Men, women and children members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS, are occupying at least three of the properties. Their presence is causing anxiety among neighbors and public officials unsure how to react to the presence of a racist sect known to coerce underage girls into plural marriages.

“Quite frankly, we don’t know what to do,” said Custer County Sheriff Fred Jobe. “We are definitely aware that they here … but until they break some laws, there isn’t much that we can do.”

The real estate purchases by Lee A. Steed, a senior member of the FLDS, constitute the largest known cluster of land holdings outside of the FLDS-controlled communities of Colorado City, Ariz. and adjacent Hildale, Utah. Mr. Steed paid $725,000 cash to acquire two of the properties, real estate records show.

County commissioner Dick Downey said government officials have been quietly observing the influx of FLDS into the community but have not made it publicly known. But rumors abound in this small town and adjacent Silver Cliff, Colo., with a combined population about 1,000.

“We are concerned because of the various reports that we have received and the media exposure we have seen about this group in the last few months,” Downey said.

The FLDS attracted worldwide attention last month when Texas authorities raided a church ranch and removed 462 children and placed them into foster care pending the outcome of child custody hearings. Texas Child Protection Services reports that among the children are as many as 31 girls under 18 who have babies or are pregnant. Authorities allege that the FLDS is threatening the welfare of all the children because leaders indoctrinate girls to enter into polygamous marriages and bear children at a young age. Last year, after two years on the lam, FLDS leader Warren Jeffs was convicted as an accomplice to the rape of a young girl who was forced to marry her cousin.

The Southern Poverty Law Center placed the FLDS on its hate group list in 2005 for its racist beliefs, including the notion that black people have been cursed by the devil and are an inferior race. The FLDS is a breakaway sect from the 13-million member Mormon Church based in Salt Lake City, which disavowed polygamy in 1890 as a condition of Utah gaining statehood, and which began allowing blacks to become priests in 1978 ¬— a move that Jeffs called a victory for the devil.

The FLDS has openly practiced polygamy since the 1930s in Colorado City and Hildale, where church members control local governments. In recent years, the FLDS has begun to disperse to other areas, including a compound in Pringle, S.D., southwestern Colorado near Cortez, and the 1,700-acre ranch in Eldorado, Texas, that was raided in April.

Steed allegedly played a key role in helping Jeffs elude a nationwide manhunt in 2005 and 2006 when Jeffs was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. Acting on orders from Jeffs, Steed purchased secluded properties in Colorado that Jeffs used as hideouts, according to a civil suit filed in St. George, Utah by a former FLDS member.

Custer County property records show that Steed filed a quit claim deed on a Westcliffe hideout in July 2006, walking away from a $40,000 down payment made in January of that year. The property was returned to the original owner one month before Jeffs was arrested. Jeffs is serving two, consecutive five-year-to-life sentences in Utah on the rape conviction and is awaiting trial in Mohave County, Ariz., on sexual misconduct and incest charges.

Jeffs’ arrest in August 2006 and conviction on two counts of accomplice to rape charges in September 2007 has not ended Steed’s acquisitions in Custer County and adjacent Fremont County. The recent spate of purchases suggests that the FLDS plans to take up permanent residence in a very conservative, decidedly Christian, ranching community. The sect’s history of plural marriages is not something that is likely to lead to the group being widely accepted in the area.

“They are not going to be assimilated into the community,” said Custer County Undersheriff Craig Feldman, whose wife’s family has resided in the area for five generations and is a major Custer County landowner.

Three of Steeds’ properties are located within a few miles of Westcliffe. In November 2006, Steed purchased a 6,000-square foot, nine-bedroom, six-bath, log home on 35 acres (pictured below) that was in foreclosure for $350,000 cash, according to Custer County records. Neighbors say a large group of men and women soon moved into the two-story structure and began working around the clock.

Kathleen Kerr, who owns a house next door, said activity on the Steed property has ruined the community’s rural flavor with bright lights on all night, constant construction, and noise generated by ATVs patrolling the property as well as occasional gunfire. “It’s just not quiet and peaceful there anymore,” Kerr said, adding that she has put her 35-acre, three-bedroom cabin retreat up for sale.

