Yesterday evening, Secret Service agents raided former Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) Commander Ron Wilson’s business. They seized silver, files and computers from Atlantic Bullion & Coin, according to the Anderson, S.C., Independent Mail. The agents also seized items from his daughter Alison Shaum’s business, which is located next door.

Wilson is accused by the South Carolina’s attorney general in a civil suit of running a massive Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors in his company. So far, no one has been charged in the scheme.

On Thursday morning, the doors to Wilson’s business were locked and dozens of angry investors were outside. The Anderson paper reported that Wilson drove out of the back of the building and veered toward a group of reporters, but did not hit them.

Ron G. Wilson, a former national commander of the Southern heritage group Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) who appointed several extremists to the group’s governing boards and oversaw a purge of anti-racist members, has been accused by the South Carolina attorney general of defrauding investors in his company. A complaint made public Monday says Wilson and his Atlantic Bullion & Coin “have engaged in acts, practices, and transactions which violate the South Carolina Uniform Securities Act of 2005.”

Five violations of state’s security laws are alleged in the civil complaint, including making false claims under oath and the fraudulent sale of securities. The complaint says that Wilson’s business handled about $71 million, predominantly for silver investments, in the last four years. Wilson allegedly told securities investigators in South Carolina that he had some $16.9 million of his customers’ silver in a Delaware depository. But the attorney general’s complaint says that the depository has no records of Wilson, Wilson’s company or the silver. The complaint alleges that when customers asked to cash out, there was no silver in their accounts or the accounts had been altered. ( continue to full post… )

An Alaska man who is challenging President Barack Obama’s eligibility for office on the grounds that the president is a “mulatto” based his complaint on an argument common to the neo-Confederate and antigovernment “sovereign citizen” movements, Hatewatch has learned.

In a complaint filed Tuesday with the Alaska Division of Elections, Gordon Warren Epperly of Juneau argued that Obama isn’t eligible for office because, as a person of mixed-race descent, he is not a “natural-born citizen” of the United States. ( continue to full post… )

A Georgia administrative law judge has left in place a subpoena directing President Obama to appear at a hearing on Thursday regarding a “birther” complaint challenging the president’s eligibility for office.

Deputy Chief Judge Michael Malihi issued his decision Friday, writing that the president’s legal team “failed to enlighten the court with any legal authority” to back up its argument that no U.S. president should be compelled to attend a court hearing. They also failed to prove that attending the hearing would be “unreasonable and oppressive” and that the president’s testimony would be “irrelevant, immaterial or cumulative,” he wrote.

Orly Taitz, who filed one of the complaints and has for years led the farcical battle to prove that the president is constitutionally unqualified for office, called Malihi’s decision a “major victory.” ( continue to full post… )

The birther movement, which has bedeviled President Obama since well before his inauguration with questions about his citizenship, is celebrating something of a watershed moment as it prepares to have a day in court.

Earlier this month, Deputy Chief Judge Michael Malihi in Georgia’s Office of State Administrative Hearings denied a motion from the Obama campaign to dismiss four complaints seeking to remove the president’s name from the state’s Democratic primary ballot in March. The decision ultimately cleared the way for a procedural hearing on the challenges.

“I can’t believe this,” Orly Taitz, an attorney who filed one of the complaints, exclaimed on her blog. “[Obama] will have to stand trial to prove his eligibility for office.” ( continue to full post… )

Emory Dan Roberts, 67, who was one of four militia members arrested yesterday in a wide-ranging terrorism plot, was also a neo-Confederate activist who has rubbed elbows with hate group leaders.

In 2003, Roberts helped organize a protest in Toccoa, Ga., against attempts to change the Georgia state flag, which at that time featured the Confederate battle flag in its design. The flag was replaced in 2003 by referendum. ( continue to full post… )

In February 1961, more than 50,000 people – including three state governors – showed up in Montgomery, Ala., to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of Jefferson Davis’ inauguration as the first (and only) president of the Confederate States of America. It was one of many massive events that would mark the controversial, racially charged centennial of the Civil War. The same year in April, officials in Charleston, S.C., hoisted a Confederate battle flag above the Capitol in commemoration of the 100^th anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter that started the war. It flew until July 2000. ( continue to full post… )

In spring 2009, a Caddo Parish, La., prosecutor struck Carl Staples from the pool of potential jurors in the capital murder trial of Felton Dejuan Dorsey.

Staples was not removed from the jury pool because he opposed the death penalty. Rather, the prosecutor dismissed Staples after he expressed reservations about serving as a juror in a building whose courtyard features a prominently displayed Confederate flag. ( continue to full post… )

Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), an ultraconservative student group, has long cultivated relationships with white nationalist organizations like American Renaissance, the National Policy Institute and the H.L. Mencken Club. Last spring, it even allowed American Renaissance leader Jared Taylor — who has written that black people are incapable of sustaining any kind of civilization without whites to aid them — to write a fundraising letter, sent out with an accompanying missive from YWC’s president, suggesting that Taylor’s followers send YWC money.

But the campus group has insistently, if improbably, denied having any racist views.

Now, the YWC appears to be forging ties with the League of the South (LOS), a neo-Confederate hate group that advocates a second Southern secession and a society dominated by “European Americans.” The League believes that the “godly” nation it forms should be run by “Anglo-Celtic” (read: white) elites who would establish a Christian theocratic state and politically dominate non-white people. It leader, Michael Hill, opposes racial intermarriage and has denounced egalitarianism as a “Jacobin” leftist doctrine that undermines healthy societies. ( continue to full post… )

ABBEVILLE, S.C. – Since its bookish beginnings as a group dominated by academics in 1994, the League of the South (LOS) has been obsessively driven to glorify Southern history and culture, pining for the independence denied the region by federal troops 150 years ago.

Over the years, the neo-Confederate group’s platform grew to be distinctly racist, with the goal of a theocratic South defined by “the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and their institutions,” as its president, former Stillman College professor Michael Hill, once put it. At the same time, its early rhetoric angrily demanding that the rest of the country treat the South with more respect has been replaced with explicit calls for a second secession from the “ungodly” North.

Now, the League’s agenda appears to be evolving even further away from the ivory tower in favor of armed militancy and survivalist resistance.

During its national conference last weekend in Abbeville, S.C. — the self-proclaimed “birthplace and deathbed of the Confederacy” — the LOS took as its theme “When the Day Comes,” an apocalyptic phrase suggesting that members should prepare for the day the federal government collapses and the South rises again. “The mantra [that] violence, or the serious threat thereof, never settles anything is patently false,” Hill said in a speech later posted on the group’s website. “History shows that it indeed does settle many things. Please don’t forget this – your enemy hasn’t.” ( continue to full post… )