Hatewatch
Minutemen ranks growing in Chicago suburbs
March 07, 2006
Hatewatch Staff
At first glance, Terry Gavin and Pete Kozak seem to have little in common.
Read full article


Hatewatch
100,000 rally for immigrant rights in Chicago
March 14, 2006
Hatewatch Staff
Tens of thousands of immigrants from all over the Chicago area, many carrying U.S. flags, marched into downtown Friday to show support for immigrant rights.
Read full article


Anti-immigration candidate exchanges gunfire with 'gang-banger'

Mesa council candidate JT Ready bought some cat litter at Wal-Mart and was driving to a friend's house about 1 a.m. Thursday when he noticed Hispanic men dressed like "gang-bangers" acting "suspiciously."
Read full article


Colorado senate passes bill targeting 'sanctuary cities'

A bill targeting immigration "sanctuary cities" won its initial vote Thursday in the state Senate.
The bill, by Sen. Tom Wiens, R-Castle Rock, passed on a voice vote with little debate. It would require local police officers to report suspected illegal immigrants they arrest to federal immigration agents.
It also requires cities to report immigration arrests to the Legislature.
An earlier version of the bill would have required police to call the feds every time they found a suspected illegal immigrant, whether or not an arrest was made...
No senator voted against the bill Thursday.
"One of the concerns we have is this is federal law, and when we incarcerate (immigrants) at the state or local level, we don't get compensation to incarcerate them," said Sen. Jim Isgar, D-Hesperus. "If somebody illegal commits a crime, yes, they need to report it. I think we all agree on that."
The Durango Herald reports

Summary: A bill targeting immigration "sanctuary cities" won its initial vote Thursday in the state Senate. The bill, by Sen. Tom Wiens, R-Castle Rock, passed on a voice vote with little debate. It would require local police officers to report suspected illegal immigrants they arrest to federal immigration agents. It also requires cities to report immigration arrests to the Legislature. An earlier version of the bill would have required police to call the feds every time they found a suspected illegal…


Hatewatch
Human rights leader receives death threat
May 16, 2006
Hatewatch Staff
Strong words coming from activist Roy Warden. But this time has he gone too far?
Read full article


Hatewatch
Immigration fervor fuels racist extremism
May 16, 2006
Hatewatch Staff
[...] The national anthem is not in danger.
Read full article


Anti-immigration billboard raises tensions

A controversial campaign calling for Americans to ''Stop the Invasion'' has brought the anti-immigration debate to South Florida with a giant billboard on Interstate 95 at Northwest 79th Street in Miami.
Read full article


Minuteman leaders denounce Bush plan

A civilian border watch group considers President Bush's crackdown plan on illegal immigration insufficient and is sticking to plans to start putting up a short border security fence on private land along the Mexican border.
Read full article


"Conspiracy to smuggle" arrests debated

Defense attorneys on Tuesday urged Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas to stop prosecuting illegal immigrants as co-conspirators in smuggling until the case for 44 illegal immigrants is resolved.
Read full article


Racism surfacing in immigration debate

The statement smacked of the rhetoric that circulated 40 years ago when some whites tried to explain their opposition to African-Americans' efforts for equality during the Civil Rights movement.
Read full article


Ballot proposal divides community

Few cities have been battered as harshly by shifting policy and economic forces as this working-class suburb 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Despite being in one of the fastest-growing regions of the state, San Bernardino is long on problems -- such as vanishing jobs, gang violence and poor schools -- and desperately short on solutions.
Read full article


Four teens charged in hate crime attack

Two Mexican immigrants fishing off a Long Island jetty were attacked by a group of white teenagers who beat them and stole their money while using racial and ethnic slurs, police said.
Read full article


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 11/28/2016
November 28, 2016
Hatewatch Staff
Derek Black reflects on white nationalism; Trump making Nazis ‘go away,’ pundit says; Five myths about the alt-right; and more.


Minuteman billboards target McCain

One of the leading groups advocating tougher border and immigration controls is going after Arizona Sen. John McCain for his support of more moderate border polices including a business-backed guest worker program.
Read full article


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
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.


Hatewatch

Counterdemonstrators greatly outnumbered the Ku Klux Klan at a weekend rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the focus was on the city’s planned removal of a large statute of Civil War Gen. Robert E. Lee.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Anti-LGBT Hate Group Leader Steven Anderson Banned From the Netherlands and the Schengen Zone
May 03, 2019
Hatewatch Staff
The Netherlands banned Steven Anderson, pastor of Arizona anti-LGBT hate group Faithful Word Baptist Church, from the country, bringing the number of nations that bar Anderson from entry to 31.


Hatewatch


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
League of the South Officer Convicted of Gun Possession at Demonstration
January 14, 2020
Brett Barrouquere
An officer in the neo-Confederate group League of the South has been convicted of illegally carrying a gun during a demonstration over the removal of a Confederate monument in North Carolina.


Klan plans immigration rally

Hatewatch
Klan plans immigration rally
July 18, 2006
Hatewatch Staff
They call themselves "a law abiding Christian organization," and have no reservations with affiliating themselves to the Ku Klux Klan...
Read full article


Vermont Minutemen get lost

Hatewatch
Vermont Minutemen get lost
October 18, 2005
Hatewatch Staff
It's hard to save the United States from illegal immigrants when you can't find the border...
Read full article


Washington Minutemen called 'racist and divisive'

...Referring to the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps as "self-appointed militia and vigilantes with limited training," Bellingham's City Council this week passed a resolution condemning the volunteer guards, who stationed themselves Oct. 1 at eight posts between Blaine and Sumas.
Read full article


For Atlanta homeless, protesting immigration pays

D.A. King, an anti-illegal immigration activist from Marietta who spoke at the protest, acknowledged Wednesday that he paid "14 willing American workers to let their voices be heard about illegal immigration.
Read full article


Hatewatch
Austin commission passes anti-Minuteman resolution
October 25, 2005
Hatewatch Staff
Members of a city-appointed advisory committee passed a resolution restricting the actions of vigilante groups on Tuesday.
Read full article


Greyhound accused of racial profiling

The nation's largest intercity bus carrier has recently come under fire from Latino groups over its policy to ferret out illegal immigrants – and their smugglers – who might be using its buses...
Read full article


Candidate accused of exploiting Mexican workers

Two undocumented workers from Mexico have filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Labor alleging Republican dairy magnate Jim Oberweis and a Lake in the Hills subcontractor paid them well below minimum wage to clean three suburban Oberweis ice cream shops.
Read full article


Governor pressured to reject detention centers

Opponents of a proposal to detain illegal immigrants at sports arenas and other public areas called on Gov. Bill Owens on Thursday to denounce what they called a "mean- spirited and racist" movement...
Read full article


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 2/22/2017
February 22, 2017
Trump spent President’s Day with man who wants to “kill 100 million” Muslims; militia groups meet the law -- in court; when hate attacks, many stand up and fight back; and more.