Following a pattern seen throughout Colorado City and Hildale where many homes are encircled by fences, Steed built a six-foot-high wooden fence across the front of the property soon after moving in around Thanksgiving 2006. The fence stands in sharp contrast to most homes in the community that refrain from blocking spectacular mountain views.

Another neighbor, who asked not to be identified, said the Steed property has generated a lot of traffic on what was before a very lightly traveled gravel road. “There were lots of expensive vehicles coming and going, mostly during the night,” the neighbor said.

The FLDS men and boys would sometimes talk to neighbors, residents say, but the women, dressed in their prairie-style dresses, hide from view. The neighbor said most of the men and boys left the property earlier this winter and that the repairs that were once quickly made have been left unattended.

The property, however, is still occupied. Hatewatch observed a large white SUV enter the property on May 11 and drive up to the house.

Steed, who did not return a message left on a phone number he listed with Custer County, added to his holdings in December when he purchased 80 acres of grazing land about three miles southwest of Westcliffe for $428,000, with a $30,000 down payment and a $398,000 mortgage.

Steed’s Custer County portfolio expanded again last month when he purchased 80 acres about six miles south of town that includes a ranch house, a large barn and other outbuildings. Undersheriff Feldman said he has seen FLDS men, women and children at the property while working on a house Feldman is remodeling across the road.

Steed’s purchase has not yet been recorded, but an official with the Custer County Assessor’s Office confirmed that Steed owns the property and is remodeling the home. The previous owner purchased the property, which includes irrigated pasture, for $650,000 in April 2007.

In addition to the three Custer County properties, Steed purchased two properties in adjacent Fremont County in 2007. In July, Steed bought a 4,600-square-foot, six-bedroom log home in an upscale development in Cotopaxi for $375,000 cash. The log home sits high on a hillside with a view of the still snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Last December, Steed bought 40 acres with a ranch house on the west of state highway 67 about 10 miles south of Florence. He paid $275,000 for the property, according to county records.

At the time of the purchase, the homestead included a 2,400-square foot house and an outbuilding. But considerable construction activity is visible from the highway, and a large building that appears to be an additional residence hovers above the original home. There is also evidence of excavation on a hillside next to the highway.

Kerr said she and her husband noticed similar excavation work done at the Westcliffe residence. “It looked like they were building underground storage or bunkers,” she said.

[CA] Public Defender Blames School For Murder Of Gay Student
The Los Angeles Times / May 8, 2008
The lawyer representing 14-year-old Brandon McInerney, who allegedly shot to death a gay classmate, argued that school officials should have quelled tensions between the two boys rather than allowing the victim to wear feminine accessories and flirt with McInerny.

[MI] Neo-Nazi Leader Schemes To Exploit Ailing Economy
The Livingston Daily Press & Argus / May 12, 2008
National Socialist Movement commander Jeff Schoep, who relocated the NSM to the Detroit area last December, sees recruitment opportunities in the region’s economic malaise and racial tensions.

[WI] ‘Die, Jew’ Scrawled On Synagogue Doors
The Wisconsin State Journal / May 5, 2008
Vandals drew three swastikas and wrote “Die, Jew” on the outside door and walls of the Beth Israel Center in Madison.

[GA] ‘Swastika Lawn Mower Man’ Re-Arrested
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution / May 9, 2008
Steven Whitfield, 31, who was arrested April 16 after he mowed swastikas into his lawn and pointed a rifle at passerby, was taken into custody again for aiming a firearm at a juvenile girl.

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[MO] FAIR-Backed Missouri Group Pushes Higher Education Ban
The Columbia Missourian / May 8, 2008
Missourians Against Illegal Immigration, a group founded by the Missouri state adviser to Federation for American Immigration Reform, placed advertisements in newspapers across the state to support a Senate bill that would ban illegal immigrants from higher education and jobs.

[CA] Lawyers For San Diego Minutemen Argue Highway Sign Case
The International Herald Tribune / May 10, 2008
Lawyers for the San Diego Minutemen argued in federal court that the state of California violated the group’s constitutional rights by relocating its Adopt-A-Highway location away from a border patrol checkpoint.

