravest young people I have ever known,” she wrote.

Epstein is himself a frequent Vdare.com contributor who has attended and hosted events featuring prominent white nationalists. “Diversity can be good in moderation — if what is being brought in is desirable,” Epstein wrote in one VDARE.com essay. “Most Americans don’t mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers — as long as these trends do not overwhelm the dominant culture.”

That sort of rhetoric marches in lockstep with Pat Buchanan’s oft-expressed white nationalist ideology.

Buchanan’s history of bigoted statements, dating back to his days in the Nixon administration, was detailed in a comprehensive June 8 Media Matters for America post. In the 1970s, Buchanan warned Nixon not to “fritter away his present high support in the nation for an ill-advised governmental effort to forcibly integrate races.” In 1989, he defended Bob Jones University’s ban on interracial dating. And in 1990 he lamented the end of apartheid in South Africa.

And he’s still at it. Media Matters notes that Pat Buchanan appeared on the June 29, 2008, and September 14, 2006, editions of “The Political Cesspool,” a white nationalist radio show whose “Statement of Principles” asserts that it “represent[s] a philosophy that is pro-White.” Buchanan’s appearance on the show last June was streamed live on Stormfront.org, a major white nationalist online forum popular with neo-Nazis, skinheads and other hard-core racists. Buchanan’s recent books have been filled with citations of white nationalists’ works and advance racist arguments about Latino immigrants, such as that they enter the U.S. to invade it (more on Buchanan’s recent racism can be found here and here).

Buchanan’s latest rants have focused on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who he claims believes “discrimination against white males is O.K.”

Buchanan’s long and extensive racist track record caused Media Matters Senior Fellow Jamison Foser to pose the question, “What would Pat Buchanan have to say to get himself fired from MSNBC?” “Oddly, the more time goes by, and the further removed America is from the time when sentiments like those regularly expressed by Buchanan were widely accepted, the media increasingly give him a pass,” was Foser’s conclusion.

Not so white supremacists, most of whom have greeted Roeder’s actions with praise. On Stormfront, the largest white supremacist forum in terms of members, the more than 400 comments that have been posted about Tiller’s murder are running about ten-to-one in favor of the killing.

“Well that vile scumbag will never kill another White child. I’d say mission accomplished on this one. Taking things into our own hands is not just right it is our duty!” wrote “Whitelad 88” on Stormfront. His compatriot “Mechanicalstar” chimed in with, “We can’t wince at every action one of our people take when they get fed up and go over the edge, because things aren’t going to change simply by talking a whole lot on the Internet.” Another poster wrote, “Scott Roeder will and should go down as a hero in our pantheon.”

A Stormfront moderator posting as “Jack Boot” chimed in to report that he’d smoked a celebratory cigar he’d been saving for the execution of black radical and convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

“I was saving this cigar for Mumia’s date with the devil. An excellent smoke, a corona,” wrote Boot. “I think the most enjoyable parties just spontaneously happen, like friends gathering to just share each others company after any given cheerful event. Weddings, births, new cars, shooting down Tiller, that kind of thing. We must see about a defense fund for the accused.”

Sentiments were similar on other white supremacist web forums.

The Vanguard News Network (VNN) forum was filled with congratulatory messages. “Too bad that it didn’t seem like a very painful death,” wrote “psychologicalschock.” “Reset,” posting to another racist forum, New Nation Newsreporters Newsroom (NNNN), wrote, “This scumbag killed tens of thousands of white infants. A shame the guy got caught, the good ‘doctor’ is not worth dying in prison for.”

Others expressed a sentiment widespread in racist circles—that abortion is perfectly legitimate as long as it involves non-whites.  “Good riddance,” wrote “deathtozog” on VNN. “The only abortion doctors that get any approval from me are those set up in places like DC or Detroit and are aborting non-White babies.” “Bigdhe3” penned on NNNN, “why is there any uproar over this… the LESS friggin niggers there are the better.”

The few racists brave enough to express their opposition to Tiller’s murder were blasted for being race-traitors, Jews and trolls.

“Wow, the comments in this thread amaze me,” wrote “Exare” on Stormfront, “Even if you disagree with abortion you honestly agree with this sort of self-righteous taking the law into your own hand method? The shooter is a murderer and a criminal and should be dealt with harshly. No wonder white nationalists have such a negative social image. The majority of you people only feed the negative gun wielding redneck persona that the media tries to paint us white nationalists as.”