Hatewatch

Following revelations that he had appeared on a right-wing nationalist podcast and protested the removal of Lost Cause statues while dressed in tropes popular with far right street demonstrators, the principal of New Orleans’ Crescent Leadership Academy was removed from his post .


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 4/6/2017
April 06, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Judges knock down anti-LGBT job discrimination; Pressure on Trump over surge in hate crimes; Teachers begin taking on white nationalism; and more.


Hatewatch

Dylann Storm Roof, indoctrinated in online hate and racism, was convicted today in Charleston, S.C., of a murderous gun rampage in 2015 that left nine people dead at a historic African-American church. The racially motivated killing spree jarred the nation.


Gilchrist boycotts election debate

Congressional candidate Jim Gilchrist, a member of the American Independent Party, on Monday said he will boycott a candidates' forum tonight because the League of Women Voters is a cosponsor of the event. Gilchrist is one of five candidates who will vie for the 48th District House seat in a Dec. 6 general election.
Read full article


Minutemen 'terrorizing' Tennessee Latinos

Carl "Two Feathers" Whitaker is a two-time gubernatorial candidate and self-described American Indian activist with a penchant for media coverage. David Foust is a car dealer and grandfather who is determined to see the United States enforce its immigration statutes…
Read full article


Hatewatch

The overwhelming support experienced by Donald Trump in rural red strongholds across the southeast during the 2016 election has forced League of the South (LOS) president Michael Hill to face the realization that Trump’s campaign rhetoric has eroded support for his historic platform beneath him. Meanwhile, the League has been bleeding young, educated members to “Alt-Right” white nationalism.


What motivates the Minutemen?

If you drive far enough south in Douglas, Arizona, you eventually hit the wall. You'll pass through tidy avenues lined with new ranch homes and the stately old brick houses built for mining officials back when Douglas was a company town, when there were jobs here besides those offered by the Border Patrol, Wal-Mart, and the prison up the road. But this is the Sonoran desert, despite the lawns, and mini-tornadoes of red dust keep whipping themselves up in the streets and just as quickly dissolving. ...
Read full article

Summary: If you drive far enough south in Douglas, Arizona, you eventually hit the wall. You'll pass through tidy avenues lined with new ranch homes and the stately old brick houses built for mining officials back when Douglas was a company town, when there were jobs here besides those offered by the Border Patrol, Wal-Mart, and the prison up the road. But this is the Sonoran desert, despite the lawns, and mini-tornadoes of red dust keep whipping themselves up in the streets and just as quickly…


Hatewatch


Save Our State protests Home Depot

Hatewatch
Save Our State protests Home Depot
January 24, 2006
Hatewatch Staff
About 125 protesters -- both opponents and proponents -- rallied outside a day labor center next to a new Home Depot on Saturday morning...
Read full article


Trespass bill proposed in Arizona

Hatewatch
Trespass bill proposed in Arizona
January 24, 2006
Hatewatch Staff
A Paradise Valley Republican thinks she's found a way to let state and local police round up illegal entrants -- make their presence in this state the crime of trespass.
Read full article


Hatewatch

Counterdemonstrators greatly outnumbered the Ku Klux Klan at a weekend rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the focus was on the city’s planned removal of a large statute of Civil War Gen. Robert E. Lee.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 5/12/2017
May 12, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Muslims taking step to blunt increase in arsons; Trump names Kobach to voter-fraud panel; IRS gives white nationalists a tax break; and more.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Friends of Border Patrol suspends operations, fires director
November 29, 2005
Hatewatch Staff


Lou Dobbs' Broken Record

Lou Dobbs is a genial sort, a pleasant-faced CNN anchorman who regularly presents himself as standing up for American working men and women against those who would injure them. Hosting "Lou Dobbs Tonight" for a prime-time hour every weekday, he is also well known and powerful. So when Dobbs focuses on an issue, millions of Americans learn just what it is that Dobbs thinks they should know.
Read full article


Minutemen, protesters clash in San Diego

The San Diego Minutemen's first public attempt to stop employers from hiring migrant workers drew about 200 people to downtown yesterday, but it did not prevent day laborers from being hired at the site...
Read full article


Nativism On Air

Radio personality Roger Hedgecock made his way to the front of the Holiday Inn conference room, surveyed the standing-room-only crowd and smiled broadly. Among the 400 people attending the first organizational meeting of the "Hold Their Feet to the Fire" anti-immigration gathering held in Washington, D.C., last April were 250 Hedgecock fans who had purchased tour packages and flown together from San Diego for the week-long lobbying blitz...
Read full article


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Extremism Headlines: Alex Jones defamation suit, Faith-based groups face threats
June 07, 2024
Hatewatch Staff
Every week, we highlight stories on extremism and the radical right from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. Here are stories that caught our attention through June 7.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Pastor who called for execution of gay people accused by his children of abuse
December 12, 2024
Emerson Hodges
Content warning: This article contains violent anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, descriptions of domestic abuse and references to sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch has identified a previously pseudonymous author and ideologue whose writings in the 2000s and early 2010s heavily influenced the “manosphere,” a loose network of blogs, forums, websites and influencers who support rolling back women’s rights, reject feminism and advocate for rigid gender roles.


