Founding Fathers on Facebook Hijacked by the Radical Right

The Founding Fathers as white racist poster boys?
Do a Facebook page search of the name Thomas Jefferson, and the very first listing that will appear is Thomas Jefferson – American. You can click to join 11,753 people who “like” the page.
Well, congratulations. You just signed onto fan pages sponsored by the racist National Policy Institute (NPI), a think tank dedicated to the preservation of America as a nation of, for and dominated by white people. NPI has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group since publishing heir William H. Regnery founded it in 2005.
NPI has hijacked many of America’s Founding Fathers. 12,835 Facebook users “like” the group’s General George Washington page. Another 5,617 network users like the page for Benjamin Franklin – American, and 2,630 like James Monroe – American. While it is unclear how many of those who add their names to NPI’s Facebook pages are aware of NPI’s mission of preserving a culturally white America, without question, the Facebook fan pages are driving thousands of clicks worth of traffic to a racist hate group’s website.
After being contacted by Hatewatch , Facebook’s management has launched an investigation of NPI’s pages. As a largely self-regulated service, Facebook relies heavily on readers to report objectionable content. “Direct statements of hate against particular communities violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and are removed when reported to us,” Simon Axten, Facebook’s manager of public policy, told Hatewatch by E-mail. “We also remove content that supports hateful or violent organizations.”
NPI proudly identifies all of its 42 sponsored Facebook pages that make up the “National Policy Institute Facebook Project,” but there is little evidence of NPI’s philosophies on the pages it devotes to iconic American historical figures. There are pages for Founding Fathers Washington, Franklin, Monroe, Madison, Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock and John Jay; patriots of the American Revolution Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and Nathan Hale, and presidents James Polk and Theodore Roosevelt. NPI also sponsors other noteworthy figures including Mark Twain, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Kit Carson, Lewis and Clark, Thomas Edison, Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney.
But some of NPI’s other sponsored fan pages celebrate American figures of a more controversial nature – though presented only in fawningly positive terms – including industrialist Henry Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh (both virulent anti-Semites), writer Jack London (whose works are popular in racist circles) and physician and lawyer William Walker, who in the mid-19 th Century organized several private military expeditions into Mexico and Central America engaging in what was then known as “filibustering” – establishing English-speaking colonies under his personal control in the interest of fulfilling America’s “manifest destiny.” (Walker briefly served as president of the Republic of Nicaragua before being defeated by a coalition of Central American armies, and executed in Honduras in 1860). NPI describes Walker as an “idealist.”
NPI also sponsors fan pages for certain non-Americans such as Beethoven, Goethe, Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. Entirely missing from NPI’s collection of sponsored Facebook pages: Any American or non-American of any race or culture other than white European, and women.
Not every “fan” of NPI’s Facebook pages is unaware of the organization’s orientation: One fan of NPI’s Jefferson site, for example, lists the racist League of the South and Ku Klux Klan co-founder Nathan Bedford Forrest among his “likes and interests.” Yet one wonders if another fan of the Jefferson page, who is in a Texas university’s Class of ’14, is aware of what NPI might say of her appreciation of musicians Earth, Wind and Fire and Selena – most definitely not white European artists.
Why has NPI chosen to host pages for these figures out of American history? “Our school children are special targets in a culture war – they are taught that their parents and ancestors have exploited and victimized the other peoples of the earth. Public institutions named for such Founding Fathers as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are being renamed for radicals like Malcolm X and Cesar Chavez – even the holiday that honors America’s discoverer, Christopher Columbus, is now under attack. Young people are trained to be sensitive towards “oppressed minorities,” but are stripped of pride for what their own people have accomplished. This anti-white – anti-American – campaign of an intellectual elite is waged in the most vicious language and it assigns collective guilt to our kinship in a way that would be considered intolerable if directed at other groups.”
NPI’s chairman is Louis R. Andrews , an acolyte of founder Regnery (who once proposed an all-white dating service ). Andrews also runs a website called “Stalking the Wild Taboo” intended for “sociopolitical thinkers unfettered by submission to the power of the pejorative,” by which Andrews means, for those unafraid of being called racist. Not insignificantly, Andrews, on his “Stalking” website, counsels that the best strategy for countering social taboos against assertions of racial differences and white superiority is stealth: “Stalking taboos requires ‘long periods of quietness, a low profile, protective coloration, and the diversion of the quarry's attention to other matters until the propitious moment.’ ... a taboo cannot be productively attacked until the time is ripe.”
Perhaps, an unobtrusive presence on Facebook is a part of that strategy.
Heidi Beirich contributed to this report .

Summary: The Founding Fathers as white racist poster boys? Do a Facebook page search of the name Thomas Jefferson, and the very first listing that will appear is Thomas Jefferson – American. You can click to join 11,753 people who “like” the page. Well, congratulations. You just signed onto fan pages sponsored by the racist National Policy Institute (NPI), a think tank dedicated to the preservation of America as a nation of, for and dominated by white people. NPI has been designated by the Southern…


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White Nationalist State Department Official Surfaces in Photographs
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Michael Edison Hayden
Hatewatch has obtained images of Matthew Q. Gebert, a State Department official who is involved in the white nationalist movement.


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Jim Benvie, Former Militia Spokesman, Violated Conditions of Bond
February 27, 2020
Hatewatch Staff
Former
United Constitutional Patriots (UCP)
militia spokesman James (Jim) Christopher Benvie has violated the terms of his bond as he awaits trial in New Mexico.


Hatewatch


Extremist 'Patriot' Pastor Videotapes Another Tense Traffic-Stop Encounter

Radical conservative Pastor Stephen Anderson’s personal antigovernment reality-TV show has unveiled a new episode.
Reprising a “role” he created and played last year, the firebrand leader of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Ariz., once again had a video camera rolling during a routine police traffic stop that turned contentious as a combative Anderson and his passengers defied police officers’ instructions. Unlike last year, when a stop at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Arizona resulted in Anderson being tased and thrown to the ground, this week’s tense confrontation in Benson, Ariz., ended peacefully. (The original footage of the April 2009 traffic stop can be viewed here - YouTube account required to view).
But with the surge in Americans claiming to be “sovereign citizens” not subject to federal or state laws or jurisdiction – and who sometimes resist police and government authority with lethal violence – the encounter illustrated anew how readily normal police work can hold hidden peril for officers. In a similarly routine traffic stop in May, West Memphis, Ark., police officers Brandon Paudert and Bill Evans were shot to death by father-and-son sovereign citizens Jerry and Joe Kane after being pulled over for a suspicious license tag. The Kanes fled but were tracked down and killed in a shootout with police an hour later in a Wal-Mart parking lot after wounding two more officers.
Anderson – a sympathizer with “Patriot” groups who last year preached that he hoped President Obama would die , and who has condemned “faggots” to death from his pulpit – seemed to try his best to create his second cause célèbre in 18 months at the expense of cops just doing their jobs. In the latest case, Benson officers Dustin Merrill and Braulio Hammons stopped Anderson’s car because his license tag light was out. As the encounter unfolds on his videotape, Anderson at first refuses to say where he is coming from or going. The officer, apparently Merrill, doesn’t challenge him but instead asks for the passengers’ IDs. Anderson intervenes, saying they don’t have to comply “because this is the United States of America, where you don’t need an ID to sit in a car.” The officer ignores Anderson and asks again, but no one in the car responds.
The officer then asks if there are any weapons in the car. Anderson pauses before arguing that he doesn’t have to answer the officers’ questions. This time, the irritated officer responds that Anderson does have to answer the question about weapons and orders him out of the car. Anderson refuses to get out. The second officer joins the first, and tensions rise as their orders and Anderson’s refusals to follow them are repeated. “What am I being accused of? What crime have I committed?” Anderson screams at one point.
Shortly afterward, Anderson asks again why he has to get out of the car. The officer replies, “For my safety.” Still, Anderson stalls.
Then abruptly, Anderson relents – and finally states that there are no weapons in the car – when it appears the officers’ patience is running out. One apparently pulls out his baton and can be heard on the tape saying, “I’m gonna bust …,” though the rest is inaudible. But now, the previously defiant Anderson adopts a fearful victim posture, declaring that he’s afraid the officer is going to attack him with his “deadly weapon” if he gets out of the car, then points out that the incident is being videotaped. The officers’ remarks can’t be discerned at this point, but Anderson finally does open the door and gets out, saying, “Do not tase me. I am not resisting. I am obeying exactly what you’re saying.” Anderson’s sudden shift from obstinate defiance – which effectively elevated the officers’ adrenalin levels – to obedient compliance, would have made for even more explosive reality TV had the officers lost their cool in the wake of his provocations. They didn’t.
His apparent attempts to provoke the officers notwithstanding, Anderson seemed well versed regarding his rights during a traffic stop. According to numerous Web sources, a driver stopped by police is obliged only to provide a driver’s license, vehicle registration and insurance information to officers. Under normal circumstances, neither the driver nor the passengers are required to answer questions or to consent to a vehicle search in the absence of a warrant or an opportunity to consult a lawyer. Several sites recommend asking, “Sir, am I free to go?” – as Anderson did – which compels the officer to formally detain or arrest the driver if there is cause. However, most sites also recommend being respectful to officers and non-confrontational – advice Anderson clearly did not follow during the early phase of the encounter.
Benson Police Chief Paul Moncada told the Benson News-Sun that the U.S. Supreme Court in Maryland vs. Wilson , ruled that it does not violate a citizen's Fourth Amendment rights to require a driver to get out a vehicle during a traffic stop.
The parallels between the Kane drama and Anderson’s latest traffic stop are eerie. In both instances, the initial problem was a seemingly minor license tag matter.  In the Kane case, son Joe was allowed to remain in the car as the officers talked to his father outside. Without warning, Joe Kane leaped from the car with his AK-47 assault-style rifle blazing and cut down the two officers. Had the West Memphis officers been as careful about the passengers in the Kane car and the possible presence of weapons as were the Benson officers in Anderson’s case, they might have survived that encounter.
By preparing for traffic stops with video cameras at the ready, and immediately choosing defiance over cooperation when confronted, Anderson seems to be itching for more YouTube-friendly material to advance his anti-government cause. His recent video was edited, with subtexts added at times, before being posted to the Internet.
In April 2009, Anderson was stopped at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 8 near Yuma. With the camera running, Anderson refused to answer the officers’ questions or get out of his car, Officers finally chose to break his car window and extract him by force, tasing him and shoving him to the ground while arresting him. Anderson sustained facial injuries requiring 11 stitches. Anderson’s video of the confrontation – and subsequent videos of him describing the events, showing off his wounds and talking about the experience before an anti-government crowd – blossomed on the Internet shortly thereafter.
In a jury trial in August, Anderson was acquitted of all charges related to the 2009 stop. He has filed a civil suit against the officers involved in that detention and arrest.