The charges stem from a posting on Turner’s blog that asked his readers to “take up arms” against two Connecticut state officials, Sen. Andrew McDonald and Rep. Michael Lawlor. The Connecticut State Capitol Police Chief, Michael Fallon, said Turner’s comments went “above and beyond the threshold of free speech.” “He is inciting others through his website to commit acts of violence and has created fear and alarm,” said Fallon.

Turner’s racist rants and violent threats are legendary. Railing against President Bush in 2007, he told his audience that, “a well-placed bullet can solve a lot of problems.” He has written that “we need to start SHOOTING AND KILLING Mexicans as they cross the border” and argued that killing certain federal judges “may be illegal, but it wouldn’t be wrong.”

In 2006, after he published an attack on New Jersey Supreme Court justices that also included several of their home addresses, state police massively beefed up security for the members of the court, checking on one justice’s house more than 200 times.

Never one to fear going over the top, in another post Turner dreamed of a mass attack on the Obama inaugural. He mused that it would be a good thing to use an unmanned drone carrying explosives to attack inaugural crowds and said a mass murder of those attending the festivities “would be a public service.”

“I won’t say what may happen Tuesday but I will say this,” Turner wrote. “After Tuesday, the name Hal Turner may live in infamy. Let it be known that I saw what was necessary and decided to do what had to be done. I make no apology to those affected or their families.”

Turner’s arrest is ironic given the evidence that it appears he has worked as a paid informant for the FBI. In January 2008, unidentified hackers electronically confronted Turner in the forum of his website for his radio program, “The Hal Turner Show.” After a heated exchange, they told Turner that they had successfully hacked into his E-mails and found correspondence with an FBI agent who is apparently Turner’s handler. Then they posted an alleged July 2007 E-mail to the agent in which Turner hands over a message from someone who sent in a death threat against Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.). “Once again,” Turner writes to his handler, “my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy.” In what is allegedly a portion of another E-mail, Turner discusses the money he is paid.

When asked in 2008 about Turner’s relationship to the FBI, the agency declined comment. Agent Richard Kolko told Hatewatch, “Longstanding FBI policy prohibits disclosing who may or may not provide information.”

No, Epstein says, he’s no racist, just a patriotic American concerned with traditional values, illegal immigration and rapid demographic change. Some prominent conservatives have bought Epstein’s line, employing him at the highest levels of their organizations regardless of his widely reported extremist activities. In fact, Epstein is a bit of a star in the anti-immigration wing of the conservative movement.

But a July 2007 assault on a black woman in Washington, D.C., has called into question Epstein’s claim that he is not racist.

Epstein works for both MSNBC columnist Pat Buchanan, who has a long history of anti-immigrant extremism and white nationalism, and his sister Angela “Bay” Buchanan, who once called for a revolution to end immigration. Epstein is executive director of Pat Buchanan’s group, The American Cause. In addition, he serves as executive director of the immigrant-bashing Team America PAC, which was founded by Bay Buchanan and former Congressman Tom Tancredo, for whom Epstein wrote speeches during his recent presidential bid.

Earlier this year Epstein co-founded Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), a well-funded group dedicated to launching a right-wing youth movement at university campuses nationwide. YWC made a splashy debut this past February as a co-sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), held annually in Washington, D.C. and billed as “the largest annual gathering of conservative students, activists and policymakers.”

But now Epstein has some explaining to do concerning his dropping the “N” bomb and throwing a wayward karate chop.

It seems that during the early evening hours of July 7, 2007, Epstein was walking near the intersection of Jefferson and M Street Northwest, in Washington, D.C., in a mild to severe state of intoxication. A friend of his later told the Secret Service that Epstein had been drinking. Apparently, Epstein was making offensive comments about non-whites, and decided to express himself more dramatically by calling an African-American woman passing by a “Nigger” and then attempted to karate chop her in the head. He was briefly detained by the woman’s husband, but escaped, only to be taken into custody minutes later by a Secret Service officer who witnessed the altercation.

All of the above details are taken from District of Columbia’s Superior Court records, which were obtained by the anti-racist group, One People’s Project. They show that Epstein, 25, has pleaded guilty to simple assault charges stemming from the incident and must appear on July 8 for sentencing. He faces a maximum punishment of 180 days in jail and a $1000 fine. He’s under a restraining order to stay away from the couple involved, has agreed to seek mental health treatment, complete an alcohol treatment program, write a letter of apology to the victim and donate $1000 to the United Negro College Fund.

At this point, Epstein’s future within the white nationalist and nativist movements seems decidedly uncertain. Epstein did not reply to repeated E-mails from Hatewatch seeking comment.

