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… )

White supremacist Mark Stroman will be executed in Texas next month after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review his case.  Stroman was convicted for killing two people and shooting another in a post-9/11 revenge spree targeting people of Middle Eastern descent.

A “general” in the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas has been sentenced to life in prison for ordering the murder of a fellow gang member and his girlfriend in a dispute over a drug debt.

The state trial of sovereign citizens accused of plotting to kill several government officials may be delayed until federal charges are resolved. The defendants are members of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia, led by Schaeffer Cox. Militia members plotted a campaign of murder in the event Cox, a fugitive at the time, was captured. ( continue to full post… )

It’s hard to say exactly what the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) remembered so fondly on Saturday during a sesquicentennial celebration of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ inauguration: a way of life that has been dead for a century and a half, or the day when the public at large appreciated their cause.

With booming cannons and bombastic rhetoric, about 1,000 Confederate revelers dressed in period costume marched up Dexter Avenue to the Alabama State Capitol – the end of the very same route taken by Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of others who participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1965. There, on the gold star where former Alabama Gov. George Wallace gave his 1963 inaugural address with the infamous phrase, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” an actor playing the part of Davis became the president of the Confederacy to cheers and hurrahs.

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This coming Saturday, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) is holding a major event to honor the sesquicentennial, or 150^th anniversary, of the beginning of the Civil War. The festivities will “commemorate” events that most Americans see as a terribly dark period in American history: “the founding of the Confederate States of America, the inauguration of Jefferson Davis and the raising of the first Confederate Flag.” Little mention is made by the SCV, which calls the Civil War a “Second American Revolution,” of the widespread devastation and death that accompanied the war the Confederate States of America (CSA) fought to defend slavery.

Taking the end of the same route as Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of others who participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1965, the celebrations will include a march up Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue to the Capitol, with participants festooned in hoop skirts, battle flags and other period dress. On the steps of the Capitol, the group will reenact the swearing in of Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the CSA. The march begins at 11 a.m.

Expect to see the SCV joined by members of local hate groups active in the neo-Confederate movement, in particular members of the racist League of the South, which believes that slavery is “God-ordained” and that “Anglo-Celts” should be put in charge of an independent South, and the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group that argues that black people are “a retrograde species of humanity.” The SCV will visit Montgomery again in July, when it plans to hold its “Confederate Sesquicentennial SCV Reunion” at the downtown Embassy Suites hotel. ( continue to full post… )

For much of the last decade, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) has been roiled by an internal civil war between racial extremists and those who want to keep the Southern heritage group a kind of history and genealogy club.

It’s beginning to look like the racists won.

First came the news, originally reported on this blog last August, that the SCV was planning a Feb. 19 march down Dexter Avenue here in Montgomery, Ala., to “CELEBRATE THE BEGINNING OF THE CONFEDERACY” and ensure that it “is remembered and portrayed in the right way.” What the SCV meant by “the right way” was made obvious by its website promoting the event, which insists that “the South was right!” and claims that “there is no difference between the invasion of France by Hitler and the invasion of the Southern states by Lincoln.”

And now, from the Mississippi Division of the SCV, comes this new gem: The group wants the state to issue a special license plate, keyed like the Montgomery march to the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, to honor Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest — a millionaire Memphis slave trader before the war, an apparent war criminal who presided over the massacre of surrendering black prisoners at Fort Pillow, Tenn., during it, and the first national leader of the Ku Klux Klan afterward, when the Klan’s terrorist violence paved the way to a Jim Crow South. ( continue to full post… )