Summary: Radical conservative Pastor Stephen Anderson’s personal antigovernment reality-TV show has unveiled a new episode. Reprising a “role” he created and played last year, the firebrand leader of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Ariz., once again had a video camera rolling during a routine police traffic stop that turned contentious as a combative Anderson and his passengers defied police officers’ instructions. Unlike last year, when a stop at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Arizona…


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Neo-Nazis, white nationalists and antigovernment extremists are publishing volumes of propaganda advocating terrorism and mass shootings on Telegram, a Hatewatch review of hundreds of channels on that app reveals.


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Racist British National Party Relaunches American Outreach Effort

A racist organization from Great Britain that once boasted a lively U.S. presence before it was routed eight years ago is back again.
The American Friends of the British National Party (AFBNP) was once a serious player in white nationalist circles. The group was created in the late 1990s to raise money from Americans for candidates of the racist British National Party . The AFBNP’s leader, Mark Cotterill, was a master networker who managed to entice right-wing American extremists of seemingly every stripe to address his rather frequent Washington, D.C., meetings.
Among the white nationalist luminaries who spoke to the AFBNP were former Klan leader David Duke , Internet hate guru Don Black , the neo-Nazi National Alliance’s military coordinator Steven Barry , and Richard Kelly Hoskins, a long-time ideologue of the anti-Semitic Christian Identity theology. Several BNP officials, including leader Nick Griffin, traveled to the United States for AFBNP meetings that solicited cash for the party.
All that came to an end in 2002 when the AFBNP collapsed after Cotterill was deported to Britain.
The deportation happened after an Intelligence Report exposé revealed that his group had raised at least $85,000 for the BNP in contravention of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Agents of foreign political entities are required to register with the government or face possible felony charges, fines and deportation. Cotterill did not register.
But now the BNP is back. In March, Adam McArthur filed FARA documents registering to run a “social networking campaign” for the BNP and to “provide overseas voting instructions” for BNP members. Unlike its former incarnation, the new group will not raise funds. McArthur, who according to The Independent is an IT worker who recently moved from England to Berryville, Va., is listed in the FARA documents as the “United States Contact – British National Party” and he reports to Andrew McBride, the BNP’s South East Regional Organizer and Overseas Liaison Officer.
The Independent also reported that the group has signed up 90 American and 60 Canadian supporters. The FARA documents filed by McArthur make no mention of Cotterill, who had a falling out with the BNP after he returned to England. Cotterill now runs his own white nationalist political party, England First .
The documents show that four individuals have so far donated funds for the effort: Patrick Doran; Vanessa McArthur; Simon Thurlow – reportedly a BNP member from New York – and Michael Storm. It is unclear if this Michael Storm is the longtime racial activist of the same name who was once active in both Aryan Nations and the NSDAP/AO (the National Socialist German Workers Party/Overseas Organization, the translated name of the original Nazi party's overseas unit). Phone and email requests for comment from McArthur, including about these donations and Storm, were not returned.

Summary: A racist organization from Great Britain that once boasted a lively U.S. presence before it was routed eight years ago is back again. The American Friends of the British National Party (AFBNP) was once a serious player in white nationalist circles. The group was created in the late 1990s to raise money from Americans for candidates of the racist British National Party . The AFBNP’s leader, Mark Cotterill, was a master networker who managed to entice right-wing American extremists of seemingly…


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Ann Coulter took another major step deep into white nationalism when she spoke to the annual “Writers Workshop” event put on by the anti-immigrant and white nationalist publishing house The Social Contract Press (TSCP).


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Kentucky’s governor has appointed an attorney who worked closely with an anti-LGBT hate group to the Board of Trustees for the University of Kentucky, a school that previously received a top national ranking for being LGBTQ-friendly.


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The acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) became the latest Trump administration official to speak at an event organized by the anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies.


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White Nationalist Threats Against Transgender People Are Escalating
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Conspiracy Trial Opens for Pennsylvania Cops in Immigrant’s Killing

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – The federal trial of three police officers accused of trying to cover up the murder of an undocumented Mexican immigrant – a hate crime that drew the nation’s attention to violence against Hispanics two years ago – opened this week with a focus on the small Northeast Pennsylvania coal town of Shenandoah. There, prosecutors say, police offered special consideration for its favored white sons and their parents, instead of following the dictates of the law.
Former Shenandoah Police Chief Matthew Nestor and two others in the department – Lt. William Moyer and Patrolman Jason Hayes – face a host of federal charges, including conspiracy and obstruction of justice for orchestrating what prosecutors say was a swift cover-up of the circumstances of Ramirez's death.
In her opening statement, federal prosecutor Myesha Braden said the 2008 beating death of Luis Ramirez was swept under the rug to protect his assailants from embarrassment and prosecution. “Like teachers and doctors, police officers are intimately connected with American culture. They are expected to protect and serve. This is a case of police officers who decided to do the opposite of what they were expected to do,” Braden told the all-white jury.
The fatal fight happened on July 12, 2008, when Derrick Donchak , Brandon Piekarsky, Colin Walsh and Brian Scully were among a group of teenagers who had left a block party where they had been drinking. They came across Ramirez in a park with a white girl and started calling Ramirez a “fucking spic,” and taunting him with threats such as “Go back to Mexico,” and “Tell your fucking Mexican friends to get the fuck out of Shenandoah,” according to testimony and the federal indictment. A fight erupted and the teens, some grasping chunks of metal to harden the impact of their punches, ganged up on Ramirez until he was knocked unconscious. Piekarsky was convicted of kicking Ramirez in the head when he was down – later determined to have been the fatal strike.
The officers are accused of altering official statements of witnesses, concealing evidence and helping the suspects and their families create a story to hide the racial nature of the attack and shift a measure of the blame from Piekarsky and Donchak to Scully. Hayes, one of the officers, was dating Piekarsky's mother at the time; the two are now engaged to be married.
Walsh, who along with Scully pleaded guilty to juvenile charges in the beating under an agreement with prosecutors, testified on Thursday that the fight targeted Ramirez because of his ethnicity, and that the other boys gathered after the fight to get their stories straight. Urged on by Piekarsky’s mother, Tammi Piekarsky, they left agreeing not to tell police that Piekarsky had kicked the man or that they had attacked him because of his ethnicity, Walsh said.
An all-white state jury found Donchak, now 20, and Piekarsky, now 19, guilty of a misdemeanor assault charges but acquitted them of more serious hate-crime charges. They were subsequently charged with a federal hate crime for their role in the assault, and in October were convicted. They face life in prison when they are sentenced later this month.
Each officer in the federal trial now under way has a separate defense attorney, each of whom presented their clients as well-meaning officers of the law caught in the confusing aftermath of a violent street fight that challenged the old-fashioned department still stuck in a bygone way of doing police work. Moyer, for example, is accused of contacting Scully’s parents and instructing them to get rid of the sneakers their son wore on the night of the attack. In another effort to conceal Piekarsky’s involvement, investigators say Moyer and Hayes mischaracterized a witness’s account in an official report to make it appear that Scully had a greater role in the attack than he actually did. “Relationships combined with privilege overthrew the rule of law,” Braden said.
At one point, attorney Enid Harris described her client, Moyer, as “the Barney Fife of Shenandoah,” a comparison to the bumbling deputy on “The Andy Griffith Show.” Moyer scowled when she made the comparison.
Nestor’s attorney Joseph Nahas also seemed content to draw the contrast between a small-town police department and its federal counterpart in his defense of the police chief. “Here’s what the government doesn’t get,” Nahas said. “What they view as corruption, collusion and conspiracy, I view as community, caring and consideration.”