Epstein’s conservative benefactors did not outright denounce him. When asked about Epstein’s behavior by The Denver Post, Bay Buchanan called the incident “an out-of-character moment” for Epstein and noted that he was struggling at the time with personal problems and was kept on only after he agreed to treatment. She added that Epstein would be voluntarily leaving Team America PAC later this summer.

Tancredo downplayed it, too, saying, “I’m assuming that the only thing that makes (the incident) even newsworthy is the fact that it comes in the context of the [Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia] Sotomayor thing.”

The former Pennsylvania leader of the neo-Nazi group World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) began referring to himself as “the doctor of all hate” in 2003 after he was kicked out of the WCOTC following an involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital.

The next year, he shot to death Lori Hann, a 41-year-old divorced legal secretary he met online. There were no witnesses to the shooting. Hardy claimed self-defense and was acquitted of murder—although he was convicted of possessing an unlicensed firearm and put on probation.

Soon enough, Lloyd began taunting Hann’s family online, bragging about how he got away with murder and writing that he shot her “just to watch her die.”

This year, Lloyd began referring to himself as “The Wolf,” informing the world that he is no longer a neo-Nazi, but an “anti-American terrorist.”

When anti-government extremist Richard Poplawski allegedly gunned down three Pittsburgh police officers on April 4, Lloyd celebrated their deaths, calling police “the front-line troops against the people.”

That may have been one loudmouth comment too many for Hardy Lloyd. He was arrested last week at his Crafton, Pa., apartment for violating the terms of his probation, which prohibit him from possessing firearms, among other conditions.

It’s unclear at this point why exactly Lloyd was arrested, although Pennsylvania law enforcement sources told Hatewatch that Lloyd’s rants have earned him a slot on a domestic terrorism watch list and that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently warned local law enforcement that Lloyd was openly calling for the murder of police officers.

Gray’s arrest is another example of revived strength in the sovereign citizens movement, a trend recently reported on in the Intelligence Report.

In court documents unsealed last week, federal agents said the case began after a paid informant revealed that Gray had been shooting a rifle and pistol in Snohomish County, Wash., at a building called the Militia Training Center which “routinely holds training for individuals involved in the militia movement.”  The informant secretly recorded Gray admitting to owning guns, even though he is forbidden to possess firearms as an ex-felon.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted, “among the weapons seized were two guns manufactured by a Snohomish gunsmith whose offerings include parts named ‘Christian warrior’ and ‘NObama.’”  In an affidavit, FBI agent Gregory Kraus stated that one of the indicators of Gray’s sovereign citizen ideology were previous legal filings he made claiming the State of Washington had no authority over him due to problems with the constitutional convention of 1889, as well as Gray’s driver’s license, on which the words “no liability accepted” are written over his signature.  “Based on my training and experience I know that this is also an indicator of ’sovereign citizen’ ideology,” stated Kraus.

Gray remains free on bond and his lawyer Jessica Riley claims he is no longer involved with the sovereign citizens movement. “Although Mr. Gray may have historically been affiliated with this group, in recent months he had begun to distance himself from the ’sovereign citizen’ movement,” Riley stated in a case filing.  “Mr. Gray is not the crazy, politically charged renegade that the government makes him out to be in its complaint.”

Gray’s father also filed a letter of support with the court stating, “Recently Andrew fell in the company with people who felt the only hope for survival was guns.  His mother and I, along with others, told him this is ‘not’ the answer.  He was beginning to agree with this [sic] sentiments and it was the beginning of him getting back on track starting with the driving issues.”

However, another letter backing Gray was filed by Thom Satterlee, who identifies himself in a notarized stamp as “Bishop of The Way, Yeshua’s Talmadin.”  For much of the 1990s, Satterlee advocated that part of Snohomish County should secede from the United States and rename itself Freedom County.  In 2000, the self-proclaimed sheriff of this non-existent county told law enforcement that, “federal agents are no longer allowed to seize property for back taxes within Freedom County’s alleged boundaries.”

Satterlee has been convicted of practicing law without a license and attempted to redeem $38 million in  “public wealth rebate notes” at a bank before they were confiscated by the Secret Service. He described Gray as a friend of over ten years and a man of “high moral character whose word is (his) bond.”

Scott Roeder, 51, allegedly killed Tiller with a single shot in the foyer of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kan. Roeder was taken into custody a few hours later in Kansas City and is being held without bail.

Roeder’s arrest is further evidence of a resurgence of right-wing extremism. A recent Department of Homeland Security report came under severe criticism from the right for making the point that such extremism is likely on the rise.