Hatewatch

Four years after purchasing a castle in rural West Virginia intended as their headquarters, the white nationalist outlet VDARE has said that an investigation by New York Attorney General (AG) Letitia James has “crucified” the site and left it “on life support.”


Hatewatch

Amid ongoing campus protests advocating for a cease-fire in Gaza, a concerning trend has emerged: Right-wing activists, mainstream media, and politicians have begun to recycle decades-old antisemitic tropes to denounce the protests as inherently antisemitic.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Extremism Headlines: Book bans, conspiracy theories, FBI building attack
April 12, 2024
Hatewatch Staff
Every week, we highlight stories on extremism and the radical right from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. Here are stories that caught our attention through April 12.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Extremism Headlines: Sovereign Citizen farmer, Far-Right Fraternal Order
March 13, 2024
Hatewatch Staff
Every week, we highlight stories on extremism and the radical right from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. Here are stories that caught our attention through March 15.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Neo-Nazis Rally in Nashville for the ‘Great White South’
February 22, 2024
Jeff Tischauser
Content warning:
This article contains graphic language, including racist slurs, antisemitic language and suggestions of sexual violence. Reader discretion is advised.


Hatewatch


Hatewatch

Antigovernment extremists and militia-types looking to bash federal law enforcement just got a new drumbeat – one to replace the worn-out tropes arising from the 1990s tragedies at Ruby Ridge and Waco.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Anti-LGBT Roundup of Events and Activities 6.26.17
June 26, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
The following is a list of activities and events of anti-LGBT organizations and individuals. Organizations listed as anti-LGBT hate groups are designated with an asterisk.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Andrew Anglin Raises More Than $150,000, Still Hiding from SPLC Lawsuit
June 06, 2017
Keegan Hankes
Andrew Anglin, proprietor of the Daily Stormer, continues to hide from an
SPLC lawsuit
filed on April 18, despite a legal defense fund that has raised more than $151,305 in just over a month.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 6/23/2017
June 23, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Domestic-terror data reveals the right-wing threat; KKK more ‘fractured’ but dangerous; Court lifts injunction blocking MS anti-LGBT law; and more.


Hatewatch

A lone gunman who open fired on Republican members of the congressional baseball team who were practicing at a field in suburban Washington, D.C., early Wednesday morning has been identified as James T. (Tom) Hodgkinson.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Jeff Schoep Sheds Neo-Nazi Past but Stays Loyal With Lawyer’s Maneuvers
September 11, 2019
Brett Barrouquere
The longtime leader of the neo-Nazi group the
National Socialist Movement
(NSM) has renounced his antisemitic past, but court records indicate he remains loyal to the organization.


Hatewatch

Three members of the Shieldwall Network (SWN), an Arkansas-based white nationalist group founded by longtime movement leader Billy Roper, were arrested last week in connection with second-degree battery.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Anti-LGBT Hate Group Leader Steven Anderson Banned From the Netherlands and the Schengen Zone
May 03, 2019
Hatewatch Staff
The Netherlands banned Steven Anderson, pastor of Arizona anti-LGBT hate group Faithful Word Baptist Church, from the country, bringing the number of nations that bar Anderson from entry to 31.


From Minuteman to Congressman?

Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the Minuteman Project civilian border patrol organization, is seriously considering a run for Congress, promising to make stemming the tide of illegal immigration his No. 1 priority.
Read full article


Officials denounce hate group immigration protests

MILFORD — The chairmen of the city's Republican and Democratic Town Committees spoke out against demonstrations by a white supremacist group, whose members have protested on the Milford Green for the past three Sundays.
Read full article


Hatewatch

Last June, six months after paying a visit to the occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Washington State Representative Matt Shea organized a chapter of the anti-Muslim hate group ACT For America in Spokane, Washington.


Friends of the Border Patrol abandon their posts

The long-planned launch of civilian border monitoring by a Southern California group that opposes illegal immigration sputtered into action this weekend but did not begin patrolling the frontier as intended.
Read full article


Hatewatch
Dispute over "MexDonald's" study supersized
October 11, 2005
Hatewatch Staff
Internal disputes in the state's most vocal organization seeking tougher immigration laws have pushed it to the brink of disintegration.
Read full article


Hispanics and immigrants clash

...Friction over lifestyle and culture plays out in neighborhoods across the Valley as Latinos and recently arrived immigrants come face-to-face with each other. Many of them often share skin color and last names, but the similarities sometimes end there...
Read full article


Simcox calls protestors 'domestic terrorists'

A co-founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps says its volunteers have been harassed by what he calls "domestic terrorists" who have threatened violence...
"I think those groups should be investigated by the FBI as hate groups and as domestic terrorists," Simcox said in a voice mail message. "They've been showing up at our meetings and causing property damage and advocating violence."...
Read full article


Texas county opposes vigilantes

Hatewatch
Texas county opposes vigilantes
October 18, 2005
Hatewatch Staff
The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps was dealt a blow
Tuesday when Brooks County commissioners passed a resolution in
opposition of the group's presence there...
Read full article


Racist British National Party Wins Seat on London Assembly

On May 1, the racist British National Party (BNP) won a seat on the 25-member London Assembly, which has the power to amend the London mayor’s budget and investigate and publish findings on matters of interest to Londoners. Richard Barnbrook, who will take the BNP seat after coming in fifth in the mayoral race and winning 5% of the overall vote, became the extreme right’s most visible elected politician in Britain as a result. All major parties had denounced the BNP in the run-up to the city elections, saying that it represented “hatred, violence and stupidity.”
In 2001, BNP head Nick Griffin, a Holocaust denier, told reporters that his party did not admit anyone not descended from European whites or “kindred” peoples. (The BNP has since accepted a tiny handful of people of color in order to bolster its battle against Muslims.) The party is particularly well known for its hardline anti-immigrant views. Its officials have proposed deporting all illegal immigrants and even paying legal immigrants to leave England, promising “voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin.”
Despite his party’s affiliation with white nationalism, Barnbrook tried to reassure foreign-born Londoners after his election. “Do not be nervous. As long as you abide by our identity and laws of this land, come to me and I will see where we can help,” Barnbrook told the BBC.
Barnbrook was the best known of several BNP councillors — the rough equivalent of local City Council members in the United States — before his May election to the higher-ranking post. He was well known to most Londoners, in part because in 2006 he was accused of making a film 17 years earlier that was widely described as gay pornography. (The BNP opposes the "promotion" of homosexuality.) He angrily disputed the charge, saying it was simply an art film about “sexuality.”
Just days after Barnbrook’s election, Scotland’s new counter-terrorism chief Allan Burnett said that neo-Nazis pose a serious terrorist threat to the United Kingdom. “We’ve had a number of right-wing issues recently in the U.K. that again have raised their head in Scotland,” Burnett said.  Referring to the arrest of an alleged neo-Nazi in Scotland last fall for making nail-bombs, he added: “There’s no point promoting positive race relations if, in claiming to be everyone’s coordinator of counter terrorism, you take your eye off the right-wing.”