Summary: WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – The federal trial of three police officers accused of trying to cover up the murder of an undocumented Mexican immigrant – a hate crime that drew the nation’s attention to violence against Hispanics two years ago – opened this week with a focus on the small Northeast Pennsylvania coal town of Shenandoah. There, prosecutors say, police offered special consideration for its favored white sons and their parents, instead of following the dictates of the law. Former Shenandoah…


WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – The federal trial of three police officers accused of trying to cover up the murder of an undocumented Mexican immigrant – a hate crime that drew the nation’s attention to violence against Hispanics two years ago – opened this week with a focus on the small Northeast Pennsylvania coal town of Shenandoah. There, prosecutors say, police offered special consideration for its favored white sons and their parents, instead of following the dictates of the law.
Former Shenandoah Police Chief Matthew Nestor and two others in the department – Lt. William Moyer and Patrolman Jason Hayes – face a host of federal charges, including conspiracy and obstruction of justice for orchestrating what prosecutors say was a swift cover-up of the circumstances of Ramirez's death.
In her opening statement, federal prosecutor Myesha Braden said the 2008 beating death of Luis Ramirez was swept under the rug to protect his assailants from embarrassment and prosecution. “Like teachers and doctors, police officers are intimately connected with American culture. They are expected to protect and serve. This is a case of police officers who decided to do the opposite of what they were expected to do,” Braden told the all-white jury.
The fatal fight happened on July 12, 2008, when Derrick Donchak , Brandon Piekarsky, Colin Walsh and Brian Scully were among a group of teenagers who had left a block party where they had been drinking. They came across Ramirez in a park with a white girl and started calling Ramirez a “f------ s---,” and taunting him with threats such as “Go back to Mexico,” and “Tell your f------ Mexican friends to get the f--- out of Shenandoah,” according to testimony and the federal indictment. A fight erupted and the teens, some grasping chunks of metal to harden the impact of their punches, ganged up on Ramirez until he was knocked unconscious. Piekarsky was convicted of kicking Ramirez in the head when he was down – later determined to have been the fatal strike.
The officers are accused of altering official statements of witnesses, concealing evidence and helping the suspects and their families create a story to hide the racial nature of the attack and shift a measure of the blame from Piekarsky and Donchak to Scully. Hayes, one of the officers, was dating Piekarsky's mother at the time; the two are now engaged to be married.
Walsh, who along with Scully pleaded guilty to juvenile charges in the beating under an agreement with prosecutors, testified on Thursday that the fight targeted Ramirez because of his ethnicity, and that the other boys gathered after the fight to get their stories straight. Urged on by Piekarsky’s mother, Tammi Piekarsky, they left agreeing not to tell police that Piekarsky had kicked the man or that they had attacked him because of his ethnicity, Walsh said.
An all-white state jury found Donchak, now 20, and Piekarsky, now 19, guilty of a misdemeanor assault charges but acquitted them of more serious hate-crime charges. They were subsequently charged with a federal hate crime for their role in the assault, and in October were convicted. They face life in prison when they are sentenced later this month.
Each officer in the federal trial now under way has a separate defense attorney, each of whom presented their clients as well-meaning officers of the law caught in the confusing aftermath of a violent street fight that challenged the old-fashioned department still stuck in a bygone way of doing police work. Moyer, for example, is accused of contacting Scully’s parents and instructing them to get rid of the sneakers their son wore on the night of the attack. In another effort to conceal Piekarsky’s involvement, investigators say Moyer and Hayes mischaracterized a witness’s account in an official report to make it appear that Scully had a greater role in the attack than he actually did. “Relationships combined with privilege overthrew the rule of law,” Braden said.
At one point, attorney Enid Harris described her client, Moyer, as “the Barney Fife of Shenandoah,” a comparison to the bumbling deputy on “The Andy Griffith Show.” Moyer scowled when she made the comparison.
Nestor’s attorney Joseph Nahas also seemed content to draw the contrast between a small-town police department and its federal counterpart in his defense of the police chief. “Here’s what the government doesn’t get,” Nahas said. “What they view as corruption, collusion and conspiracy, I view as community, caring and consideration.”


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Dearborn, Mich., Police Arrest Man in Apparent Mosque Bombing Attempt

Editor’s note: Since this story was published, authorities have revised their suspicions that the suspect was carrying out an attack aimed at all Muslims. In fact, it turns out that Roger Stockham is an American convert to Sunni Islam, and reportedly was angry at the mosque in question because it was Shi’ite.
A 63-year-old Southern California man who reportedly has “a long history of antigovernment activities” was arrested in a car laden with explosives outside one of the nation’s largest mosques, the authorities said Sunday. More than 500 members of the Dearborn, Mich., mosque were attending a funeral service at the time.
Police said Roger Stockham was arrested last Monday, Jan. 24, in the parking lot of the Islamic Center of America, where he’d apparently driven from California in a vehicle filled with M-80s and other illegal explosives. He was arraigned last Wednesday on charges of making a terrorist threat and possessing explosives with unlawful intent. The charges carry possible prison sentences of 20 and 15 years.
The apparent anti-Islam terror plot comes after a year of apparently increasing hatred directed at Muslims in America. That was most obvious last August, when a national controversy erupted over a planned Islamic center in Manhattan, stoked by politicians like Newt Gingrich, who compared Muslims to Nazis. More recently, U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the new chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, announced plans for February hearings into “radical Islam.” King has said there are “too many mosques” in the United States and this January claimed that “80% of the mosques in this country are controlled by radical imams.”
Ibrahim Cooper, a spokesman for the Center for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in December that King had a long history of such remarks, “and that’s exactly what we don’t need at a time when anti-Muslim sentiment is growing.”
A local CAIR official told The Detroit News that he had learned from police that Stockham had been drinking in a Detroit bar earlier in the day of his arrest. He allegedly threatened to harm a mosque in Dearborn, and was followed outside the bar by an employee who gave police his license plate number. A search then began, although Dearborn Police Chief Ronald Haddad said a 911 call from a local resident tipped off police to Stockham’s presence. Haddad told The Associated Press that Stockham had a history of antigovernment activities but did not elaborate.
Dearborn is home to one of America’s largest Muslim communities, and the targeted mosque there is huge — 70,000 square feet with a 150-foot dome height and 10-story-tall minarets, according to The Detroit News .
Stockham, who reportedly left his home in Imperial Beach, California, some weeks ago, was described as an Army veteran who stayed to himself. The Detroit News found Internet postings where Stockham said he had joined the Army in 1965 and served in an assault helicopter company in Vietnam in 1968.
Stockham faces his first court hearing this Friday.
The level of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States appears to have fluctuated in response to both events and the reaction of national leaders. Such crimes were at very low levels until 2001, when they skyrocketed by some 1,700% immediately following the 9/11 attacks. But President Bush gave a number of important speeches in the aftermath of the attacks, saying that America’s enemies were not Muslims or Arabs, but only the Al Qaeda terror networks. Very likely as a result, anti-Muslim hate crimes plummeted the next year by almost 68%.

Summary: Editor’s note: Since this story was published, authorities have revised their suspicions that the suspect was carrying out an attack aimed at all Muslims. In fact, it turns out that Roger Stockham is an American convert to Sunni Islam, and reportedly was angry at the mosque in question because it was Shi’ite. A 63-year-old Southern California man who reportedly has “a long history of antigovernment activities” was arrested in a car laden with explosives outside one of the nation’s largest…


Hatewatch

A weekend tweet by President Donald Trump mirrors the language of a militia movement that has been calling for civil war for at least three years and gives extremist groups a powerful seal of approval.


Hatewatch

The acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) became the latest Trump administration official to speak at an event organized by the anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies.


Hatewatch

Kentucky’s governor has appointed an attorney who worked closely with an anti-LGBT hate group to the Board of Trustees for the University of Kentucky, a school that previously received a top national ranking for being LGBTQ-friendly.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Attorney With Ties to Anti-LGBT Groups Hired for Key Government Agency
September 20, 2019
Hatewatch Staff
Right-wing attorney, writer and legal analyst Ken Klukowski has landed a position in the Trump administration in the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
WCF Verona: Where the 'Wind of Change' Marked a Sea Change in Hate Group's Strategy
April 03, 2019
Hatewatch Staff
Anti-LGBT hate group
World Congress of Families
(WCF) used its annual gathering to signal a strategy shift for gaining support for its anti-LGBTQ and anti pro-choice policies.


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Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 5/24/2017
May 24, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Mapping the many new factions of the far right; How the Dixie flag came to equal the swastika; Neo-Nazis try to rewrite Frank lynching history; and more.


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Hatewatch
In unusual alliance, Infowars, Joey Gibson teaming up for ‘street army’ teams
August 31, 2018
Brett Barrouquere
Infowars and Patriot Prayer’s Joey Gibson haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, with Gibson once calling the creator of the show, Alex Jones, “crazy.”