Roeder’s support of violent extremism dates back at least as far as April 1996, when police in Topeka, Kan. pulled him over for driving with a bogus license plate. Instead of a legitimate license plate his vehicle bore a “sovereign citizen” plate that proclaimed the driver immune from state and federal laws.

The same type of tag was being used by members of the Montana Freemen, a violent sovereign citizen group that at the time was involved in a prolonged armed standoff with federal agents in Montana.

In Roeder’s trunk, investigators found a pound of gunpowder, a nine-volt battery wired to a switch, ammunition and blasting caps.

Since his 1996 arrest, Roeder seems to have focused primarily on anti-abortion radicalism, including several posts in recent years proposing a confrontation with Dr. Tiller inside Tiller’s church.

“Bless everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp,” Roeder posted to the website of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue in May 2007. “Sometime soon, would it be feasible to organize as many people as possible to attend Tillers church (inside, not just outside) to have much more of a presence and possibly ask questions of the Pastor, Deacons, Elders and members while there? Doesn’t seem like it would hurt anything but bring more attention to Tiller.”

Roeder isn’t the only link between the militant anti-abortion movement and the Freemen. During the 1996 standoff, the Rev. W.N. Otwell, who called America a “white man’s country” and led camouflage-clad followers in protests of abortion clinics, traveled from his Texas compound to support the Montana Freemen in their 81-day armed standoff.

Dr. Tiller is the eighth abortion provider to be assassinated since 1977, according to the National Abortion Federation. Fifteen years ago, his name appeared atop a “hit list” that was circulated among pro-life militants.

Reacting to Sotomayor’s membership in the Latino rights organization National Council of La Raza and comments she has made on her judging, radio fulminator Rush Limbaugh compared her to KKK leader David Duke, suggesting she is a “reverse racist.” William Gheen, president of the nativist extremist group Americans for Legal Immigration, called her a “brown or Hispanic supremacist.” Former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, the Colorado Republican and one-time presidential candidate who long headed the far-right Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, attacked Sotomayor for her membership in La Raza, which he said was a “Latino KKK.” Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich described the high court nominee on Twitter as a “Latina woman racist” and said she should withdraw.

Now comes the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist hate group which has called black people a “retrograde species of humanity,” with its own special addition: a computer-generated “photo” of “whitey-hating” Sotomayor in Klan robes that fits in well with the tenor of the more “mainstream” attacks from politicians, pundits and nativist leaders.

That’s par for the course for the gutturally racist CCC, which is descended from the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s that battled school desegregation. Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court Justice, once referred to that group as “the uptown Klan.”

Despite the furious comments from people like Tancredo, La Raza is hardly a racist group — indeed, it is a thoroughly mainstream human rights organization.

As to her comments, Sotomayor is being attacked for saying in a 2001 university lecture that she “would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white man who hasn’t lived that life.” President Obama said earlier this week that Sotomayor wishes she had phrased that differently, but that the comments simply suggested that a diversity of experience helped judges make good decisions. Sotomayor made similar remarks, saying earlier this week: “My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept that there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

The Louisiana Klan leader indicted for the murder of a woman who tried to quit his group coerced three of his sons to join the Klan and used threats of violence to keep members from leaving, according to an interview with his wife in the latest issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, released today. The case has brought back troubling memories of a town where Klansmen fiercely resisted the civil rights movement.

Theresa Foster said her husband, Raymond Charles “Chuck” Foster, “threatened everybody,” creating the volatile atmosphere surrounding Cynthia Lynch’s death last November near Bogalusa, La. She also describes the days leading up to Lynch’s death and her attempt to dissuade the Oklahoma woman from joining the Klan.

“The way I look at it is, Raymond Foster is wholly to blame for what happened,” she told the Intelligence Report.

Lynch signed up to join the Sons of Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan after apparently reading Foster’s MySpace page. She traveled to Bogalusa by bus from Tulsa to be initiated into the group. Foster allegedly shot her when she asked to leave, and other members of the group helped cover up the murder.

Lynch’s death put the spotlight on Bogalusa, a town that was once such a hotbed of Klan activity that it was dubbed “Klantown, U.S.A.” Today, local officials who believed the Klan was a relic of Bogalusa’s past are re-evaluating this town where stark racial divisions still exist and the Klan remains a lurking presence.

“The town where Raymond Foster formed his Klan group may be the most telling aspect of this tragic story,” said Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, a quarterly investigative journal that monitors the radical right. “This is a town where longtime black residents say they still live separate and unequal lives more than 40 years after the civil rights movement.”

