Serious federal conspiracy and firearms charges remain in place against Alaska militia leader Francis Schaeffer Cox, and he’s still in jail, even though state murder-conspiracy charges have been dismissed. ( continue to full post… )

The horrific events that took place in Norway this past Friday— a huge bombing in central Oslo closely followed by a bloody shooting rampage on nearby Utoya island that left 93 dead—are a sobering reminder of what extreme radical-right beliefs can drive some to do. And the threat is not confined to Norway or Europe. Exactly the same ideas that motivated the Oslo shooter to take up arms are popular in radical-right circles on this side of the Atlantic.

Anders Behring Breivik, 32, described by Norwegian police as a right-wing Christian fundamentalist, was apparently driven to act by hatred of Muslims and fears of multiculturalism. Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, equates liberalism and multiculturalism with “cultural Marxism,” something Breivik says is destroying European Christian civilization. Posted online just before the attacks, the manifesto is described in The New York Times as a diary of Breivik’s months of planning.

Writing under the Anglicized name “Andrew Berwick,” Breivik predicted a massive war that would kill or injure more than a million people as he and his small group seize “political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda.” Breivik’s manifesto also describes a secret April 2002 meeting in London to reconstitute the Knights Templar, a military order active in the medieval Crusades, that was attended by “representatives” of European countries and one “European-American.” The document does not name the attendees, and authorities are unclear the meeting actually occurred.

Fears of “cultural Marxism” have a long pedigree in this country. It’s a conspiratorial kind of “political correctness” on steroids — a covert assault on the American way of life that allegedly has been developed by the left over the course of the last 70 years. Those who use the term posit that a small group of German philosophers, all Jews who fled Germany and went to Columbia University in the 1930s to found the Frankfurt School, devised a cultural form of “Marxism” aimed at subverting Western civilization. The method involves manipulating the culture into supporting homosexuality, sex education, egalitarianism, and the like, to the point that traditional institutions and culture are ultimately wrecked. ( continue to full post… )

Alex Linder, who operates a leading Internet hate forum called Vanguard News Network, is expected to be subpoenaed by the Justice Department as a prosecution witness in the trial of a man accused of planting a potentially deadly bomb on the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. “unity parade” in Spokane, Wash.

Linder may be subpoenaed to answer questions about email exchanges and 1,139 postings made on the VNN forum by Kevin William Harpham (right), who used the moniker “Joe Snuffy” on the Web site while posting racist comments and seeking bomb-building advice, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Rice said at a pretrial hearing Thursday.

Linder and Harpham both have past ties to the National Alliance, once regarded as the most-dangerous neo-Nazi organization in the United States. ( continue to full post… )

The Washington Post today reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “has stepped back for the past two years from conducting its own intelligence and analysis of home-grown extremism” despite what experts describe as a rising threat from domestic extremists. The Post story was sparked by an explosive interview by the Southern Poverty Law Center of Daryl Johnson, who was DHS lead analyst of non-Islamic domestic terrorism until quitting in frustration last year.

As the Post noted, DHS “effectively eviscerated” Johnson’s team, cut the number of analysts studying such matters, and effectively stopped issuing reports meant for law enforcement agencies after the leak of an April 2009 DHS report on “rightwing extremism.” That report, which was meant for law enforcement only but was quickly leaked, was attacked by an array of conservative groups and individuals for supposedly tarring all on the political right as potential terrorists.

The Post also noted that SPLC President Richard Cohen wrote DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano last Friday requesting a reassessment of resources devoted to “the threat of non-Islamic domestic terrorism.” It also pointed out that the SPLC had compiled “Terror From the Right,” a list of almost 100 domestic terrorism and similar incidents on the radical right since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. In addition, it said, the SPLC recently reported that the number of hate groups has been growing for more than a decade, topping 1,000 for the first time in 2010. ( continue to full post… )