Hatewatch


Feds Sue Seattle Man Peddling Sovereign 'Strawman' Scheme

The federal government is suing a Seattle, Wash., man with a long history of involvement with the radical right for running a scheme whereby his clients filed bogus tax forms as part of a “sovereign citizen” plot to defraud the government. In the complaint, filed in June, the Justice Department accuses John Lloyd Kirk of selling so-called redemption plans in the name of a phony American Indian tribe.
“Kirk’s scheme is part of an ongoing trend amongst tax protestors to file frivolous tax returns … with the IRS and courts in an attempt to escape their federal tax obligations and steal from the U.S. Treasury,” the complaint says.
Kirk, a a friend of infamous Montana Freeman Leroy Schweitzer, has a long history of extremism. He was arrested in 1997 on a variety of weapons and explosives charges, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and for years has been tied to the Little Shell Pembina Band, a sovereign citizen group that claims to be a legitimate American Indian tribe.
The group is hardly legitimate. In June 2004, according to the ADL , the IRS sent group founder Ronald Delorme, whose family made up a large portion of the membership, a letter complaining that the group’s identification cards described holders as exempt from federal income taxes. (Delorme defended his group and insisted the issuers of the cards had been expelled from the group.)
The new versions of Kirk’s plans involve two fictitious entities, according to the complaint: the Indian Nations Advocate Law Office and The Kirk of Yahh Hava. Through those entities, he provided detailed instructions to his customers on how to submit frivolous tax returns. He also is accused of offering help challenging IRS penalty assessments for filing frivolous returns. At least 31 of Kirk’s customers have filed fraudulent returns totaling $8 million, the government says.
Such tax schemes are the calling cards of the antigovernment sovereign citizens movement – far-right extremists who believe they are beyond the reach of government laws, regulations or taxes. Over the past 30 years, there have been hundreds of similar ploys packaging different combinations of forms and paperwork, attempting to perfect the process. Each exploits the sovereign tenet that the government holds a secret account in every U.S. citizen’s name, known as a “strawman,” and that the money can be obtained by filing the right forms and declarations. No one has been successful yet.

Summary: The federal government is suing a Seattle, Wash., man with a long history of involvement with the radical right for running a scheme whereby his clients filed bogus tax forms as part of a “sovereign citizen” plot to defraud the government. In the complaint, filed in June, the Justice Department accuses John Lloyd Kirk of selling so-called redemption plans in the name of a phony American Indian tribe. “Kirk’s scheme is part of an ongoing trend amongst tax protestors to file frivolous tax…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 5/7/2017
May 08, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
In reality, Richard Spencer is merely a fraud; Bundy prosecutors struggle with charges; ‘Beta’ males grow violent, radicalized at 4chan; and more.


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Hatewatch
Vandals Topple Headstones  in Another Jewish Cemetery
February 27, 2017
Bill Morlin
For the second time in a week, vandals with apparent anti-Semitic intent have toppled and damaged headstones in a Jewish cemetery in a major U.S. city.


Radical Campus Youth Group Attacks Another Alleged Rape Victim

Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), whose founder almost a decade ago verbally attacked women who claimed to be rape victims, is at it again.
On its blog yesterday, the far-right campus group, as part of a more general attack on foreign asylum-seekers, described the woman who accused the former International Monetary Fund (IMF) head of sexual assault as a prostitute. YWC’s John Anderson said the New York City hotel maid “worked as a prostitute, making money from an illegal activity which she probably did not pay taxes on.” Later, he repeated the same charge.
No allegedly. No reportedly. No original reporting. Just a long, nasty post attacking the woman whose charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn cost the Frenchman his IMF post. It’s true that the notoriously sensational New York Post said on Saturday that it had “learned” that the woman was a prostitute, and it’s true that lies the woman told about other matters have thrown a wrench into the sexual assault case now pending against Strauss-Kahn. But it’s far from clear that the woman was not raped, and in fact she has sued the New York Post for libeling her. What's more, a second woman, in France, has said in the last few days that Strauss-Kahn attempted to rape her several years ago and that she now intends to file charges.
It all seems par for the course for YWC, which has worked with white supremacists to raise funds and is white nationalist in its ideology. The group was started in 2006 by Kevin DeAnna, who two years earlier wrote a long article for a campus newspaper demanding an apology from a 16-year-old girl after prosecutors dropped charges against a student she had accused of raping her at a fraternity party. DeAnna and another future YWC principal were the top editors at the student paper at the College of William & Mary when it angrily argued that “feminist lies about supposed rape designed to demonize all men should be exposed.” The girl sued DeAnna for libel, but the case was dismissed for reasons that are not clear from the court record.
It’s not clear whether or not the New York City maid was, in fact, sexually assaulted. But as of now, the charges against the powerful Frenchman stand. And forensic evidence suggestive of a sexual assault has been widely reported.
But to YWC, apparently, there are no further questions to be asked. The woman, who happens to be black, reportedly lied about some matters. Therefore, she must have lied about the assault and is, in fact, a prostitute. Or so says YWC.

Summary: Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), whose founder almost a decade ago verbally attacked women who claimed to be rape victims, is at it again. On its blog yesterday, the far-right campus group, as part of a more general attack on foreign asylum-seekers, described the woman who accused the former International Monetary Fund (IMF) head of sexual assault as a prostitute. YWC’s John Anderson said the New York City hotel maid “worked as a prostitute, making money from an illegal activity which she…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 5/31/2017
May 31, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Portland train attacker confesses to stabbing; Right-wing terrorist threat is rising; Judge slams Trump for deportation order; and more.


Hatewatch

John Tanton, the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement, has left behind a legacy that spawned more than a dozen nativist organizations, driven an anti-immigrant agenda for four decades, and found friends in the White House.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
YouTube Yanks Second Red Ice Channel
October 23, 2019
Hannah Gais
YouTube has taken down a second Red Ice channel after the hate network tried to circumvent the media giant’s initial ban.


Hatewatch

A cluster of far-right extremists including neo-fascists, white nationalists and militia members are expected to descend on Washington D.C. Saturday, amidst President Trump’s refusal to accept his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election.


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Hatewatch
Winston Shrout, One of America's Most High-Profile 'Sovereign Citizens,' is a Fugitive
April 23, 2019
Brett Barrouquere
Winston Shrout spent years defying the federal government as one of the country’s most high-profile sovereign citizens and tax dodgers.


Yet Another White Nationalist Leader Felled by Child-Sex Charges

Not that Klansmen and their ilk should ever be associated with negative stereotyping, mind you – but it does seem that the type of man who rises to leadership positions in the white nationalist universe has a peculiar knack for becoming entangled in child-sex scandals.
The latest is Neal Ray Schmidt, described by federal investigators as a former grand dragon of the Missouri chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Schmidt was sentenced Wednesday to 20 years in prison after admitting he drove 600 miles to have sex with who he believed were two 14-year-old girls he had met online – but who were, in fact, undercover police officers.
Schmidt was arrested June 21, 2010, in McDonough, Ga., after traveling from his home in St. Louis, a trip that culminated a four-month investigation during which Schmidt gradually cultivated an online relationship with the “girls.” He was arrested in the parking lot of a motel where he was supposed to meet the girls, and was carrying several guns, Klan paraphernalia and an assortment of sex toys.  He had earlier E-mailed explicit videos of himself as well as images and videos of child pornography “in an effort to groom the girls for an eventual sexual encounter,” according to a release issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia.
Schmidt, who also went by the alias Raymond "German" Owens,  subsequently was also charged with molesting his own granddaughter in Missouri and arranging a sexual encounter with an underage girl in Florida, according to the release.
Schmidt's wife Pamela told investigators that he was active in an unspecified Missouri Klan chapter from the early 1980s to the early '90s, and often attended Klan-related rallies in Harrison, Ark. Investigators found Nazi paraphernalia and over 60 legal firearms at the Schmidt home.
This case takes its place the gallery of sex scandals involving men who believed, by the virtue of their race alone, they deserved to run the world.
In December 2006, Matthew Downing , the 25-year-old organizer for the neo-Nazi National Vanguard in Boston, was charged with statutory rape after coercing a 14-year-old girl to perform oral sex on him. Two weeks later, Kevin Alfred Strom , 50, the leader of the parent National Vanguard group and considered one of the leading “intellectuals” of the white supremacist movement, was charged with possessing child pornography and enticing a 10-year-old girl to have sex. Strom in 2008 beat the latter charge when the judge ruled that while there was “overwhelming evidence [Strom] was sexually drawn to this child,” he never actually tried to have sex with her. Strom did plead guilty to a charge of possessing child pornography and was sentenced to 23 months in prison.
The same month Strom was arrested, the imperial wizard of Maryland’s World Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Gordon Creal Young, 40, was arrested and charged with seven criminal counts, including twice attempting to force a 15-year-old girl to perform oral sex on him. The indictment also accused him of telling the girl she would need to strip before being inducted into the Klan, to prove she was free of “imperfections.” Young was acquitted in July 2007, apparently due in part to unpersuasive testimony from the alleged victim.
In 2006, Joe Fields, once the head of the racist Nationalist Forum, became embroiled in a vitriolic internecine white nationalist controversy over allegations that in California in 1996, he had pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts of annoying a child under 18, after allegedly attempting to solicit underage girls to do a “porn movie,” though police presumed the movie offer to be a ruse. The ideological catfight  boiled over in October 2006 when white nationalist attorney Edgar Steele – who would later be convicted of attempting to have his own wife murdered – blasted Fields as “a self-confessed child molester” and “liar” who deserved no place in the movement. “Joe pled, did some hard time and then served extended probation,” Steele wrote. Fields shot back, claiming his “no contest” plea was a pragmatic decision, and pointing out that his “hard time” amounted to 90 days in the county lock-up. Fields accused unnamed Jews of trumping up “false charges” to ruin his character.
Of Fields and Strom, Steele – ironically destined to become a convicted felon himself – wrote, “We do not need this sort of role model in the [white nationalist] movement. … It is our responsibility to clean up our own act and condemn those among us who break the law, particularly when violations so thoroughly trash the fundamental principles upon which we stand.”