Summary: On May 1, the racist British National Party (BNP) won a seat on the 25-member London Assembly, which has the power to amend the London mayor’s budget and investigate and publish findings on matters of interest to Londoners. Richard Barnbrook, who will take the BNP seat after coming in fifth in the mayoral race and winning 5% of the overall vote, became the extreme right’s most visible elected politician in Britain as a result. All major parties had denounced the BNP in the run-up to the city…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Anti-LGBTQ Group's Compound Ordered Sold for $2.8 million
October 29, 2019
Brett Barrouquere
A judge has ordered the remote compound of the anti-LGBTQ group Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps sold for $2.8 million.


Hatewatch


Hatewatch Headlines

[MO] Two Men Convicted Of Hate Crime Thrill Killing The Kansas City Star / May 8, 2008 Kansas City residents Gary Eye, 21, and Steven Sandstrom, 22, were both convicted of randomly shooting to death a homeless black man targeted for the color of his skin in March 2005.
[CA] Public Defender Blames School For Murder Of Gay Student The Los Angeles Times / May 8, 2008 The lawyer representing 14-year-old Brandon McInerney, who allegedly shot to death a gay classmate, argued that school officials should have quelled tensions between the two boys rather than allowing the victim to wear feminine accessories and flirt with McInerny.
[MI] Neo-Nazi Leader Schemes To Exploit Ailing Economy The Livingston Daily Press & Argus / May 12, 2008 National Socialist Movement commander Jeff Schoep, who relocated the NSM to the Detroit area last December, sees recruitment opportunities in the region's economic malaise and racial tensions.
[WI] 'Die, Jew' Scrawled On Synagogue Doors The Wisconsin State Journal / May 5, 2008 Vandals drew three swastikas and wrote "Die, Jew" on the outside door and walls of the Beth Israel Center in Madison.
[GA] 'Swastika Lawn Mower Man' Re-Arrested The Atlanta Journal-Constitution / May 9, 2008 Steven Whitfield, 31, who was arrested April 16 after he mowed swastikas into his lawn and pointed a rifle at passerby, was taken into custody again for aiming a firearm at a juvenile girl.
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Summary: [MO] Two Men Convicted Of Hate Crime Thrill Killing The Kansas City Star / May 8, 2008 Kansas City residents Gary Eye, 21, and Steven Sandstrom, 22, were both convicted of randomly shooting to death a homeless black man targeted for the color of his skin in March 2005. [CA] Public Defender Blames School For Murder Of Gay Student The Los Angeles Times / May 8, 2008 The lawyer representing 14-year-old Brandon McInerney, who allegedly shot to death a gay classmate, argued that school officials…


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.


