Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes has always trusted his intellectual pedigree to keep him above the fray.

Boasting a Yale Law School degree and a smooth-talking manner, Rhodes from the start described the group he formed in 2009 — made up largely of law enforcement officials and past and present members of the military — as merely standing up for the Constitution and American liberties. When he urged his members to resist orders to impose martial law or create detention camps, he said, his were merely theoretical worries. After all, he said, Hessian mercenaries once did help the British during the American Revolution and Japanese Americans were rounded up and detained in internment camps during World War II.

He was no conspiracy theorist.

But nearly four years later, if there were any questions still remaining about what the Oath Keepers really are, an event the group has planned for this weekend should lay them all to rest. Starting on Friday at the Farragut State Park outside Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, the Oath Keepers are hosting the Northwest Patriots and Self Reliance Rally. The lineup of participating allies is revealing. ( continue to full post… )

The anti-immigrant lobby has long enjoyed influence in Washington but in recent years has been forced to defend itself against charges that it represents the narrow interests of white nationalists who fear the “browning” of America.

So it may have surprised some when a new coalition of African-American activists, called the Black American Leadership Alliance (BALA), announced its opposition to legislation that could provide a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented Latino immigrants.

In a June 3 letter to members of Congress, BALA claimed the proposed bill “will harm black American workers more than any other group” because “[m]ass immigration and amnesty puts African Americans from all walks of life out of work and suppresses wages, causing them to compete with aliens willing to work in poorer working conditions for cheaper pay.”

What BALA did not say in that letter — or during a press conference in April when it called itself the African American Leadership Council — was anything about its provenance. There’s a good reason for that. It turns out that BALA is simply the latest front group for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the flagship of a network of anti-immigrant organizations formed by the white nationalist John Tanton. ( continue to full post… )

Derek Black, son of the former Alabama Klan leader who now runs the largest racist Web forum in the world, has renounced white nationalism, saying that he has been through “a gradual awakening process” and apologizing for his past activism.

In an E-mail (pdf) to the editor of this blog earlier this week, Black, 24, wrote that he had come to see the arguments of white nationalism as “principally flawed,” adding that he had realized that American society is marked by an “overwhelming disparity between white power and that of everyone else” and that white nationalism was really about “an entrenched desire to preserve white power at the expense of others.” ( continue to full post… )

Tony Perkins

As barriers to equality for the LGBT community continue to fall, the Family Research Council (FRC), an influential Christian Right group that has been propagating anti-gay pseudo-science for decades, is broadening its message by adopting the language of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement.

Case in point: This week, less than two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the federal government cannot discriminate against legally married same-sex couples, the FRC circulated an online fundraising appeal that urges recipients to “Seize this Opportunity to Stop Tyranny in America!” ( continue to full post… )

Paula Deen has had a crummy couple of weeks.

Since it emerged in late June that the celebrity chef has used offensive racial slurs, is fond of racist and anti-Semitic jokes, yearned to host a “real Southern plantation” wedding featuring black waiters tricked out as slaves, and doesn’t particularly mind if her employees watch pornography at work, Deen’s sponsors have dropped her like the hotcakes she’ll no longer be shown making on The Food Network. Wal-Mart, Target, Smithfield Foods, and pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk have cut ties with Deen, and on June 28, Ballantine Books canceled a multi-book contract, despite high presale numbers for Paula Deen’s New Testament: 250 Recipes, All Lightened Up.

But where some brands see a liability, WorldNetDaily (WND), the far-right supermarket tabloid of the Internet, sees an opportunity. ( continue to full post… )

For the past three years, a mysterious figure calling himself Horus the Avenger has operated White Rabbit Radio, an online community of racists dedicated to spreading a message called the “Mantra” far and wide.

Written by a curmudgeonly segregationist with a history of drug abuse named Robert Whitaker, the 221-word Mantra is an attack on multiculturalism. “Anti-racist is code word for anti-white,” the Mantra reads in part.

Its widespread presence on the Internet is due to a small but highly dedicated group of activists who call themselves the “swarm” and furiously propagate it online. In essence, they comprise an online flash mob, spending hours posting the Mantra in the comments section of YouTube videos, tagging it to news articles on race, and reprinting the Mantra in full on most white nationalist websites of note.

But until now, little was known about the energetic propagandist known as Horus. He has had no known membership in any racist group and has gone to great lengths to hide his identity. In his first podcast, in 2009, he boasted, “You don’t know who I am. You’re never going to know.” ( continue to full post… )

Kevin MacDonald with racist skinheads

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Or perhaps descended is a better word.

Psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, a once-respectable instructor at California State University, Long Beach, who once may have inspired students to pursue the honorable path of examining and improving the human condition, now celebrates the imagined deaths of his enemies, including those of myself and a colleague. ( continue to full post… )

The advertising pitch says it all: “Put some Ham in MoHAMed.”

Jihawg Ammunition, based in Dalton Gardens, Idaho, has recently begun selling bullets laced with a pork coating, promising “patriot” gun owners that the bullets “will strike fear into the hearts of those bent upon hate, violence and murder.” ( continue to full post… )

They just can’t stop lying. They claim to represent Christianity and the celestial love for mankind that Christ embodied, but when it comes to whomever they regard as their enemies here on planet Earth, the crudest of libels will do.

The latest example of the religious right’s endless series of falsifications, slanders and baseless demonizations came last Friday from Janet Porter, the former Janet Folger who heads the Faith2Action website, is an Obama-bashing “birther,” and really, really dislikes gay people. On a YouTube video, Porter claimed that the Southern Poverty Law Center had named the Concerned Women for America a hate group, published its president’s address, and “invited” people to “visit” her. ( continue to full post… )

Ron Paul, the libertarian former Texas congressman whose hard-line views are widely admired on the radical right but who claims to reject racism, has started a new organization stacked with a hodgepodge of far-right extremists.

As The Daily Beast reported yesterday, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity is ostensibly designed to promote a discourse about U.S. foreign policy. But its advisory board is stacked with what writer James Kirchik characterized as “a bevy of conspiracy theorists, cranks, and apologists for some of the worst regimes on the planet.” ( continue to full post… )