Summary: Not that Klansmen and their ilk should ever be associated with negative stereotyping, mind you – but it does seem that the type of man who rises to leadership positions in the white nationalist universe has a peculiar knack for becoming entangled in child-sex scandals. The latest is Neal Ray Schmidt, described by federal investigators as a former grand dragon of the Missouri chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Schmidt was sentenced Wednesday to 20 years in prison after admitting he drove 600 miles to…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
League of the South Announces Formation of ‘Southern Defense Force’
February 06, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Edging closer to militancy, the neo-Confederate League of the South says it's forming a force to combat the 'leftist menace to our historic Christian civilization.'


Neo-Nazi Twins Drop Racism for Love and Marijuana

Lynx and Lamb Gaede were twin pop sensations for all the wrong reasons. Their songs dealt with overt white nationalist themes, and even their band – Prussian Blue – was a reference to the distinctive color of Zyclon B residue in the Nazi gas chambers. In one of the most infamous photos from their childhood, the twins posed wearing white T-shirts with a smiley face adorned with Hitler’s toothbrush mustache and neatly parted, jet-black hair.
That’s all over, the girls say now. In an exclusive interview with The Daily , Lynx and Lamb – once described as the “new face of hate” – say they’ve abandoned the racism hoisted on them by their mother April Gaede and instead settled into “a place of love and light."
“I’m glad we were in the band,” Lynx said. “But I think we should have been pushed toward something a little more mainstream and easier for us to handle than being front-men for a belief system that we didn’t completely understand.” Lamb put their transformation more bluntly. “I’m not a white nationalist anymore.”
Given the backdrop of their upbringing, the comments reflect a radical sea change in ideology and, to a certain degree, a hopeful coming of age story that began in the company of the National Alliance (NA) – for decades the most dangerous and most organized neo-Nazi formation in America. In 2003, when Lynx and Lamb turned 9, their mother was a prominent member of the NA and began heavily promoting the twins as the young face of white nationalism.
Several years later, as they toured white power music festivals playing Aryan folk music, Gaede came clean with her reason for pushing Lynx and Lamb into the spotlight. “What young, red-blooded American boy isn’t going to find two blonde twins, 16-years-old, singing about white pride and pride in your race … very appealing?” Gaede asked.
That was only part of the disturbing path Gaede had for her children. Lynx and Lamb also were kept out of public school and spoon-fed a particularly myopic white nationalist curriculum – a fact Gaede would frequently brag about. “I’ve done it without an ‘approved’ curriculum,” Gaede said of their education in a 2005 interview published on the National Alliance website. “And what I’ve done is use a lot of books from the 1950s – from the years before ‘civil rights’ and feminism became so evident.”
For the girls, that was the problem. “I was just spouting a lot of knowledge that I had no idea what I was saying,” Lamb said in the interview published on Sunday. When The Daily contacted Gaede to discuss the girls’ comments, she dismissed it as the stuff of an ill-advised youth. “They’re 19,” she said. “When they have children of their own, they’ll come to the same conclusions I have.”
Despite a very public childhood, for the past five years Lynx and Lamb have been outside the limelight because of health problems. Lynx was diagnosed with cancer during her freshman year of high school, and doctors removed a large tumor from her shoulder, the newspaper reported. Now she suffers from a rare condition called cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS). Lamb suffers from scoliosis and chronic back pain. They each carry state-issued medical marijuana cards in Montana, where they live with their mother. “I have to say, marijuana saved my life,” Lynx said. “I would probably be dead if I didn’t have it.”
“Pot has also helped the twins rekindle the creative impulses they once channeled into their music,” The Daily reported, adding that the girls hope to enroll in college and dedicate their lives to making medical marijuana legal in all 50 states. The revelation has prompted the blogosphere to erupt with harsh dismissals of the girls’ transformation. One tongue-in-cheek headline read, “Tween White Power Folks Singer Twins Now ‘Liberal’ Potheads.” Another proclaimed, “Neo-Nazi Girl Group Cured of their Hate with Marijuana.”
Lynx and Lamb, in the meantime, don’t seem concerned with what they were, or how they might be viewed now. “I think we’re meant to do something more – we’re healers,” Lamb said. “We just want to exert the most love and positivity we can.”

Summary: Lynx and Lamb Gaede were twin pop sensations for all the wrong reasons. Their songs dealt with overt white nationalist themes, and even their band – Prussian Blue – was a reference to the distinctive color of Zyclon B residue in the Nazi gas chambers. In one of the most infamous photos from their childhood, the twins posed wearing white T-shirts with a smiley face adorned with Hitler’s toothbrush mustache and neatly parted, jet-black hair. That’s all over, the girls say now. In an exclusive…


Hatewatch

The false narrative of an epidemic of so-called “black-on-white crime” has long been one of the most effective deceptions in white nationalist propaganda, playing directly into an idea of besieged white populace while also attacking the press for censoring the “real facts."


Judge Ignores ‘Martian law,’ Tosses ‘Sovereign Citizen’ Into Slammer

This Georgia judge had heard just about enough nonsense from a “sovereign citizen” charged in a scheme to steal a house.
Rockdale County Superior Court Judge David Irwin repeatedly advised Akeem Kwame – a self-described “Moorish national” charged with mortgage fraud for falsely claiming ownership of a house in Conyers, Ga. – to get a lawyer or accept a public defender.
And Kwame repeatedly rejected that advice. It was time for trial.
“It’s a simple question,” Irwin told Kwame on Monday, according to the Rockdale News . “Are you ready for trial, yes or no? It’s a yes or no. After that you may explain.”
Sovereign citizens are not given to straight answers. They believe they are not subject to government or law enforcement authority, and typically rely on convoluted, often incomprehensible pseudo-legal gobbledygook to assert their immunity. Moorish nationals are sovereigns who claim to be members of an indigenous black tribe independent of U.S. jurisdiction.
“Judge, I conditionally accept your offer to continue this once I am presented with the documentation so I can inspect any accusatory original instruments for my inspection,” replied Kwame, 48, also known as Gregory Ross of Covington, Ga.
Annoyed by Kwame’s non-answer, Irwin tossed the suspect – who had been free on bond pending trial – into a holding cell to ponder his options. A few hours later, the judge offered Kwame one last chance to request an attorney – and made clear he’d had it with the legal shenanigans.
“As far as the Moor Nations, or Martian law, we’re going to go on Georgia law,” Irwin said. “As based upon the Georgia statutes, as done by the Georgia Legislature, you have a right to a trial on those issues. That’s it. I’m not doing Moorish law. … I’m not doing paper law. I’m doing Georgia law. … I have given you opportunities, I have given you offers, and you have refused. … You’re not free to go. A jury will be picked for you today.”
Kwame seemed bewildered. “You’re placing the occupant of the executor office of the Akeem Kwame [trust] in custody? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m going to place Akeem Kwame and anybody else that doesn’t respond [in custody]. Your imaginary friend. You and the Grand Poobah of the Moor Nation if that happens to be you. ”
Asked if he understood his constitutional right to a lawyer, Kwame told Irwin, “I waive those constitutional rights because that Constitution is not in my jurisdiction. I am an American foreign national. I am not an American citizen.”
After a few more minutes of this, an exasperated Irwin finally ordered Kwame taken to jail and canceled the trial until the state could do a psychological evaluation.
“That is not my wish today, judge,” Kwame said as he was being escorted away. “Let the record reflect, I did not give the court jurisdiction to take me into custody against my free will ….”

Summary: This Georgia judge had heard just about enough nonsense from a “sovereign citizen” charged in a scheme to steal a house. Rockdale County Superior Court Judge David Irwin repeatedly advised Akeem Kwame – a self-described “Moorish national” charged with mortgage fraud for falsely claiming ownership of a house in Conyers, Ga. – to get a lawyer or accept a public defender. And Kwame repeatedly rejected that advice. It was time for trial. “It’s a simple question,” Irwin told Kwame on Monday,…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Identity Dixie Leaders Helped Plan Deadly Rally
July 26, 2019
Hatewatch Staff
Behind the shield of anonymity, members of a neo-Confederate hate group appeared to have emerged without consequences for their participation in a deadly Virginia rally. But that shield has vanished.