Racist FLDS Cult Surfaces in New Location

WESTCLIFFE, Colo. — A top aide to imprisoned fundamentalist Mormon polygamist leader Warren S. Jeffs has purchased $2 million worth of property in five locations along the remote eastern flank of the rugged Sangre De Cristo Mountains about 175 miles southwest of Denver, Hatewatch has learned.
Men, women and children members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints , or FLDS, are occupying at least three of the properties. Their presence is causing anxiety among neighbors and public officials unsure how to react to the presence of a racist sect known to coerce underage girls into plural marriages.
“Quite frankly, we don’t know what to do,” said Custer County Sheriff Fred Jobe. “We are definitely aware that they here … but until they break some laws, there isn’t much that we can do.”
The real estate purchases by Lee A. Steed, a senior member of the FLDS, constitute the largest known cluster of land holdings outside of the FLDS-controlled communities of Colorado City, Ariz. and adjacent Hildale, Utah. Mr. Steed paid $725,000 cash to acquire two of the properties, real estate records show.
County commissioner Dick Downey said government officials have been quietly observing the influx of FLDS into the community but have not made it publicly known. But rumors abound in this small town and adjacent Silver Cliff, Colo., with a combined population about 1,000.
"We are concerned because of the various reports that we have received and the media exposure we have seen about this group in the last few months," Downey said.
The FLDS attracted worldwide attention last month when Texas authorities raided a church ranch and removed 462 children and placed them into foster care pending the outcome of child custody hearings. Texas Child Protection Services reports that among the children are as many as 31 girls under 18 who have babies or are pregnant. Authorities allege that the FLDS is threatening the welfare of all the children because leaders indoctrinate girls to enter into polygamous marriages and bear children at a young age. Last year, after two years on the lam, FLDS leader Warren Jeffs was convicted as an accomplice to the rape of a young girl who was forced to marry her cousin.
The Southern Poverty Law Center placed the FLDS on its hate group list in 2005 for its racist beliefs , including the notion that black people have been cursed by the devil and are an inferior race. The FLDS is a breakaway sect from the 13-million member Mormon Church based in Salt Lake City, which disavowed polygamy in 1890 as a condition of Utah gaining statehood, and which began allowing blacks to become priests in 1978 ¬— a move that Jeffs called a victory for the devil.
The FLDS has openly practiced polygamy since the 1930s in Colorado City and Hildale, where church members control local governments. In recent years, the FLDS has begun to disperse to other areas, including a compound in Pringle, S.D., southwestern Colorado near Cortez, and the 1,700-acre ranch in Eldorado, Texas, that was raided in April.
Steed allegedly played a key role in helping Jeffs elude a nationwide manhunt in 2005 and 2006 when Jeffs was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. Acting on orders from Jeffs, Steed purchased secluded properties in Colorado that Jeffs used as hideouts, according to a civil suit filed in St. George, Utah by a former FLDS member.
Custer County property records show that Steed filed a quit claim deed on a Westcliffe hideout in July 2006, walking away from a $40,000 down payment made in January of that year. The property was returned to the original owner one month before Jeffs was arrested. Jeffs is serving two, consecutive five-year-to-life sentences in Utah on the rape conviction and is awaiting trial in Mohave County, Ariz., on sexual misconduct and incest charges.
Jeffs’ arrest in August 2006 and conviction on two counts of accomplice to rape charges in September 2007 has not ended Steed’s acquisitions in Custer County and adjacent Fremont County. The recent spate of purchases suggests that the FLDS plans to take up permanent residence in a very conservative, decidedly Christian, ranching community. The sect’s history of plural marriages is not something that is likely to lead to the group being widely accepted in the area.
“They are not going to be assimilated into the community,” said Custer County Undersheriff Craig Feldman, whose wife’s family has resided in the area for five generations and is a major Custer County landowner.
Three of Steeds’ properties are located within a few miles of Westcliffe. In November 2006, Steed purchased a 6,000-square foot, nine-bedroom, six-bath, log home on 35 acres (pictured below) that was in foreclosure for $350,000 cash, according to Custer County records . Neighbors say a large group of men and women soon moved into the two-story structure and began working around the clock.
Kathleen Kerr, who owns a house next door, said activity on the Steed property has ruined the community’s rural flavor with bright lights on all night, constant construction, and noise generated by ATVs patrolling the property as well as occasional gunfire. “It’s just not quiet and peaceful there anymore,” Kerr said, adding that she has put her 35-acre, three-bedroom cabin retreat up for sale.
Following a pattern seen throughout Colorado City and Hildale where many homes are encircled by fences, Steed built a six-foot-high wooden fence across the front of the property soon after moving in around Thanksgiving 2006. The fence stands in sharp contrast to most homes in the community that refrain from blocking spectacular mountain views.
Another neighbor, who asked not to be identified, said the Steed property has generated a lot of traffic on what was before a very lightly traveled gravel road.  “There were lots of expensive vehicles coming and going, mostly during the night,” the neighbor said.
The FLDS men and boys would sometimes talk to neighbors, residents say, but the women, dressed in their prairie-style dresses, hide from view. The neighbor said most of the men and boys left the property earlier this winter and that the repairs that were once quickly made have been left unattended.
The property, however, is still occupied.  Hatewatch observed a large white SUV enter the property on May 11 and drive up to the house.
Steed, who did not return a message left on a phone number he listed with Custer County, added to his holdings in December when he purchased 80 acres of grazing land about three miles southwest of Westcliffe for $428,000, with a $30,000 down payment and a $398,000 mortgage.
Steed’s Custer County portfolio expanded again last month when he purchased 80 acres about six miles south of town that includes a ranch house, a large barn and other outbuildings. Undersheriff Feldman said he has seen FLDS men, women and children at the property while working on a house Feldman is remodeling across the road.
Steed’s purchase has not yet been recorded, but an official with the Custer County Assessor’s Office confirmed that Steed owns the property and is remodeling the home. The previous owner purchased the property, which includes irrigated pasture, for $650,000 in April 2007.
In addition to the three Custer County properties, Steed purchased two properties in adjacent Fremont County in 2007. In July, Steed bought a 4,600-square-foot, six-bedroom log home in an upscale development in Cotopaxi for $375,000 cash. The log home sits high on a hillside with a view of the still snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Last December, Steed bought 40 acres with a ranch house on the west of state highway 67 about 10 miles south of Florence. He paid $275,000 for the property, according to county records.
At the time of the purchase, the homestead included a 2,400-square foot house and an outbuilding. But considerable construction activity is visible from the highway, and a large building that appears to be an additional residence hovers above the original home. There is also evidence of excavation on a hillside next to the highway.
Kerr said she and her husband noticed similar excavation work done at the Westcliffe residence. “It looked like they were building underground storage or bunkers,” she said.

Summary: WESTCLIFFE, Colo. — A top aide to imprisoned fundamentalist Mormon polygamist leader Warren S. Jeffs has purchased $2 million worth of property in five locations along the remote eastern flank of the rugged Sangre De Cristo Mountains about 175 miles southwest of Denver, Hatewatch has learned. Men, women and children members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints , or FLDS, are occupying at least three of the properties. Their presence is causing anxiety among…


Anti-Gay 'Christian' Activist Cites Radical Anti-Semite

Peter LaBarbera has spent more than 20 years on the hard edge of the religious right, ranging from a stint as a reporter for The Washington Times to a whole career as what he calls a “conservative critic of the homosexual activist movement.” He has been an official of far-right groups like Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council , the Illinois Family Institute, and Accuracy in Media. The founder of the gay-bashing Lambda Report , LaBarbera is now president of Naperville, Ill.-based Americans for Truth About Homosexuality .
LaBarbera is no friend of gay people, whose lifestyles he characterizes as “aberrant” and whom he accuses of working diligently to “penetrate” the schools. But up until now, he hasn’t relied on the help of radical anti-Semites.
That ended the other day when LaBarbera — who claims to operate “in a spirit of love and truth” — posted portions of an article by one Ted Pike (right), the Oregon-based reverend who heads the National Prayer Network and who was described by LaBarbera as simply a “pro-family advocate.” (Pike’s article described an April 12 encounter in Champaign, Ill., which ended with one college student charged with an anti-gay hate crime for attacking another.) Pike may or may not be pro-family — but he is most definitely anti-Jew, as reflected in his endless rants about the “Jewish origins of bolshevism, Jewish dominance of Hollywood and the media, [and] Jewish control of Congress.” Last year, Pike said that the Jewish holy book, the Talmud, “is full of moral filth” and attacked mainstream Christian evangelical leaders for “carefully concealing the Jewish identity of those who corrupt Christian culture.”
Perhaps there’s a reason LaBarbera didn’t provide a link to Pike’s website.
Pike doesn’t go into his theories about “evil Jewish leadership” in his website posting. But right up there with the story in his site’s archives are headlines like these: “Jewish Media Corrupts Teen Girls,” “Jews Pressure Bush to Sign Hate Crime Bill.” “Jews Attack National Day of Prayer Committee,” and “Jews Behind ‘the Ten’.”
The incident that enraged both LaBarbera and Pike, the “pro-family advocate,” occurred on April 12, when University of Illinois student Steven Velasquez was walking with a group of friends. Another student, Brett VanAsdlen, yelled something at Velasquez and the two had a physical confrontation that ended with Velasquez hospitalized for a head injury overnight. Pike and LaBarbera claim to have spoken to the mother of VanAsdlen — who LaBarbera describes as “a strapping, clean-cut, All-American looking young man” — and heard assertions that throw doubt on officials’ contention that Velasquez was victimized.
LaBarbera wasn’t the only activist who latched on to Pike’s essay. So did David Duke, the notorious neo-Nazi and former Klan leader, who posted the article on his website under this banner headline: “Zionist-Inspired ‘Hate Legislation’ Railroading Christian Teenagers in Illinois.”

