Pvt. Isaac Aguigui, the alleged ringleader of a murderous antigovernment group, was charged today by the United States Army with killing his wife, who was several months pregnant when she was found dead in their home on the Fort Stewart military base in Georgia nearly two years ago.

The 21-year-old Aguigui, according to Georgia state prosecutors, funded his dreams of overthrowing the government through a campaign of political assassination and other acts of terror with money from a $500,000 life insurance policy he received after the “highly suspicious” death in July 2011 of his wife, Deirdre, an army sergeant who had served a tour of duty in Iraq as a linguist. ( continue to full post… )

The assassination-style killings of two prosecutors in Texas are precipitating the postings of vile, anti-Semitic, almost-gleeful public comments by assorted racists and white supremacists. ( continue to full post… )

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — “Here they come,” someone shouted, standing in the rain in the fenced-in and heavily guarded protest area set up here more than 100 yards from where the Ku Klux Klan was beginning its controversial rally Saturday on the steps of the Shelby County Courthouse.

“I can’t see them,” someone else said, climbing on his tiptoes. “They’re too many cops in the way.”

The police presence was indeed overwhelming and the rain steady as the Klan arrived at the courthouse steps at 2:15, about 45 minutes late on the day before Easter. But from the city-designated protest area it was impossible to hear them and nearly impossible to see them except for the tops of their pointy white hoods. ( continue to full post… )

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Pay no attention to that man beneath the sheet.

Do not go downtown to listen to his wicked words. Do not heckle or protest his presence. He is not worth it. His time has passed. He has no teeth.

That’s the message of the city of Memphis as it faces a trying day.

On Saturday – Easter eve – the Ku Klux Klan is scheduled to hold a “mass” rally here to protest the city’s recent decision to rename three Confederate-themed parks, including one honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, the wealthy slave trader and ruthless Rebel cavalry lieutenant general, who became the first national leader of the KKK. But as the general’s modern day Klan kin rant and rave on the steps of the Shelby County Courthouse, local political, religious and business leaders hope everyone else in town – except for a huge contingent of police officers in riot gear – is more than five miles away at a hastily organized counter-event called the Heart of Memphis. It is scheduled to be an all-day affair at the fairgrounds with food, music, an Easter egg hunt and several panels on improving race relations in this Mississippi River city of more than 600,000 residents, 63% of whom are African-American. ( continue to full post… )

A 36-year-old software engineer who shot and killed a California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer last fall was bipolar and held antigovernment “sovereign citizen” views, an investigation by the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office has concluded.

Christopher Lacy’s ideological ties to the sovereign citizen movement, whose adherents generally believe they are immune to federal tax and many criminal laws, were documented with more than 100 interviews and search warrants. But the seven-month investigation failed to determine why he shot CHP Trooper Kenyon Youngstrom on Sept. 4. ( continue to full post… )

White supremacist student Matthew Heimbach, a thorn in the side of Maryland’s Towson University who has led two racist campus organizations, says his White Student Union (WSU) will start patrolling the campus at night next week in order to halt what his group characterizes as a “black crime wave.”

Heimbach, a 21-year-old who has said he had his “racial awakening” while still in high school, has been in the national news since earlier this month, when he and fellow WSU member Scott Terry interrupted panelists at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with a series of racist arguments. Terry advocated “separate but equal” policies, described slavery as providing food and shelter to black people, and allegedly muttered, “Why can’t we just have segregation” in the exchange. The event, caught on videotape and broadcast nationally, was a severe embarrassment to CPAC, which has tried to avoid being tarred as racist. ( continue to full post… )

More than 250,000 Americans over the age of 12 are victimized every year by hate criminals, according to a new government study that puts the number some 50,000 higher than the best earlier analyses. At the same time, the study found that in recent years only about one in three hate crimes are ever reported to law enforcement officials.

The study, carried out by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, was based primarily on the annual National Crime Victimization Survey, which employs detailed questionnaires that are widely considered the most accurate measure of U.S. crime available. In addition to analyzing more recent years, it refines two earlier studies based on the surveys, to produce data for the years 2003-2011. ( continue to full post… )

Thousands of conservative culture warriors are gathering in Washington this morning for the “March for Marriage,” timed to coincide with today’s U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments over the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, the 2008 voter referendum that banned same-sex marriage.

The march and rally on the National Mall is sponsored by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the most visible and well-funded group working to deny marriage to same-sex couples. It’ll probably be a feel-good moment for the anti-LGBT activists, but given the rapidly changing political landscape and a powerful tide of public opinion turning against them, it wouldn’t be surprising if the NOM organizers felt they were marching straight into oblivion. ( continue to full post… )

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — You might have thought that a conference with the title “Conservative Call to Action” would feature lots of talk of small government, of Ronald Reagan, of the need to defend traditional values and a capitalist economy. But that would be yesterday’s conservatives.

Instead, at the event held Saturday in this famously conservative town that is home to the nation’s biggest concentration of Christian Right organizations, rabid Florida pastor Terry Jones, whose televised burning of Korans set off riots overseas that left several people dead, claimed that he didn’t hate Muslims at all — and then went on to rant that Islam “makes Nazism, fascism look like charity.” He was joined by other “conservatives” who warned that the universities are brimming with “commies,” that all liberals are evil, that President Obama only won re-election through “massive voter fraud,” and that the president’s health care plan is “Marxism to the core.”

Symptomatic of the shift of a broad swath of the conservative movement to outright paranoid fantasy was the appearance of Dinesh D’Souza, who was once a respected commentator on the right. D’Souza began to run off the rails with a 2010 Forbes magazine article that he expanded into a book and then into a 2012 film, “2016: Obama’s America.” The article was pilloried by more old-fashioned conservatives, including Daniel Larison, who described it in The American Conservative as “the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written.” The article, book and film argue that Obama is motivated by a dream of undermining Western power. ( continue to full post… )

A federal jury on Friday convicted James Timothy Turner, one of the nation’s most prominent antigovernment “sovereign citizens,” on 10 tax fraud charges stemming from seminars he held between 2007 and 2009 that purported to teach people how to tap into “secret” government accounts to pay their tax bills.

Turner, 57, of Ozark, Ala., gave a half-hearted wave as U.S. Marshals took him into custody after the guilty verdict was read today in Montgomery, Ala. He faces as many as 168 years in prison when he is sentenced in U.S. District Court this summer.

Turner was convicted of using a fictitious financial instrument, purportedly valued at $300 million, to pay his own taxes and of assisting others who wanted to get out of paying their taxes with similar “bonds” that he claimed would draw on government accounts. ( continue to full post… )