Alleged Killer in Mississippi Hate Crime was 'Good Boy,' Says Uncle

The horrifying – and apparently racially motivated – random killing of a black man in Jackson, Miss., in late June is gaining national attention after CNN obtained motel surveillance video of white teens running over the man with a large pickup truck.
Prosecutors have charged 18-year-old Deryl Dedmon with murder in the killing of James Craig Anderson, 49.  John A. Rice, 18, is charged with simple assault.
Dedmon allegedly was the ringleader of two carloads of white teens who, after a night of drinking, drove from mostly white Rankin County to Jackson 16 miles away, looking for a black person. Prosecutors allege that Dedmon suggested they “go fuck with some niggers.”
It was about 5 a.m. on Sunday, June 26, when they found Anderson, who worked at a local automobile plant, in a motel parking lot near the interstate.
Yelling “white power” and various racial slurs, the teens brutally beat Anderson.  One group of teens left in an SUV, but another group, believed to be driven by Dedmon, got into a Ford F250 pickup truck and ran over Anderson, killing him instantly.
After the murder, Dedmon allegedly said in a cell phone call, “I ran that nigger over.” Prosecutors say he laughed about it.
“A good boy,” is how Ray Dedmon described his nephew, a slight, blond teen, in an interview with The New York Times . Ray Dedmon told the Times that his nephew comes from a “happy-go-lucky” family.
“He probably just got with the wrong crowd.”
The Hinds County, Miss., district attorney said that Dedmon and his friends had a history of “harassing white teens that had black friends or gay teens.”
On a Facebook page set up by Rice’s supporters, his great aunt posted: “He is not a racist or a murderer. If anything, he is being tried by the media, suffering from reverse racism and placed in jail without bond. I am sick of the race card.”
Apparently, Rice’s family members are not the only ones to share these sentiments. The white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (the reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils) called the story a “sickening double standard.”
“Every single day white people are murdered by blacks,” one post notes. “On the other hand, white on black violent crime is extremely rare.” The CCC described CNN and other news outlets as “gleefully reporting” the murder and that “the media is thankful for the crime.”
Anderson’s murder is chillingly reminiscent of other high-profile hate crimes involving gangs of youths motivated by racism. In November 2008 , a group of seven teens in Suffolk County, N.Y., decided to go “beaner jumping,” one of many such expeditions. The group randomly spotted a 38-year-old Ecuadorean immigrant, Marcelo Lucero, and beat him while uttering racial slurs. One of the teens pulled out a knife and stabbed him to death.

Summary: The horrifying – and apparently racially motivated – random killing of a black man in Jackson, Miss., in late June is gaining national attention after CNN obtained motel surveillance video of white teens running over the man with a large pickup truck. Prosecutors have charged 18-year-old Deryl Dedmon with murder in the killing of James Craig Anderson, 49.  John A. Rice, 18, is charged with simple assault. Dedmon allegedly was the ringleader of two carloads of white teens who, after a night of…


FLDS Leader Warren Jeffs Sentenced to Life for Raping Child Bride

Warren Jeffs, the racist leader of a breakaway Mormon sect, was sentenced to life in prison today for raping a 12-year-girl, taken as a bride in a “spiritual marriage.” Jeffs, the president and prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) was also sentenced to 20 years for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old member of his cult.
Jeffs is already imprisoned for an earlier conviction.
The charges stemmed from a 2007 raid on the FLDS “Yearning for Zion” compound outside Eldorado, Texas. About 460 children were initially taken into custody during the FBI raid, triggered by an anonymous phone tip that turned out to be a hoax.  Jeffs vigorously denied the charges, but prosecutors played tapes of him sexually assaulting the 12-year-old and produced DNA evidence proving Jeffs had a child with the 15-year-old. Jurors also saw a 2005 document, among thousands of pages of notes seized in the raid, in which Jeffs wrote, “If the world knew what I was doing, they would hang me from the highest tree.”
As the SPLC has reported , Jeffs preached a virulent racism to his 10,000 followers as well as hatred toward LGBT people.  "The black race,” he said, “ is the people through which the devil has always been able to bring evil unto the earth."
The judge said Jeffs, 55, who represented himself, will be eligible for parole in 35 years.

Summary: Warren Jeffs, the racist leader of a breakaway Mormon sect, was sentenced to life in prison today for raping a 12-year-girl, taken as a bride in a “spiritual marriage.” Jeffs, the president and prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) was also sentenced to 20 years for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old member of his cult. Jeffs is already imprisoned for an earlier conviction. The charges stemmed from a 2007 raid on the FLDS “Yearning for Zion” compound…


Idaho Militia Leader Sentenced for Weapons, Bombs

A federal judge in Idaho delivered a pointed message to an ailing militia leader caught amassing an “arsenal of firearms and ammunition” and building improvised bombs in fear of an imminent invasion of the United States by “communists.”
It was “far-fetched” to think the arsenal of weapons and homemade bombs “would have any impact one way or another if there was an invasion from a communist country,” Judge Edward Lodge told Kenneth Bernard Kimbley, the self-styled leader of the Brotherhood of American Patriots.
The 60-year-old militia leader’s defense attorney previously told the court her client was inspired by his idol, the conspiracy-mongering Fox News host Glenn Beck , and really didn’t intend to harm anyone.
But with a lengthy history of drug abuse and a felony record for assaulting his girlfriend with a handgun, Kimbley couldn’t legally possess or sell firearms or ammunition. Nonetheless, ignoring the law, he amassed an arsenal, including more than 22,000 rounds of ammunition and assault rifles, illegally sold a handgun, and was teaching others in his militia group how to build bombs, federal authorities said. He pleaded guilty in November to attempting to make explosive devices and illegal possession of a firearm.
This Monday in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Kimbley was sentenced to a year and a day in prison – equal to nine months if he gets credit for good behavior – far less than the 46 months recommended by Assistant U.S. Attorney Traci Whalen. When he is released from prison, Kimbley also must serve one year of home confinement as a condition of three years of probation and serve 100 hours of community service — talking to school children about the evils of bombbuilding. He was allowed to self-report to prison, and will get credit for five months already served.
“The defendant built improvised explosive devices (and) more alarmingly taught others how to build IEDs,” the federal prosecutor said in a sentencing memorandum.
One of those invited to Kimbley’s bombbuilding lessons was an undercover FBI agent, assigned to the Inland Northwest Joint Terrorism Task Force, who infiltrated the Brotherhood of American Patriots militia. The agent drove up to the militia’s secret headquarters in North Idaho in July 2010 in a motor home secretly wired for sound and video, court documents disclose.
When the IED-making got to a dangerous point, just short of complete assembly, the documents say, the agent suggested the group step outside the motor home for a cigarette break. As they went outside, Kimbley and co-defendant Steven Winegar were arrested by other agents. Winegar, with no prior felony record, has since been sentenced to eight months of home detention and five years of probation.
“When a felon carries a gun or builds and teaches other to build an IED, society is at risk,” said Whalen, the prosecutor. Her recommendation of 46 months in prison took into account a downward departure from a standard range of 63 to 78 months in exchange for Kimbley’s cooperation with federal authorities. Although Kimbley and his militia group didn’t directly harm anyone, their activities put others at risk, Whalen told the court.
Since his arrest a year ago, Kimbley, has been diagnosed with lung cancer and is undergoing treatment, public defender Kim Deater told the judge, urging the court not to send her client to federal prison. Kimbley was not plotting an overthrow of the U.S. government or violence directed at others and, in fact, he thought it was only right to pay federal income taxes, Deater told the court.
Instead, he and his Brotherhood of American Patriots were “worried about an invasion” of the United States, and that’s why they collected firearms and built IEDs, Deater said. “They were worried about the Russians, they were worried about the Chinese.”
Asked to address the court, Kimbley said he now realizes his final days would be better spent with his grandchildren instead of a militia. “I realize that I was in the wrong,” he said. “I can tell you there will never ever be another firearm in my home. I just pray for some forgiveness. That’s all I have to say, your honor.”

Summary: A federal judge in Idaho delivered a pointed message to an ailing militia leader caught amassing an “arsenal of firearms and ammunition” and building improvised bombs in fear of an imminent invasion of the United States by “communists.” It was “far-fetched” to think the arsenal of weapons and homemade bombs “would have any impact one way or another if there was an invasion from a communist country,” Judge Edward Lodge told Kenneth Bernard Kimbley, the self-styled leader of the Brotherhood of…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 11/17/2016
November 17, 2016
Hatewatch Staff
Twitter suspends alt-right accounts; Will Trump roll back the hate?; Bannon’s white-nationalist worldview explained; and more.


Hatewatch


Black ‘Flash Mobs’: Anti-White or Destructive Self-Hatred?

