Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State and the architect of harsh, anti-immigrant laws in several states and cities, made a special trip to Hatewatch’s home state last week to testify in Birmingham before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The statutes pushed by Kobach – among them Arizona’s SB 1070 and Alabama’s even more draconian HB 56 – were devised to make life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they give up and “self-deport.” A lawyer with degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Yale, he began crafting anti-immigrant policy while working in John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice. In 2004, he was hired as senior counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), where he devised immigration legislation that would later serve as the basis of the laws in Arizona and Alabama. (IRLI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant hate group that yearns for a return to the days when immigration policy favored light-skinned northern Europeans over all others.) ( continue to full post… )

John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, the immigrant-bashing Los Angeles radio personalities who were suspended earlier this year when they referred to Whitney Houston as a “crack ho” and marveled that the late pop singer “took this long” to die, are back on the air and up to their old tricks.

In the August 3 edition of the “John & Ken Show,” the duo took up for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group since 2008 because of its virulent and false attacks on non-white immigrants.

“The Federation for American Immigration Reform, I think, has been defined by some of these think tank organizations as a hate group,” Chiampou said. ( continue to full post… )

Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association (AFA) spokesman whose ultraconservative worldview is so extreme that he makes Pat Buchanan look like Rachel Maddow, seems never to have met a fact that he couldn’t improve upon.

He has declared that gays were responsible for the Holocaust and opined that American Indians lost their land to European settlers because they (the natives) weren’t Christian. He has claimed that states have the right to impose religious tests on elected officials and said that HIV is not linked to AIDS – a dangerous and utterly false theory that has led to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in South Africa and elsewhere. ( continue to full post… )

Wade Michael Page, the racist skinhead who killed six people last weekend at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin before turning the gun on himself, was a “patched” member of the Northern Hammerskins, a regional chapter of the larger Hammerskin Nation, the Southern Poverty Law Center has learned.

Page became a full, or patched, member of the Hammerskin chapter last October and appeared to be rising quickly in the organization, according to postings on Crew 38, the online forum for Hammerskin Nation (HSN). This year, in fact, his girlfriend, using the name “LuluRoman” on the forum, directed all regional inquiries regarding Northern Hammerskin events to Page. ( continue to full post… )

The Family Research Council (FRC), an anti-gay hate group that claims LGBT rights advocates want to “recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order,” announced on Friday the appointment of retired Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin as its new executive vice president.

The press release accurately describes Boykin as a veteran who spent 36 years in the Army, serving in the elite Delta Force and, later, as deputy undersecretary of defense and intelligence in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.

What it does not mention, however, is Boykin’s troubled history of making  damaging, controversial statements; his work as a radical anti-Muslim propagandist; or his close involvement with the New Apostolic Reformation, a theocratic evangelical movement that believes demons control LGBT people, Catholics, Muslims and freemasons. ( continue to full post… )

Scott Lively, the anti-gay activist behind Abiding Truth Ministries, has been engaged in a decades-long, international campaign to demonize the LGBT community. He has lobbied on behalf of a law in Uganda to make homosexuality punishable by death and has worked hard to propagate the myth that gay men caused the Holocaust.

Now, he’s turning his attention to Springfield, Mo., where he has labeled a proposed expansion of the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance a “Gay Fascism bill.”

If passed, the new law will add protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity to the city’s standing law. According to local news reports, the Springfield City Council is scheduled to rule on it in August. ( continue to full post… )

The Tea Party Nation, one of the more extreme factions of the Tea Party movement, has dipped deeper into the conspiratorial waters of antigovernment lore, most recently promoting the Oath Keepers and other antigovernment “Patriots” as the last line of defense for Americans increasingly confronted with “a government verging on evil.”

In a post published over the weekend on the Tea Party Nation’s website, regular blogger Alan Caruba painted a dire picture of the threats to freedom that lie in wait under President Obama, whom he calls a “red diaper baby” and a far-left functionary “raised from birth and mentored to embrace communism.”

“Obama’s disregard for the Constitution, its separation of powers, and Americans suffering greatly from his policies, suggests that he is not beyond making the greatest grab for power using a bogus ‘national emergency’ or manufactured ‘crisis’ to declare martial law,” Caruba wrote. He goes on to cite three recent executive orders as proof positive that Obama is setting up the nation to abandon its constitutional mandates and wage an all-out campaign against freedom. ( continue to full post… )

A would-be Aryan warrior who apparently thought he’d committed the perfect murder forgot one thing: There’s no mud in North Dakota in the middle of the winter.

It was a pair of muddy boots and coveralls, along with a mud stain on a basement wall, that led investigators to discover the buried, decapitated head of a missing state university researcher in January 2011 in Cooperstown, N.D., Griggs County Sheriff Robert S. Hook told Hatewatch today.

Daniel Evan Wacht, a 31-year-racist from California with a lengthy criminal record, was convicted Tuesday in Griggs County District Court of felony murder in the death of Kurt Johnson, 54, of Cooperstown. ( continue to full post… )

The New Black Panther Party (NBPP) and New Black Liberation Militia (NBLM) are planning an armed rally in Sanford, Fla. later this month, Hatewatch has learned.

Speaking via phone from Jacksonville, where his group was holding a press conference with NBPP area spokesman Mikhail Muhammad, NBLM head Minister Prince Najee Shaka Muhammad today told Hatewatch that the armed rally, planned for April 21, is part of a crusade to obtain “justice” for Trayvon Martin, the black teenager whose shooting death in Sanford at the hands of a neighborhood watch volunteer has caused waves of outrage across America. ( continue to full post… )

The number of antigovernment “Patriot” groups grew at an astounding pace last year, as it has in all three years of the Obama presidency, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) annual count of extremist groups, released today. The number of these groups rose from 824 in 2010 to 1,274 last year.

This dramatic expansion of the radical right was driven by fears related to economic dislocation, the country’s changing racial makeup, and the prospect of four more years under our first black president. The campaign season, with its vitriolic rhetoric, has also contributed to the overheated atmosphere that is fostering these groups. In addition, many politicians and other public figures increasingly have been pushing conspiracy theories and demonizing rhetoric into the political mainstream.

The report on SPLC’s annual count and review of the last year in American extremism may be found here. The table of contents for the entire new issue of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report is here. What follows are synopses of the major stories found in the new edition. ( continue to full post… )