An Independence woman allegedly helped others in 2006 to vandalize and set fire to a biracial man’s mobile home because they wanted him out of their neighborhood. A federal grand jury indicted Teresa Witthar, 43, on seven counts Wednesday for allegedly conspiring to violate the man’s civil rights by threatening and intimidating him because of his race or color.

A Bay Point heroin dealer has been sentenced to 13 years for fatally stabbing a Pittsburg man he wrongly suspected had stolen Harley-Davidson motorcycle parts from a fellow gang member’s garage. Van Quinliven, 47, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for attacking 35-year-old Ricky Mendoza last year. Quinliven is a member of the CoCo Boys, an Aryan street gang with strong prison ties.

A federal appeals court last week affirmed a lower court decision throwing out a lawsuit brought by a hard-line anti-abortion group against the Obama Administration over a controversial government report on right-wing extremism.

The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, represented by the religious-right Thomas More Law Center, had alleged that the April 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security essentially set up conservatives for disfavored treatment. It also claimed, without evidence, that the report had been “created, adopted, implemented, and enforced through a partnership” with the Anti-Defamation League, the National Abortion Federation and the Southern Poverty Law Center, publisher of this blog.

A lower court dismissed the case, but the Thomas More Center filed an appeal. On Aug. 4, the 6^th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the plaintiffs “have not pleaded a claim that plausibly suggests their entitlement to relief.” ( 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… )

It’s hard enough trying to overcome a history of violence and race hatred for a new life of redemption and purpose. Imagine trying to do so with the evidence of your evil past etched indelibly on your face in the form of tattoos proclaiming racist and violent themes.

After spending 16 years as a vicious brawler and razor-carrying enforcer for white-power skinhead gangs operating in Indiana and Ohio, Bryon Widner (above) became a husband and father – and realized he didn’t want to raise his family in the hostile culture of white supremacy and violent lawlessness he once embraced and promoted. But the co-founder of the Vinlanders Social Club skinhead gang – at one time one of the largest and most notorious of the nation’s skinhead groups – knew that his marked face would forever frustrate his efforts to rejoin the respectable world.

Against daunting odds, Widner made a permanent break with his past, undergoing some two dozen horribly painful laser treatments over the course of two years to remove the tattoos on his face and neck. The expensive treatments were made possible by the Southern Poverty Law Center – the same civil rights and social justice organization that once tracked Widner’s career in hate.

The dramatic story of Widner and his wife, Julie, is captured in the one-hour documentary “Erasing Hate,” which airs Sunday at 9 p.m. EDT on MSNBC. The film recounts the couple’s life within the white power movement, the decision that led them to leave it, and the treatments he underwent to remove the tattoos. ( continue to full post… )

Today, The Atlantic magazine published an analysis of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups, which hit a high in 2010 of 1,002 groups. The analysis provides a “geography of hatred” in America and looks at what factors correlate with areas that are hotbeds for hate groups.

Written by Senior Editor Richard Florida, the research found that hate groups, when population is taken into account, are most highly concentrated in the Deep South and the northern Plains states. The states with the highest per capita concentrations of hate groups are Montana and Mississippi. Hate groups are least concentrated in the Northeast, the Great Lakes region and the West Coast. Minnesota has the lowest per capita concentration of hate groups of all.

The Atlantic also found that several other factors are associated with high concentrations of hate groups: high levels of poverty and religiosity and low levels of education. The share of the vote for President Obama is negatively correlated with a high concentration of hate groups. The Atlantic also reports that hate groups “reflect the underlying openness, tolerance and diversity of an area.” According to the analysis, hate groups negatively correlate with concentrations of gay and lesbian households and with areas where there are larger concentrations of immigrants.

In line with earlier studies, the research found no correlation between hate crimes and the number of hate groups. Instead, the research found that hate crimes are more closely connected to “adverse economic conditions, particularly unemployment and to a lesser extent poverty.”

Editor’s Note: The Southern Poverty Law Center is today releasing its annual count of groups on the American radical right and analysis. What follows is the main essay from the new issue of the Intelligence Report, the SPLC’s investigative magazine. In the story, you’ll find links to our new hate group map and additional lists of antigovernment “Patriot” groups and nativist vigilante organizations. The issue also contains my editorial and stories on Cliff Kincaid, a homophobic propagandist at the far-right Accuracy in Media group; the adoption of an Oklahoma law forbidding the use of Shariah law; a racist group’s funding of two Mississippi private academies; a white supremacist’s new novel targeting the SPLC; the National Center for Constitutional Studies and its extremist version of American history; candidates with extreme-right ideas who ran in last year’s elections; an interview with a former “esoteric Nazi,” and more. The new issue’s table of contents is here.

For the second year in a row, the radical right in America expanded explosively in 2010, driven by resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government’s handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities. For many on the radical right, anger is focusing on President Obama, who is seen as embodying everything that’s wrong with the country.

Hate groups topped 1,000 for the first time since the Southern Poverty Law Center began counting such groups in the 1980s. Anti-immigrant vigilante groups, despite having some of the political wind taken out of their sails by the adoption of hard-line anti-immigration laws around the country, continued to rise slowly. But by far the most dramatic growth came in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement ­— conspiracy-minded organizations that see the federal government as their primary enemy — which gained more than 300 new groups, a jump of over 60%.