[CA] Minuteman Project Extends Consulate Protests
The Press-Enterprise / May 8, 2008
Minuteman Project activists continued demonstrating outside Mexican consulates in San Bernardino, Santa Ana and San Diego.

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First Phoenix New Times blogger Stephen Lemons unearthed a photo of Patriots Border Alliance leaders and members posing with a wheelchair-bound Elton Hall, a septuagenarian neo-Nazi and past Arizona organizer for George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party who still frequently attends racist skinhead festivals and anti-immigration demonstrations in the Phoenix area. Hall was injured in February when he was struck by a car while participating in a Patriots Border Alliance-sponsored protest outside a day labor center. The photo of him surrounded by adoring Patriots Border Alliance activists was posted on the group’s website accompanied by this caption: “PATRIOTS BORDER ALLIANCE HONORING ELTON HALL: In appreciation for your service, devotion, commitment to securing American border and promoting THE RULE OF LAW.”

Three days after the Hall photo surfaced, the El Paso Times ran a story in which Border Patrol spokesman Doug Mosier debunked several outlandish claims made by Patriots Border Alliance president Bob Wright at a recent meeting of the far-right Eagle Forum in Alamagordo, N.M.

At that meeting, Wright claimed that he’d been shocked during one recent mission on the Texas border when he’d spotted “hundreds” of people massed on the Mexican side of the line, waiting to cross.

Mosier told the Times, “We have never seen anything like that, nor have we even heard of anything like that.”

Wright also repeated the common border vigilante legend about “rape trees” on the border (Wright called them “sex trees”), to which women are supposedly tied and gang-raped by Mexican bandits.

“Again, we have never heard or seen such a thing,” Mosier said. “I am sure if this was factual, we would have at least heard something about it. … We know that some [women] are attacked. But trees? No. That is not true.”

[PN] Skinheads Held For Trial On Weapons, Conspiracy, Assault Charges
Philadelphia Daily News / April 26, 2008
Three members of the Keystone State Skinheads face a criminal trial for allegedly conspiring to attack a fourth member of the gang last Memorial Day weekend because he got a tattoo they didn’t like.

[FL] Synagogue Defaced With Swastikas
Miami Herald / May 1, 2008
Vandals spray-painted a series of swastikas on a synagogue along with pro-Hitler graffiti nearby two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day.

[FL] White Supremacist Arrested For Sexual Battery
The Suncoast News / April 28, 2008
Self-proclaimed Aryan Brotherhood member Larry Austin Gregory, 37, was arrested for allegedly raping a 17-year-old girl.

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In 2001, BNP head Nick Griffin, a Holocaust denier, told reporters that his party did not admit anyone not descended from European whites or “kindred” peoples. (The BNP has since accepted a tiny handful of people of color in order to bolster its battle against Muslims.) The party is particularly well known for its hardline anti-immigrant views. Its officials have proposed deporting all illegal immigrants and even paying legal immigrants to leave England, promising “voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin.”

Despite his party’s affiliation with white nationalism, Barnbrook tried to reassure foreign-born Londoners after his election. “Do not be nervous. As long as you abide by our identity and laws of this land, come to me and I will see where we can help,” Barnbrook told the BBC.

Barnbrook was the best known of several BNP councillors — the rough equivalent of local City Council members in the United States — before his May election to the higher-ranking post. He was well known to most Londoners, in part because in 2006 he was accused of making a film 17 years earlier that was widely described as gay pornography. (The BNP opposes the “promotion” of homosexuality.) He angrily disputed the charge, saying it was simply an art film about “sexuality.”

Just days after Barnbrook’s election, Scotland’s new counter-terrorism chief Allan Burnett said that neo-Nazis pose a serious terrorist threat to the United Kingdom. “We’ve had a number of right-wing issues recently in the U.K. that again have raised their head in Scotland,” Burnett said. Referring to the arrest of an alleged neo-Nazi in Scotland last fall for making nail-bombs, he added: “There’s no point promoting positive race relations if, in claiming to be everyone’s coordinator of counter terrorism, you take your eye off the right-wing.”

[AZ] American Freedom Riders Join Recall Effort Against Phoenix Mayor
The Arizona Republic / April 30, 2008
American Freedom Riders member Keith LeFebvre announced that his group was the core of American Citizens United, a political action coalition formed to attempt to recall Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon for being “soft” on illegal immigration.