Summary: Peter LaBarbera has spent more than 20 years on the hard edge of the religious right, ranging from a stint as a reporter for The Washington Times to a whole career as what he calls a “conservative critic of the homosexual activist movement.” He has been an official of far-right groups like Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council , the Illinois Family Institute, and Accuracy in Media. The founder of the gay-bashing Lambda Report , LaBarbera is now president of Naperville,…


Hatewatch
Anti-Immigrant Hate Speech Thrives On Right-Wing Radio Shows
May 20, 2008
Hatewatch Staff
Racial slurs and harsh rhetoric demonizing all Latinos have found a home on conservative radio broadcasts.
Read full article


Hatewatch
Minuteman Project Mobile Consulate Protests Criticized
May 20, 2008
Hatewatch Staff
Recent Minuteman Project demonstrations targeting the Mexican consulate's mobile services program seem designed more to intimidate immigrants than to reform immigration policy.
Read full article


Hatewatch
Editorial: Anti-Immigration Hysteria Threatens Idaho Farmers
May 27, 2008
Hatewatch Staff
Laws designed to appease nativists are hurting farmers in Idaho, according to the Times-News editorial board.
Read full article


New Jersey Anti-Immigration Rally Draws 70 People

"We're not vigilantes. We're undocumented border patrol agents," read a sign onstage at a Memorial Day weekend anti-immigration rally in Lakewood, whose organizers closed the event to the public to keep out neo-Nazis. Read full article


Sheriff Claims Donations Are Pouring In To Fund Immigration Round-Ups

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said his office received more than $13,000 in donations in less than a week after the governor of Arizona canceled state funding of Arpaio's controversial immigration crackdown. Read full article


Media Matters Report Further Debunks Dobbsian Myths

Undocumented immigrants:
Sound familiar?
That could be because you've heard it all before on cable news, where derogatory myths about immigrants are regularly presented as fact.
Last summer the Intelligence Report revealed that several major cable news hosts , most notably CNN's Lou Dobbs, were broadcasting discredited information as part of their ratings-grabbing anti-immigration polemics, in some cases relaying falsehoods that originated with white supremacists.
Now, a new report from the Media Matters Action Network further debunks the most pernicious of these rumors with statistics from respected sources, and offers a blistering criticism of three cable programs whose hosts — Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs — never seem to tire of blaming illegal immigrants for various societal ills or demonstrating a reckless disregard for the truth.
"When it comes to this issue [of anti-immigrant rhetoric], cable news overflows not just with vitriol, but also with a series of myths that feed viewers' resentment and fears, seemingly geared toward creating anti-immigrant hysteria," states the introduction to Fear & Loathing in Prime Time .
The 21-page report, which was released May 23, goes on to quantify just how often O'Reilly, Beck and Dobbs rail against undocumented immigrants: "Dobbs is the one most obsessed with the topic; indeed, instead of Lou Dobbs Tonight , his program might be more properly called Lou Dobbs Crusades Against Illegal Immigration Tonight . Fully 70 percent of the 2007 episodes of Lou Dobbs Tonight contained discussion of illegal immigration. The O'Reilly Factor is not far behind; 56 percent of 2007 episodes discussed illegal immigration. And though Glenn Beck was less consumed with the issue (28 percent of his 2007 programs discussed it), his show is the one on which viewers often find the most inflammatory claims."
The most widespread damaging misperceptions, spouted as gospel by these commentators, are that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a "crime wave," and that they drain government coffers by consuming social services without paying taxes.
The Media Matters report points out that both these assertions are untrue. Citing a Harvard study, Justice Department statistics, and a study from the Public Policy Institute of California, the report concludes that "there is no evidence to indicate that undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than American citizens; indeed, the evidence strongly suggests that immigrants in general are less likely to commit crimes."
Another anti-immigrant myth that refuses to die, even though it was thoroughly debunked by the Intelligence Report last year, is one that blames Mexican and Central American immigrants for a supposed dramatic upsurge in leprosy . The Media Matters report highlights the repeated assertion on Lou Dobbs Tonight that 7,000 cases of leprosy were documented in the United States between 2002 and 2004. In fact, according to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), there were only 398 cases of leprosy recorded during that period.
Fear & Loathing in Prime Time also shows up urban legends that falsely claim plans are afoot to build a "NAFTA superhighway," to merge Mexico, the United States and Canada into the "North American Union," or to re-conquer parts of the Southwest for Mexico, falsehoods the Intelligence Report first examined and countered last summer.
In defending his show's ridiculous leprosy story, Lou Dobbs infamously assured 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl that, "If we reported it, it's a fact." But as Fear & Loathing in Prime Time makes all the more clear, when it comes to the national immigration debate, facts are secondary to ideology where Dobbs and company are concerned.