An apparent wave of street rowdiness by urban black teenagers – not always accurately called “flash mobs” – has rolled across American cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee in recent months. The phenomenon could represent the leading edge of a rise in anti-white hate among black youths – or it could merely be the latest destructive symptom of wretched dysfunction eating away at the nation’s black underclass. Either way, the trend, if not stanched, could push the nation toward a new social rupture that undermines decades of tentatively easing tensions between whites and blacks.
“Flash mobs” are groups of people who, using the instant networking capabilities of text messages, Tweets, Facebook and other types of social media, rapidly rendezvous at a specific location. Originally, flash mobs were entertaining, often-humorous eruptions of dance, performance art or simple silliness, like pillow or snowball fights. But some disaffected urban youths have utilized the technique to quickly muster the numerical strength to engage in lawlessness with a sense of impunity.
In Chicago, groups of juveniles conducted coordinated shoplifting raids on stores in posh Northside shopping districts in January. Dozens of teens from the distressed West Philadelphia neighborhood boarded El trains to stage a similar raid June 23 at a Sears store across town in Upper Darby.
More often, however, it appears teens use social media to converge on a site just to mingle and hang out, only to have violence break out as their numbers swell. The worst recent case was the Aug. 4 opening night of the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee, where scores, perhaps hundreds, of unsupervised black youths inside and outside the fair grounds began punching and kicking white people at random and pounding on their cars. At least 11 people, seven of them police officers, were injured, and 31 were arrested. One victim told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the marauding youths were deliberately bypassing black fairgoers. One suspect later admitted seeking out white people because they were “easy targets,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times . At least 11 of the criminal cases being pursued involve race as a factor, according to the West Allis (Wis.) Police Department.
It wasn’t the summer’s first eruption of injurious violence. In Philadelphia on June 25, a group of between 20 and 40 teens chased, tackled, punched and kicked white pedestrians in North Philly, breaking one woman’s leg and sending at least two others to the hospital. The marauders resurfaced on July 26, as about three dozen teens assaulted and robbed pedestrians at random and vandalized property in the Center City district.
Hundreds of black teenagers quickly converged on two Cleveland-area summer events. At the Coventry Street Fair in Cleveland Heights on June 26, a flurry of fights and vandalism resulted in at least 15 arrests. On July 4, 500 to 1,000 youths zeroed in on a fireworks show at Shaker Heights Middle School, “some with the intent to disrupt and ruin a family event,” said Police Chief Scott Lee, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer . Two juveniles were arrested.
That these and other cases of urban lawlessness are perpetrated almost exclusively by black youths is inescapable – yet it’s also not clear what to make of that fact. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, during an Aug. 7 address to the Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, minced no words in addressing the racial aspect of the hooligans who had disrupted the city’s tranquility on prior weekends.
“You’ve damaged yourself. You damaged another person. You damaged your peers. And quite honestly, you damaged your own race,” Nutter, who is black, said in statements directed to young people. “If you want black folks, if you want white folks, Latinos, Asians or anybody else to respect you and not be afraid when they see you walking down the street, then leave the innocent people who are walking down the street minding their own damned business, leave them alone. Cut it out.
“Some of them,” Nutter said of the offending teenagers, “should be ashamed of their behavior. Some of them have made shame on our race.” The next day, Nutter tightened summer curfew restrictions, deployed more officers and extended the hours of social centers to help prevent a repeat of the violence.
But race may only be a coincident factor in the disturbances. In the wake of Cleveland’s street unrest, the Open Doors Academy, a nonprofit developmental program for high-risk middle- and high school-aged teenagers, held a youth-led community forum. “The kids said, ‘This was not an issue of race, we believe this is an issue of age and economics,’” said Annemarie Grassi, the CEO of Open Doors. Grassi is white, but the agency’s programs serve a primarily black clientele. “They said, ‘There is not enough for us to do in this community.’ … It’s economic differences more than the color of their skin, and unfortunately, a lot of the poorer kids are African-American.”
There is some logic to Grassi’s observation. For one, the black teen mobs that have caused mayhem lately seem entirely bereft of political motivation. Also, they are leaderless – a stark contrast to black urban violence of the 1960s and ’70s, which was infused with conscious anger over perceptions of racial and social injustice, and led by firebrand orators. Today’s black teen marauders may more accurately typify what Washington University Medical School researcher Wesley Bryant calls “internalized racism” – a lack of self-respect and socially reinforced negative attitudes toward one’s own race. Bryant published a study in March demonstrating that internalized racism in teens can lead to an increased propensity toward violent behavior.
Whether the black flash mob trend is a manifestation of anti-white hate – as white nationalist commentators eagerly affirm with breathless self-righteousness – or just a familiar spilling over of boredom and frustration from a teenage class that is still wracked by high unemployment and minuscule prospects for opportunity and advancement, one thing appears certain: Thanks to digital-speed social media, its consequences may be felt virtually anywhere, at any time – and with very little warning.

Summary: An apparent wave of street rowdiness by urban black teenagers – not always accurately called “flash mobs” – has rolled across American cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee in recent months. The phenomenon could represent the leading edge of a rise in anti-white hate among black youths – or it could merely be the latest destructive symptom of wretched dysfunction eating away at the nation’s black underclass. Either way, the trend, if not stanched, could push the…


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White Nationalist State Department Official Surfaces in Photographs
August 09, 2019
Michael Edison Hayden
Hatewatch has obtained images of Matthew Q. Gebert, a State Department official who is involved in the white nationalist movement.


Hatewatch

A national survey of 1,500 adults fielded by the Intelligence Project and Tulchin Research revealed that Americans understand white supremacy and other forms of racism as a threat to our society, but still struggle to connect those issues to systemic and structural racism.


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Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 11/16/2016
November 16, 2016
Hatewatch Staff
What Bannon in the White House means; We really know little about hate crimes; Church keeps its ‘Heil Trump’ graffiti; and more.


Liberty Counsel Dips Toes in the ‘Patriot’ Pool

The Liberty Counsel for Law and Policy is traditionally known for its pro bono litigation work with regard to perceived slights against the practice of Christianity in schools and other public venues, as well as its work against abortion and LGBT rights. It was no surprise, therefore, when its president, Mathew Staver, and Matt Barber, on staff at Liberty University, recently assailed the American Psychological Association (APA) for its support of LGBT people and same-sex marriage on their Faith and Freedom radio show.
It was standard Liberty Counsel rhetoric: Gay men and lesbians can and should change their orientation, because the Liberty Counsel considers it harmful and immoral. Barber and Staver dismissed leading, reputable mainstream organizations and instead touted the findings of small religious (often Christian-only) groups like the American Association of Christian Counselors, which the Liberty Counsel has said is larger than the APA (the APA has 154,000 members, while the AACC claims "nearly 50,000").
What's more surprising is that the Liberty Counsel seems to be dipping its toes into the anti-government “Patriot” pool. Patriot groups see the federal government as part of a conspiracy to impose a socialistic one-world government – or “New World Order” – on freedom-loving Americans. They often rail against involvement with the United Nations, worry about government instituting martial law, and express fears about "creeping socialism" (more recently, "creeping Shariah law") and other government plots to undermine freedom.
In a recent fundraising letter, the Liberty Counsel included a "2011 State of the Nation Issues Survey," in which participants check boxes that range from "strongly agree" to "disagree" when prompted by specific statements. Along with its usual claims –  that LGBT people want "special rights," that public schools should not teach the "homosexual agenda," and the false claim that hate crime legislation punishes Americans for opposition to "the homosexual lifestyle" – the survey included other sections on "Homeland Security" and "Radical Islam."  In the "Homeland Security" section, one statement says, "American soldiers should never be forced to submit to the authority of U.N. commanders, nor wear a U.N. uniform." Another says, "Ethnic profiling should be used to prevent further terrorist attacks, as Israel does."
The Liberty Counsel also jumps on the anti-Islamic bandwagon in its "Radical Islam" section. There, participants are to respond to statements like "America should never incorporate Muslim Sharia law into our legal and economic systems, as is being promoted by the U.S. Muslim community." And, sounding more like a Tea Party group, the survey's statements in the "Economic/Domestic" section include calls to lower personal and business taxes, repeal Obama's socialized health care, increase oil drilling in Alaska, and impeach “activist federal judges."
The letter accompanying the survey claims that thanks to the collective efforts of the Liberty Counsel and like-minded individuals and groups, "the slide to socialism has been slowed for now," even though "We have seen Barack Obama's vision for this nation as a socialist, big government, limited freedom, anti-life, anti-marriage, pro-homosexual America that apologizes for its religious heritage."
So, for a donation of $25 or more, the Liberty Counsel offers both a copy of  Mathew Staver's Take Back America , and a copy of The Patriot's Handbook of American Liberty , which includes the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, Patrick Henry's speech before the Virginia House of Burgesses, and an essay by Mat Staver. If you can't afford the $25, that's OK. The Liberty Counsel will provide a copy of The Patriot's Handbook for any amount. In other words, join them in the pool.