[TX] Border Mayors Spar With Tancredo
San Antonio Express-News / May 2, 2008
Members of the Texas Border Coalition took issue with U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo’s muttered suggestion that a border fence should be placed north of Brownsville, Tex.

[CA] Fire Coalition Teams With Minuteman Project For Consulate Protest
San Bernardino County Sun / May 1, 2008
About 20 members of the Minuteman Project and the Fire Coalition, many of them clad in red, white and blue, gathered outside a Mexican Consulate to protest illegal immigration.

[UT] Minuteman Submits Immigration Resolution To GOP Convention
The Deseret News / May 2, 2008
Utah Minuteman Project member Alex Segura submitted a resolution to the Salt Lake County GOP convention that calls for Republicans to oppose Illegal immigration, advocate for secure borders and affirm the United States as a “Christian nation.”

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And what brought on Buchanan’s gloomy mood? Apparently, he was greatly bothered by a new report put out in early April by the National Policy Institute (NPI), a white nationalist research group. Entitled “Global White Population to Plummet to Single Digit – Black Population to Double,” NPI’s research supposedly spells doom for the white “race.” In so many words, the report argues that by 2060, blacks and Asians will have whites on the run. This “status reversal” will lead to countries like Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Russia being “pressured to accept collectively hundreds of millions of refugees from India, and sub-Sahara Africa,” according to the report.

That thought has Buchanan mightily worried. “Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them,” he frets.

That may be the closest thing to a criticism of the white “race” that Buchanan has ever uttered. Just last month, his writing had a more familiar whites-are-the-best tone, as reflected in his “A Brief for Whitey”: “It was [in America] that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. … No people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans.”

As usual, Buchanan was underestimating and minimizing the effect of slavery on Africans. In fact, scholars say that more than 1 million slaves survived the trip to the United States from Africa (about 10 times that number were sold in other countries) between the 15th and the 19th centuries. Buchanan also made no mention of the huge numbers — an estimated 1 million people — who died during the Middle Passage across the Atlantic because of abominable conditions in the slave ships.

It’s not surprising that Buchanan relies on suspect research put out by white nationalists. After all, he has done the same in prior columns and in his books, The Death of the West and State of Emergency, both of which could fairly be described as white nationalist tracts. What is surprising is that someone pushing racist views so far out of the mainstream can be regularly found on mainstream media organizations like MSNBC.

[CA] Prosecutors: White Supremacist Cop Killer Tried To Have Witness Murdered
The Sacramento Bee / April 22, 2008
White supremacist gang member Brendt Volarvich, 22, allegedly tried to have a witness killed while awaiting trial for murdering a highway patrolman, a crime for which he was convicted and now faces the death penalty.

[CA] Asian Man Stabbed By ‘White Power’ Attackers
The San Gabriel Valley Tribune / April 23, 2008
A 15-year-old and a 20-year-old were arrested on attempted murder and hate crime charges for allegedly stabbing an Asian man in the face and torso while shouting racial epithets, leaving the victim in critical condition.

[LA] Teenager Accepts Plea Deals In Noose Incident
The Town Talk / April 23, 2008
Jeremiah Munsen, 19, pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor for driving a pick-up truck displaying a hangman’s noose around a group of black civil rights marchers after a “Jena Six” rally last year.

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[NC] Latinos Protest County Commissioner’s Comments
WBTV News / April 25, 2008
Mecklenburg County Commissioner Bill James is refusing to apologize for likening illegal immigrants to drug dealers and prostitutes.

[WI] School Official Physically Threatened Over Pledge Of Allegiance In Spanish
The Progressive / April 21, 2008
Dr. Norman Fjelstad, the school superintendent in charge of Edgerton High School, says he’s received threats of physical harm for allowing students in the school’s Spanish class to recite the pledge of allegiance in the language they’re studying.

[TX] Conservative Students Organize ‘Catch The Illegal Immigrant’ Game
The Amarillo Globe-News / April 22, 2008
Members of the Texas Tech chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas roiled their campus by playing “Catch the Illegal Immigrant,” a politically charged version of hide-and-seek.

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