Summary: Undocumented immigrants: Sound familiar? That could be because you've heard it all before on cable news, where derogatory myths about immigrants are regularly presented as fact. Last summer the Intelligence Report revealed that several major cable news hosts , most notably CNN's Lou Dobbs, were broadcasting discredited information as part of their ratings-grabbing anti-immigration polemics, in some cases relaying falsehoods that originated with white supremacists. Now, a new report from the…


Hatewatch
Congressman Calls Immigration Crackdown 'Repugnant'
June 03, 2008
Hatewatch Staff
U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) assailed Georgia laws targeting illegal immigrants, calling them "an insult to human dignity."
Read full article


Dobbs, Limbaugh Stir Up Xenophobic Sentiment

Media personalities like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh blur the lines between legal and illegal immigrants and promote resentment of all Latinos with tactics that range from sophomoric to sinister.
Read full article


Hatewatch
Judge Strikes Down Farmers Branch Immigration Ordinance
June 03, 2008
Hatewatch Staff
A federal judge ruled that a Dallas suburb's prohibition against renting apartments to illegal immigrants was unconstitutional and cannot be enforced.
Read full article


New Intelligence Report Focuses on Armenian Genocide Deniers

The latest issue of our investigative Intelligence Report magazine is out today, and it is led by a provocative cover story that exposes a network of U.S. scholars, paid by the government of Turkey, many of whom work to cover up the Turkish genocide of as many as 1.5 million Armenians during World War I — an effort that has found success in Congress and the White House.
Despite abundant documentation and eyewitness accounts of the slaughter of Armenians by Turkey’s Ottoman government between 1915 and 1918, the current Turkish government has paid lobbyists and funded the network of American academics, including several who dismiss or rationalize the killing. A consensus of genocide scholars agree that the slaughter was, indeed, a genocide.
“What we are seeing is a despicable rewriting of history aimed at absolving the perpetrators of mass murder and demonizing their victims,” said Mark Potok, editor of the Report , a quarterly journal published by the Southern Poverty Law Center that monitors the radical right (see Potok's editorial on the genocide, "Lying About History," here ). “It is no different than the Holocaust denial of Nazi sympathizers who claim there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and Treblinka.”
The story, “State of Denial,” recounts a March 2007 event where Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, told a Harvard University audience that the Turkish government at the time may have been guilty of ineptness and “bungling misrule” — but not genocide. Lewy, one of the most active members of the network of academics, has made similar revisionist claims in speeches at other campuses and in his 2005 book, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide .
As early as 1985, Turkey bought full-page newspaper advertisements to publish a letter questioning the genocide that was signed by 69 American scholars. All 69 had received funding that year from the Turkish government or its proxies.
As the only Muslim-dominated country in a troubled region to call the United States and Israel its allies, Turkey also has wielded significant political influence in Washington. Last fall, lobbyists on the Turkish payroll stymied a congressional resolution commemorating the genocide by persuading more than 100 lawmakers to reverse their positions. Even President Bush flip-flopped on a 2000 campaign promise to back official U.S. recognition of the genocide.
“Denial is the final stage of genocide,” Gregory Stanton, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, told the Report . “It is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world.”
Also, in the Summer 2008 issue of the Intelligence Report :
• “Secret Identity?” probes the ideology of Shepherd’s Chapel, an Arkansas-based television ministry led by Arnold Murray that has an audience in the millions. Despite a theology that identifies an evil race he calls the “Kenites” as the killers of Christ, Murray says his ministry is not anti-Semitic. Mounting evidence suggests otherwise. Along with the story, we've posted an audio file of Potok interviewing writer Casey Sanchez about Murray and his theology. • “Stalked by Skins” tells the story of twin brothers who have lived in fear since a bloody 2003 encounter with a gang of racist skinheads in Illinois that left one man dead. In an interview, Bill and Roger Larson recount how they and their families have been tormented by gang members ever since. • “North Meets South” reports on the strange alliance forged by a Vermont separatist group in recent years. Born of the left, the Second Vermont Republic has now partnered with the white supremacist League of the South, which seeks a second Southern secession, to build a national movement. Here, too, we've posted an audio file of Potok and writer Heidi Beirich discussing the secession movement. • “Of Race and Rockets” reveals famed aerospace scientist Walter Kistler’s $200,000 in donations to the Pioneer Fund, a racist foundation that funds controversial studies of race and intelligence. A defiant Kistler says he is “not concerned about battles in society about what is and what is not ‘racist.'"

Summary: The latest issue of our investigative Intelligence Report magazine is out today, and it is led by a provocative cover story that exposes a network of U.S. scholars, paid by the government of Turkey, many of whom work to cover up the Turkish genocide of as many as 1.5 million Armenians during World War I — an effort that has found success in Congress and the White House. Despite abundant documentation and eyewitness accounts of the slaughter of Armenians by Turkey’s Ottoman government between…


Yaqui Indian Town Becomes Racial Profiling Battleground

Under the cover of traffic stops for minor offenses like improper use of a horn, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department conducted a farcical immigration sweep in Guadalupe, Ariz., whose brown-skinned residents are mostly Yaqui Indians.
Read full article