The public high school in Bogalusa still has separate proms for white and black students. And despite being the site of some of the most memorable clashes of the civil rights era, there is not a single historic marker commemorating those events. In 1965, the town’s first two black sheriff’s deputies were shot from a passing pickup truck while on patrol; one of them, Oneal Moore, died. A suspect was arrested, but no one was ever prosecuted. Moore’s name is now engraved on the Civil Rights Memorial at the SPLC’s offices in Montgomery.

“Everything is still racially divided,” the Rev. Coleman Moses, a lifelong black resident of Bogalusa, told the Intelligence Report. “But the methods have changed. They’re more covert than back in the 1960s. You listen for code words. There is a KKK presence.”

Also, in the Summer 2009 issue of the Intelligence Report:

* “From Hate to Hurt” features four experts discussing the effect of hate propaganda in the aftermath of a recent killing spree in Brockton, Mass., where the alleged gunman reportedly told police he had been reading racist websites and was “fighting for a dying race.”
* “Beyond the Bishop” reports on the recent Vatican uproar over an anti-Semitic bishop. While the controversy focused on the bishop, little was learned about the beliefs of his order, which reflects much of his thinking.
* “National Anarchism” examines a California group called the Bay Area National Anarchists, an organization that claims to represent a new and more vital form of anarchism but in reality is a white nationalist project.
* “Going Under” tells the story of Bart McEntire’s undercover work with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — work against white supremacist organizations in the Southeast that helped solve a series of murders and other crimes.

You’ve spent decades doing anti-racist work and tracking the white nationalist movement. How did you get started in this, Lenny?
While I was studying in a bar mitzvah class, we read Black Like Me [a 1961 book by John Howard Griffin detailing his harrowing experiences as a white man disguised as a black man], and the local NAACP president spoke at the synagogue the Friday before my bar mitzvah. So it was part of my life in the Jewish community.
Eventually, I came to understand that white people needed to address the problem of racism in other white people. So I got involved in trying to organize the younger white people in the working-class neighborhood I was living in. I spent 13 years in heavy industry, working as a grassroots organizer.
I started paying attention to the resurgence of white supremacist activity in the 1970s, around ’77, ’78. I started reading racist publications and helped put out a little magazine with a small group in Kansas City starting in 1982. But the real moment of transformation for me was in 1984 when I found a picture of Bob Weems as chairman of the Populist Party [a far-right party started by anti-Semite Willis Carto and others that year]; at the same time, I was looking at another picture of Weems leading a meeting of the Klan. The following year, I became a paid professional in the field [at the Anti-Klan Network], rather than an unpaid volunteer.

Before we get into some of the details, how is your book different than others that have traced much of the same history?
I tried to write about the white nationalist world as a movement in which the organizations meant less as individual organizations and more as springboards for the interaction of all these groups’ different tendencies and ideologies. I tried to describe how the movement developed a political identity and self-consciousness. To the extent that it does that, it grows.
One of the things that became evident to me is that much of the language and many of the concepts we tend to use have lost whatever analytical power they once had. One idea that isn’t helpful is the untested assumption that economic distress, direct and unmediated, drives the tendency towards racism and white supremacist organizing. If you look at the votes [former Klan leader] David Duke got in 1990 and 1991, they came from ordinary middle-class white people — not just those who were the most poverty-stricken. More, the concepts of left and right have lost a lot of their explanatory power. Who’s on the left, who’s on the right, in Russia and Eastern Europe today? I can’t tell.

You suggest the white nationalist movement started to develop the political self-consciousness you just mentioned in the 1970s, and that two major tendencies, “mainstreamers” and revolutionary “vanguardists,” emerged from that.
Almost from the moment it became a resurgent movement in the late 1970s, white nationalism started to define itself. Wilmot Robertson’s book, The Dispossessed Majority, is important in this. People in the movement saw themselves as dispossessed — they had to explain to themselves how they had lost the battle over civil rights in the 1960s.
That’s an important piece. White nationalists were no longer defending the status quo, because the status quo had changed. They saw themselves as an oppressed group, and they began to develop a movement with characteristics of that type. They saw themselves at odds with society and, to varying degrees, with the majority of white people who were supposedly their constituency.
The “vanguardists” looked at white people and saw a bunch of cowards with their brains lost to “Jewish” TV. But the “mainstreamers” still thought there was a possibility of winning a majority following.
Here’s the trick about spotting the transformation into a white revolutionary movement: The piece that makes them the most revolutionary is anti-Semitism, because it creates for them a ruling class. The invention of a fake ruling class transformed a reform-oriented conservative movement into a revolutionary movement.
Jared Taylor [editor of the white nationalist journal American Renaissance], for example, does not embrace the anti-Semitic theories that William Pierce [late leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance] did. Taylor apparently worked in international finance at one point, and he doesn’t see himself as separate from that, despite the people railing at the banks and the Federal Reserve.
It would be a mistake to call vanguardists and mainstreamers factions; they’re ideological tendencies, and they can both exist within a single organization.