Summary: The Liberty Counsel for Law and Policy is traditionally known for its pro bono litigation work with regard to perceived slights against the practice of Christianity in schools and other public venues, as well as its work against abortion and LGBT rights. It was no surprise, therefore, when its president, Mathew Staver, and Matt Barber, on staff at Liberty University, recently assailed the American Psychological Association (APA) for its support of LGBT people and same-sex marriage on their…


News Roundup for August 25, 2011

Prosecutors in Muscogee County, Ga., indicted a man for assault they allege is connected to the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Authorities say that Michael Carothers, 31, allegedly pulled up alongside an African-American man who was walking and pepper sprayed him. Carothers is known for passing out National Alliance literature, and is facing up to 20 years in prison for the attack.
A man in Portland, Ore., has been charged with a hate crime for allegedly firebombing a mosque in Corvallis, Ore. Cody Crawford is accused of the attack on the mosque, only a block away from his home, which had once been attended by a suspected attempted bomber.
A lesbian couple in Harlan County, Ky., is asking the federal government to investigate a possible hate crime against them. The couple alleges that while they attended a Fourth of July fireworks display with their family, including their children, a group of people began shooting fireworks at them, burning one victim’s grandmother. After one victim’s father attempted to approach the group, people in the crowd began to attack her and her partner, resulting in serious injuries to both.
Police in Port Orange, Fla., are searching for a grandmother accused of kidnapping her grandson, and who may be dangerous. According to police, Laurine Sue Arnold, 49, is believed to be a “sovereign citizen” and may be uncooperative if found. Arnold was allegedly not allowed to see her grandson, and is also wanted on an unrelated charge of resisting arrest.
Authorities in Waterloo, Iowa, have announced that they will not seek hate crimes charges in the death of a 19-year-old African-American teen. The victim was allegedly beaten in front of a friend’s house by a group of individuals, and later died at a local hospital. The friends of the victim claim it was a hate crime due to his being called gay slurs. Police say previous animosities between the two sides caused the taunting and fight.

Summary: Prosecutors in Muscogee County, Ga., indicted a man for assault they allege is connected to the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Authorities say that Michael Carothers, 31, allegedly pulled up alongside an African-American man who was walking and pepper sprayed him. Carothers is known for passing out National Alliance literature, and is facing up to 20 years in prison for the attack. A man in Portland, Ore., has been charged with a hate crime for allegedly firebombing a mosque in Corvallis, Ore.…


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Proud Boys Destroy Churches' Black Lives Matter Signs During Protest in Washington, D.C.
December 16, 2020
Cassie Miller
Proud Boys attended a pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday that ended with members of the group tearing down and destroying Black Lives Matter banners from two historic Black churches.


Alleged Mosque Firebomber Arrested in Oregon

In a distant echo of the mass murder last month in Norway, a young man who once described himself to police as a “Christian warrior” and talked about a jihad against Muslims is in federal custody in Oregon on federal hate crime and arson charges.
Cody Seth Crawford, 24, of Corvallis, Ore., was arrested Wednesday on a federal indictment accusing him of the Nov. 28 arson of the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center near his home.
The firebombing of the mosque came two days after Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a former Oregon State University student, was arrested in a terror plot to detonate a car bomb during at Portland's annual holiday tree-lighting ceremony. Mohamud, now 20, who worshipped at the Corvallis mosque, is awaiting trial.
Crawford’s arrest came a little over a month after Anders Breivik, who described himself as a “Christian” warrior, murdered 77 people in Norway, most of them teenagers at a youth camp. Breivik, who repeatedly cited American Islamophobes in a kind of manifesto he wrote to explain the July 22 attack, has admitted the murders of people who he thought were encouraging Muslim immigration to Norway.
In the United States, Crawford is accused of two federal crimes in an indictment that is partially sealed from public inspection. In a redacted companion document, he is accused of damage to religious property and use of fire to commit a felony.
The indictment accuses Crawford of carrying out the crime “because of the race, color, and ethnic characteristics of an individual and individuals associated with that property.”
He was ordered held without bond as a flight risk and a danger to the community after an appearance Thursday in Eugene before U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas M. Coffin.
Assistant U.S.  Attorney William "Bud" Fitzgerald told the court that Crawford suffers from “a pattern of bipolarity and alcohol addiction,” The Oregonian reported.
FBI agents who arrested Crawford Wednesday afternoon smelled alcohol on his breath, Fitzgerald said.
Bryan Lessley, assistant federal public defender, told the court that Crawford "has very severe mental health issues.”
Crawford was released in June from a six-month civil commitment to a mental hospital. He was sent there after being arrested by police in McMinnville, Ore., for allegedly harassing and threatening a convenience store clerk who refused to sell him alcohol on Dec. 14, 2010. Two days later, police took him to a hospital after a witness saw Crawford waving a knife outside his home.
During those contacts with police, Crawford made rants about Muslims and described himself as a Christian warrior, The Oregonian reported.
“You look like Obama,” Crawford told a McMinnville police officer who arrested him on Dec. 14. “You are a Muslim like him. Jihad goes both ways, Christians can jihad too.”
In 2009, he was charged with third-degree assault for throwing urine on a prison guard.
Shortly after the firebombing of the mosque, investigators found a blue Maglite flashlight on a sidewalk near the mosque. DNA tests identified Crawford as a "potential major contributor of the DNA" found on the flashlight, according to court documents. A plastic 2-liter strawberry soda bottle and a brick were found near a broken window of the mosque. Lab tests showed the bottle contained gasoline and mineral oil, the court documents say.
“Burning a house of worship because of hatred toward members of one religion is not just an attack on that religion, it is an attack on our core American values,” Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said of the case.
Dwight C. Holton, the U.S. Attorney for Oregon, said freedom of religion “is essential to who we are as Americans. We will not tolerate attacks based on faith.”
Greg Fowler, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Oregon, said the arrest in mosque firebombing demonstrates the FBI’s mission to “protect the rights of all Americans as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.”

Summary: In a distant echo of the mass murder last month in Norway, a young man who once described himself to police as a “Christian warrior” and talked about a jihad against Muslims is in federal custody in Oregon on federal hate crime and arson charges. Cody Seth Crawford, 24, of Corvallis, Ore., was arrested Wednesday on a federal indictment accusing him of the Nov. 28 arson of the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center near his home. The firebombing of the mosque came two days after Mohamed Osman Mohamud,…


News Roundup for August 29, 2011

Federal jurors convicted an alleged militia member from Parma, Ohio, of illegally possessing firearms and submitting false forms to the Internal Revenue Service. Karl Herrington, 59, was found guilty in a Detroit federal court of two counts of corruptly endeavoring to obstruct the administration of the IRS, and one count each of filing false tax forms and being a felon in possession of firearms. Herrington’s wife, Jeanne, is currently in a Michigan prison and will do time in federal prison for similar offenses.
A Maryland teenager secretly arrested by the FBI for allegedly conspiring with the woman from the Philadelphia suburbs known as Jihad Jane also spoke of a Columbine-style plot with a Pittsburgh-area friend, Emerson Begolly, in a jihadist chat room. Begolly, a former neo-Nazi from New Bethlehem, Pa., has pleaded guilty to using the chat room to solicit terrorists to use explosives and propane tanks to target police stations and railways.
Former Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV and associate Antoine Mackey were sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing journalist Chauncey Bailey and two other men in 2007. Bey IV is due back in court next month to set a trial date for a separate case in which he is charged with killing two women and torturing one of them in a failed attempt to learn where a drug dealer hid money.
Five teens were arrested and charged after a shot was fired outside of an Orleans County, N.Y. mosque Monday night as worshipers were leaving nightly Ramadan services. According to members of the mosque in Waterport, they had been repeatedly harassed since the mosque was founded in 1974. Things escalated last Monday night after prayer services, when a speeding vehicle allegedly swerved directly into a group of worshipers and a shot was allegedly fired from the vehicle before the car sped away.

Summary: Federal jurors convicted an alleged militia member from Parma, Ohio, of illegally possessing firearms and submitting false forms to the Internal Revenue Service. Karl Herrington, 59, was found guilty in a Detroit federal court of two counts of corruptly endeavoring to obstruct the administration of the IRS, and one count each of filing false tax forms and being a felon in possession of firearms. Herrington’s wife, Jeanne, is currently in a Michigan prison and will do time in federal prison for…


Hatewatch

It should be no surprise that anti government folks seeking redress want someone besides the government to adjudicate for them. As a result, common law courts have sprung up across the United States. Many members of these courts are sovereign citizens who believe their judgments supersede federal and district court decisions, and then bring their quasi-legal activity into legitimate courts and use tactics including intimidation and paper terrorism.


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Racist Flyers Use Photo, False Statement from Idaho Mayor
April 13, 2017
Bill Morlin
Neo-Nazi propagandists used a photo of the mayor of Sandpoint, Idaho, and a purported statement from him about multiculturalism in the latest batch of racist flyers to hit to city.


Hatewatch

This is the final post in a six part Hatewatch series examining the Newslinks & Articles section of Stormfront.org . Until last summer, Stormfront was the most trafficked white supremacist website online.


Hatewatch

The antisemitic and neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Movement (NSM) is now under the control of a black civil rights advocate from California who once dissolved a notorious Ku Klux Klan chapter in Mississippi.


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Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 4/12/2017
April 12, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
It’s white Americans’ job to combat hate; Spicer apologizes for Hitler gaffe; Federal judge strikes down Texas’ discriminatory voter-ID law; and more.


News Roundup for September 1, 2011

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.

Summary: 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…