Taken together, these three strands of the radical right — the hatemongers, the nativists and the antigovernment zealots — increased from 1,753 groups in 2009 to 2,145 in 2010, a 22% rise. That followed a 2008-2009 increase of 40%. ( continue to full post… )

White racial extremists are certain that “their” culture is under attack and has to be defended with guns. “If there is going to be any salvation of our culture, white European culture, violence is guaranteed because they’re not listening,” says long-time neo-Nazi and White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger. I am not quite sure what Metzger is talking about — salvation for European culture in the United States? What exactly is “white culture”? But as Mariah Wilson’s new documentary “Revealing Hate” shows, racial extremists are typically better at advocating and committing violence than coherently explaining their irrational views.

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Since the SPLC warned the U.S. military about extremist activity among active-duty personnel in 2006, the Pentagon brass has steadfastly denied that a problem existed and insisted that its “zero-tolerance” policy was sufficient to keep organized racists out of its ranks.

That changed this past November, when the Pentagon quietly tightened its policy on extremist activity, which formerly only banned “active participation” in extremist groups but did not define what that meant.

Under the new regulations, military personnel “must not actively advocate supremacist doctrine, ideology or causes” or “otherwise advance efforts to deprive individuals of their civil rights.” The new rules specify that “active participation” includes activities such as recruiting, fundraising, demonstrating or rallying, training, organizing and distributing supremacist material, including online posts.

The revision should give commanders ample new tools to root out racial extremists in their midst. The previous policy, in effect since the mid-1990s, could be interpreted to mean that military personnel were allowed to be “mere members” of hate groups or that they could engage in unaffiliated extremist activities — such as posting racist and anti-Semitic messages to social networking websites and e-mail lists or maintaining online profiles filled with racist materials. As the SPLC has repeatedly pointed out, the policy allowed numerous active-duty members to engage in a range of supremacist activities.
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Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released its annual “Year in Hate and Extremism” report. Broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.

The SPLC documented a 244 percent increase in the number of active “Patriot” groups in 2009. “Patriot” groups and the paramilitary arm of the movement, the militias, are steeped in wild, antigovernment conspiracy theories and see the federal government as their enemy. Their numbers grew from 149 groups in 2008 to 512 groups in 2009, an astonishing addition of 363 new groups in a single year. Militias were a major part of the increase, growing from 42 in 2008 to 127 in 2009.

The numbers back up an August report by the SPLC, “The Second Wave: Return of the Militias,” that first documented the return of antigovernment extremist groups. The movement came roaring back to life after more than a decade of decline. The increase is worrying as the 1990s Patriot movement was associated with high levels of violence, most dramatically the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead.

The growth of Patriot groups comes at a time when the number of hate groups stayed at record levels – rising from 926 in 2008 to 932 in 2009, according to the report. The increase caps a decade in which the number of hate groups surged by 55 percent. The expansion would have been much greater in 2009 if not for the demise of the American National Socialist Workers Party, a key neo-Nazi network whose founder was arrested in October 2008.

There also has been a surge in “nativist extremist” groups – vigilante organizations that go beyond advocating strict immigration policy and actually confront or harass suspected immigrants. These groups grew from 173 groups in 2008 to 309 in 2009, a rise of nearly 80 percent.

These three strands of the radical right – the hate groups, the nativist extremist groups, and the Patriot organizations – are the most volatile elements on the American political landscape. Taken together, their numbers increased by more than 40 percent, rising from 1,248 groups in 2008 to 1,753 last year.

Hatewatch recently posted a report about private E-mails of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) showing up on the Internet. While that post focused on the infighting that has dogged America’s largest neo-Nazi group, some of the E-mails also shed light on a more serious matter: racial extremists in the military.

The E-mails show that several people who identified themselves as active military personnel contacted NSM over the past two years to express interest in the organization, including at least one soldier who subsequently joined. Their inquiries were among more than 600 NSM E-mails that were posted late last month to the website wikileaks.org, which publishes leaked documents. The E-mails had been sent to a hotmail account maintained by an NSM member whose responsibilities included corresponding with potential recruits.

The NSM E-mails from military personnel provide more evidence that racial extremists are infiltrating the military and that service members are being recruited by hate groups. Since 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center has provided the military with information about white supremacist activity in its ranks. In July, the SPLC asked Congress to investigate the problem and to take steps to ensure that the armed forces are not inadvertently training future domestic terrorists.

Asked if the servicemen who contacted NSM would face consequences if they were still in the military, Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Les’ Melnyk said department policy prohibits active participation in “supremacist” groups. But enforcement of that policy falls to the individual service branches. “The Department works closely with its criminal investigative agencies and the FBI to ensure that gang or extremist activity in the military is aggressively investigated and appropriately prosecuted,” he wrote in an E-mail, “and that new accessions [recruits] are rigorously screened to deny entry to those who do not renounce participation in criminal gangs and activities.”

However, the policy sometimes has been interpreted to mean that military personnel are allowed to be “mere members” of hate groups or to engage in unaffiliated extremist activities, such as posting racist and anti-Semitic messages to social networking websites and E-mail lists or maintaining online profiles filled with racist materials. Melnyk said in his E-mail that the Defense Department believes it “is broad and inclusive in its definition of ‘active participation,’ and encourages commanders to pursue and weed out service members who actively participate in these type of groups.”

Among those who contacted NSM was an infantryman who identified himself as Kyle R. Wrobel. Writing from a hotmail contact, Wrobel told NSM that he was from Cleveland, Ohio. “i am a sergeant in the US Army infantry, currently serving my second combat tour to iraq,” he wrote on Jan. 17, 2008. “i vehemently support your cause, ( continue to full post… )