How did those two tendencies play out?
In the early 1980s, the vanguardist wing of the movement started to develop an organizational face and a cohesive argument. [Hard-line leaders] Bob Miles and Louis Beam were crucial to that development, through their jointly produced Inter-Klan Newsletter and Survival Alert and with Beam’s Essays of a Klansman. Then came the formation of The Order [a racist terrorist group that assassinated a Jewish talk show host and robbed more than $4 million in armored car heists] in the fall of 1983. The Order was built upon the notion that the majority of white people are inept and won’t make a revolution without being dragged along kicking and screaming. They wanted to push the entire society into a ditch and start a race war, with the result that black people and white people would be forced to choose sides based upon their skin color.
After the sedition trial [the unsuccessful 1987 federal prosecution in Arkansas of 14 major white supremacist leaders, including Beam and Miles], however, the vanguardist wing started to lose steam.  Multiple arrests and trials simply took their toll on them.

How did the mainstreamers become ascendant?
I think that the January 1987 events in Forsyth County [Ga.] marked a turning point, along with Howard Beach. [Editor’s note: In December 1986, a large group of white teens attacked three black men in Howard Beach, a neighborhood of New York City, leaving one of them dead. Authorities compared the attack to a lynching.] In Georgia, 400 white people threw rocks at a small, interracial group of so-called brotherhood marchers. There were some Klansmen there, maybe 40, but they weren’t the 400. So it had a mass character to it; it was a mainstream event. I can remember the difficulty we had in North Georgia getting Methodist ministers to speak out against the white mob without condemning the interracial brotherhood marchers [as provocateurs] in the same breath.
David Duke, who had been laying low for some six years after leaving the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, actually understood the significance of the events in Forsyth and Howard Beach. He understood that something was happening among white people, that there was a growing insurgency among a sector of white people that would carry him into his Louisiana campaigns. [Editor’s note: Although Duke had run for office before, and was elected to the Louisiana House in 1989, he astonished the nation by winning more than 600,000 votes in both 1990 and 1991 during unsuccessful campaigns for U.S. senator and governor.] Now, everybody in the movement wanted to run for public office. A half dozen characters associated themselves with the Duke phenomenon, because it looked like the going thing.
What happened, as I write in the book, was that Duke opened the door and, in 1992, [long-time television commentator and white nationalist] Pat Buchanan walked through it. People remember Buchanan as running [for president on the GOP ticket] because he was mad about [the first President] Bush breaking his “No New Taxes” pledge. But Buchanan ran on a platform of America-first nationalism, anti-war isolationism, and nativism. It wasn’t exactly a David Duke platform — Buchanan’s not a national socialist like Duke — but his 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns did carry Duke’s banner.

But the 1990s, when the militia movement appeared, experienced a real resurgence of the violent vanguardists, didn’t they?
After 1992, you have the development of vanguardists and mainstreamers both at the same time.  The militias, for example, had within them the bombers and bank robbers, the vanguardists; but they also had people who were mainstreamers, interested in pursuing gun disobedience without robbing banks. The militia movement as a whole was primarily a revolt against what they believed was an erosion of national sovereignty. So it was basically a nationalist, a white nationalist, movement.
The vanguardists were busy creating their little enclaves — the Republic of Texas, the Militia of Montana, the Montana Freemen and so forth. They separated themselves from most white people and started to create their own little white, Christian enclaves. It looked like the vanguardists were the biggest things on the block, but that wasn’t true. You also had the Buchanan candidacy, all this stuff going on inside the Republican Party. And, after the [1995] Oklahoma City bombing, the government did an intensive roundup that hurt the most violent vanguardists.
In the years since the 1990s, I think the biggest failure of the mainstreamers was in 2000, when Buchanan [making his third bid for the presidency, this time on the Reform Party ticket] failed to make good use of the federal money [almost $13 million] the Reform Party got for his campaign. White nationalists put a lot of energy into that campaign, and they came out of it with very little. Buchanan gave them Ezola Foster [a black woman with extreme-right views who ran for vice president on the Buchanan ticket] and people like Jared Taylor were saying, “Why is this? Why are we going to support this?”
At that point, the mainstreamers were in trouble, and the National Alliance looked like the biggest kid on the block. It was growing like topsy.

Wasn’t a key part of National Alliance leader William Pierce’s importance at the time his intellectual leadership?
Ideas explain the world to people. They pull people together in a collective fashion around a common view of the way the world works. Pierce created a whole white ethic. By the time he died [in 2002], he had created a more or less complete ideology in terms of explaining the world. It’s important to remember that this movement doesn’t exist in a vacuum. These ideas explain the world to people where other explanations don’t work for them, or aren’t available.
Of course, after Pierce dies, the National Alliance crashes on the rocks. And then you have a series of other events that amount to political defeats. The Liberty Lobby [long America’s leading anti-Semitic organization] finally does itself in [after losing an extended court battle with former colleagues]. There’s the David Irving trial [in which the world’s leading Holocaust denier was labeled “pro-Nazi” by a British judge in a major libel battle], and then, after 9/11, comes the outbreak of the “War on Terror.” (By the way, I do not think that the events of 2001 changed the dynamic of nationalism seeing itself in opposition to globalism.)
At least for that moment, the vanguardist wing was essentially put out of business by the war on terror. In a world in which the dominant discourse is a war on terror, robbing a bank or blowing up a building probably isn’t going to get you many friends.

In the last 10 years or so, both mainstreamers and vanguardists have focused on non-white immigration as their key issue, with some real success. But now we’re in a changing situation, with the election of a black president and the crash of the economy. How do you see the coming years?
I’m skittish about making predictions. A part of the reason is that it doesn’t only depend on what white nationalists do — there are larger social forces out there and there are significant numbers of white people who have signed onto multiracialism and the Obama vision of American life. The white nationalist vision of an exclusively white, Christian country has not disappeared, but it’s made much more tenuous by the fact that we have a black president who a lot of white people voted for. That’s not easily explained as just the Jews brainwashing everybody.
I think the future depends on whether or not the economic crisis that we’re in becomes a political crisis, a crisis in confidence in the government. It’s at that point that the white nationalists will have their greatest chance. And that, in part, depends on whether the core inside the southern, white section of the Republican Party manages to mount any kind of successful opposition. If that happens, I think you’ll see fast growth in the movement. But if they want to take advantage of the economy, they also need to find their own programmatic plank — sort of like in Europe, where some of the organizations created their owns councils of the unemployed.
I do not believe that the economic crisis alone, or the Obama campaign, or the demographic process [which is expected to lead to a loss of a national white majority by about 2042], is driving a fast-growth movement. If you look at actual events and compare them to the past, the violence this year is not as great as the violence was in 1987, for example. The Obama presidency might prove to be an organizing opportunity for white nationalists. But it’s not just a raw opportunity. It’s mediated through political frames.

What can we examine to get a fuller sense of the future?
I think it’s best to look at indicators such as housing segregation. If housing segregation remains at the high levels that it is now, then the possibilities for white enclaves to emerge politically increases. We have a long-term tendency where the natural constituency of white nationalists will, over time, separate themselves from the multiracialists among white people, and tend to lock themselves into politically and territorially gated communities. And these gated communities may try to assume more and more civic powers. Remember that 5% of the white voting public last year told a pollster they would not vote for a black president. That’s millions of people. That’s white nationalists’ natural constituency.
It’s also useful to look at opinion poll data on young people’s attitude toward the separate-but-equal doctrine, which has some support among the young. That’s a place to look. Another is particular bellwether political races, whether they’re anti-immigrant referenda or candidacies. If a defined group of white voters seems to stay intact, that’s another indicator. What white nationalists will do as the political terrain changes is look for a base. And it will be in these kinds of places.
As the demographics change at a national level [with whites dipping as a proportion of the population], the chance for a white nationalist revival obviously becomes more problematic as long as voting rights remain intact. So another of the things we should also look for is an assault on those rights. If violence becomes an expression of a piece of the political movement, rather than just an expression of an individual’s disenchantment, that’s important, too.

What about the role of political parties in the near term?
I’ve had conversations with people who think the Republican Party is going to have to develop more [non-white] leaders like [Republican National Committee chief] Michael Steele and [Louisiana Gov.] Bobby Jindal. But so far, that hasn’t worked out too well. I would bet even money that the hard core of the Republican Party will start to congeal itself and that we’ll see a resurgence of anti-immigrant activity when comprehensive immigration reform gets introduced this fall. Unlike in other years, they’re geared up. So that may be their opening bid.
The problem for white nationalists right now is they don’t have an independent third party [like, for example, the Populist Party of the 1980s and 1990s]. They don’t have a [far-right party like the] British National Party, or a Front National [in France], or an NDP [in Germany]. They’re totally dependent electorally on the Republicans. And the Republicans are fickle friends.
The question before us, then, is, “What proportion of the population are the ones for whom Obama’s election is an abomination, rather than a plus? Are they cohesive? Do they learn to think and act together?” If they don’t, they’ll lose traction and history will move forward without them. But as we know from our own terrible history with the collapse of [post-Civil War] Reconstruction, we’ve always taken a step forward and then fallen back again.

The scheduled speaker, John DeNugent, is a frequent contributor to virulently anti-Semitic and racist online forums and writes regularly for The Barnes Review, a Holocaust denial journal.

“I guess they were concerned about his political views, and him being — I’m not really sure of what group he’s even affiliated with — and being a white supremacist, or whatever they called him,” Miller told The Republican & Herald.

Miller’s fellow activists had good cause for concern. DeNugent has posted more than 1,000 messages to the racist online forum Stormfront in recent years. However, he was banned from that forum earlier this year after he apparently threatened Stormfront moderator Don Black following Black’s request that DeNugent tone down the implied threats of violence in his posts.

DeNugent was enraged by the arrest of Henrik Hollapa, a young, Finnish neo-Nazi who fled to the U.S. last year after he was charged with inciting violence against Finnish citizens of Somali descent. Hollapa was living with DeNugent in a rural Pennsylvania home when he was taken into custody by federal agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

“I thank the Jews for making me more determined that ever to bring them all to conclusive world justice that all psychopaths merit,” DeNugent posted to Stormfront after Hollapa’s arrest. “I will transmute this rage I felt at my very core into a newer and icier resolve.”

“John, you’ve really lost it,” Black wrote in a post announcing that DeNugent was banned. “Back in the early 90s when you were just ‘John Nugent’ and came to our house to visit when you were selling a trust package for [leading anti-Semite] Willis Carto to the lady across the street, you told me you’d found a psychiatrist who was politically supportive who’d helped you. You need to leave here and find him.”

Miller said he plans to reschedule the planned May 30 Shenandoah rally for a date in the near future that will give him enough time to carefully examine the backgrounds of invited speakers, who include representatives of United Patriots of America, a nativist extremist group, and You Don’t Speak For Me!, a “Latino” front group for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Last week, pro-immigrant forces cheered news that the U.S. Justice Department has opened an investigation into Ramirez’s death and the way local authorities handled the case. Earlier this month, a Schuylkill County, Pa., jury found high school football stars Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak not guilty of homicide, ethnic intimidation and aggravated assault. Both were convicted of simple assault.

A few days later, a coalition of immigrant-bashing groups announced plans to hold a rally against illegal immigration in Shenandoah on Saturday, May 30. The groups include United Patriots of America, a nativist extremist group based in Linden, N.J., that’s known for conducting surveillance of day labor centers, and You Don’t Speak For Me!, a group created and funded by the Federation for American Immigration Reform that purports to represent Hispanic-Americans. “My main concern is getting these illegals off the streets, out of this town, and bringing forth the legal Mexican-American community,” rally organizer Joe Miller told The Republican & Herald, a regional newspaper.

Saturday’s rally will mark the second major nativist rally in Shenandoah since Ramirez, a 25-year-old father of two, was kicked to death in July 2008 by white teens shouting racial epithets. Six weeks after Ramirez was killed, the nativist extremist group Voice of the People held a “pro-immigration enforcement” rally near the site of the murder. The attending crowd of roughly 50 included several members of the Keystone State Skinheads, a Harrisburg, Pa.-based racist skinhead gang.

The New York Times reported last week that racial tensions in Shenandoah intensified after the verdict, with racist threats, vandalism and fights on the rise.

Joanne Yoon sued Carney and Schwilk for $1 million after the men circulated photos of her in late 2006 along with comments referring to her as “the Korean anorexic ACLU slut.” Yoon, who was then 24, helped monitor SDMM rallies for the American Civil Liberties Union. The images of her were posted to a Yahoo group titled “Korean Kommie Kunt.” Ever the sensitive soul, Schwilk changed the name of the group to “Joanne Yoon ACLU Goon” after female SDMM activists objected. But that didn’t stop Carney from sending a mass E-mail to SDMM members suggesting that Yoon was interested in protecting the civil rights of Mexican immigrants because of her fondness for “Brown Schlong.”

Schwilk was ordered to pay compensatory damages yesterday after a Superior Court jury decided against him. Punitive damages will be decided May 26. The court also entered a default judgment against Carney, who did not file a response to Yoon’s lawsuit.

Schwilk’s attorney called the decision “an injustice” and vowed to file an appeal.