Institute of Turkish Studies Chair Forced Out For Rebuking Genocide Deniers

The new issue of the Intelligence Report exposes a network of U.S. scholars, many of them paid by the Turkish government, who promote denial of the Armenian genocide .
One of the damning pieces of evidence examined in the Report is a letter denying the Armenian genocide that was signed in 1985 by 69 American scholars and published in full-page advertisements in major newspapers paid for by the Turkish government. All 69 of the signers, including Donald Quataert, then an associate professor of history at the University of Houston, had received funding that year from the government of Turkey, mostly from the Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS), a nonprofit organization housed at Georgetown University that was founded in 1982 with a $3 million grant from Turkey to promote a pro-Turkey agenda, including denial of the Armenian genocide.
Quataert later served as chairman of the ITS board of governors from 2001 until Dec. 13, 2006. Although the circumstances of his leaving that post were unclear at the time, last week it was revealed that he was forced to resign by Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy after he refused to retract a scholarly book review in which Quataert said “what happened to the Armenians readily satisfies the U.N. definition of genocide.”
In his review of Donald Bloxham’s book, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians , which was published in the Fall 2006 issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History , Quataert further wrote that “[a]lthough it may provoke anger among some of my Ottomanist colleagues,” avoiding the term genocide “runs the risk of suggesting denial of the massive and systematic atrocities that the Ottoman state and some of its military and general populace committed against the Armenians.”
As Harut Sassounian described it June 3 on The Huffington Post, “Prof. Quataert boldly criticized Turkish scholars' work on the Armenian Genocide by stating that ‘they were not writing critical history but polemics.  ... Many of their works were directly sponsored and published by the Turkish government.’”
Quataert’s forced resignation finally came to light last week in a scathing open letter to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan from Mervat Hatem, president of the Middle East Studies Association , the preeminent organization promoting scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa.
“We are enormously concerned that unnamed high officials in Ankara felt it was inappropriate for Professor Quataert to continue as chairman of the board of governors and threatened to revoke the funding for the ITS if he did not publicly retract statements made in his review or separate himself from the Chairmanship of the ITS,” Hatem wrote in the letter dated May 27.
Hatem further pointed out to Prime Minister Erdogan that the circumstances of Quataert’s forced resignation "sharply contrasts with your government’s recent call to leave the debate regarding the events of 1915 to the independent judgment and study of scholars.”

Summary: The new issue of the Intelligence Report exposes a network of U.S. scholars, many of them paid by the Turkish government, who promote denial of the Armenian genocide . One of the damning pieces of evidence examined in the Report is a letter denying the Armenian genocide that was signed in 1985 by 69 American scholars and published in full-page advertisements in major newspapers paid for by the Turkish government. All 69 of the signers, including Donald Quataert, then an associate professor of…


Hatewatch
Laura Ingraham: Right-Wing Radio's High Priestess of Hate
June 10, 2008
Hatewatch Staff
Shock radio host Ingraham is a master of sounding funny and appealing while dishing out the same hate speech as Sean Hannity.
Read full article


Most Immigrants Lived in California Illegally, Study Says

More than half of new California immigrants who are permanent legal residents lived in the state illegally before getting green cards, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California. Read full article


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Mar-a-Lago Pulls Plug on Anti-Muslim Hate Group’s Gala
October 07, 2019
Hatewatch Staff
The Trump Organization says the anti-Muslim hate group
ACT for America
’s Nov. 7 gala is no longer welcome at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort.


Hatewatch


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.


States Take New Tack on Illegal Immigration

Three months after the local police inspected more than a dozen businesses searching for illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, this community in the Florida Panhandle has become more law-abiding, emptier and whiter. Read full article


What’s in a Name? The Defamation of  the National Council of La Raza

In a recent posting to National Review Online, long-time columnist John Derbyshire (right) attacked the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), for the last two words in its name, which Derbyshire translated as “The Race.” With that, Derbyshire joined thousands of other Americans who use the organization’s name to claim — entirely without foundation — that NCLR is a race-based, supremacist organization.
Said Derbyshire: “The idea, as I had it explained to me, is that by blending the European race with the Mesoamerican, Mexico has brought forth a new race, the mestizo or bronze race, which is claimed to be superior to both the contributing races, I suppose by dint of hybrid vigor. This bronze über-race is ‘La Raza.’”
Next time, Derbyshire — who has described himself as a “racist,” albeit a “mild and tolerant” one — might want to consult a dictionary, or perhaps a linguist, before he goes public with his proposed translations of the Spanish language. If he had, he’d have learned that “La Raza,” in the context of the organization’s name, doesn’t mean “The Race” at all. In fact, the term is much more commonly translated as “the people” or “the community” and it is intended to be inclusive, encompassing the blending of European, African, and indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Derbyshire might even have paid a visit to NCLR’s website, which includes a nuanced explanation of the term: “While it is true that one meaning ‘raza’ in Spanish is indeed ‘race,’ in Spanish, as in English and any other language, words can and do have multiple meanings. Translating our name as ‘the race’ is not only inaccurate, it is factually incorrect. ‘Hispanic’ is an ethnicity, not a race. As anyone who has ever met a Dominican American, Mexican American, or Spanish American can attest, Hispanics can be and are members of any and all races.”
The NCLR site continues: “The term ‘La Raza’ has its origins in early 20th century Latin American literature and translates into English most closely as ‘the people,’ or, according to some scholars, ‘the Hispanic people of the New World.’ The term was coined by Mexican scholar José Vasconcelos to reflect the fact that the people of Latin America are a mixture of many of the world’s races, cultures, and religions. Mistranslating ‘La Raza’ to mean ‘the race’ implies that it is a term meant to exclude others. In fact, the full term coined by Vasconcelos, ‘La Raza Cósmica,’ meaning the ‘cosmic people,’ was developed to reflect not purity but the mixture inherent in the Hispanic people. This is an inclusive concept, meaning that Hispanics share with all other peoples of the world a common heritage and destiny.”
Had he bothered to check it out — rather than simply grasping for an argument to support his angry nativism — Derbyshire also would have found that the NCLR site clearly condemns ethnic separatist organizations. The group even has repeatedly disavowed certain founding documents of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanos de Aztlan (MEChA), a fellow Latino rights organization that is not a racist separatist group but did, more than 40 years ago, publish what NCLR characterizes as “inappropriate rhetoric.” NCLR publicly condemns Voz de Aztlan, a virulently anti-Semitic outfit that has long been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But none of this prevented Derbyshire from characterizing NCLR as a hotbed of racism, with “published material [that] shouts an ethic of racial triumphalism.” He argues that NCLR publications belong on the library shelf next to materials from bona fide hate groups like the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations . In employing this kind of propaganda — almost identical to what groups like the Klan falsely claim about organizations such as the multiracial NAACP — Derbyshire sounds similar to many on the radical right. For example, the hate group American Patrol, whose leader Glenn Spencer has spoken at several white supremacist events, regularly refers to the NCLR as the “Race Mob” or the “Tan Klan.” His close friend and fellow racist Barbara Coe — who is a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that has described blacks as “a retrograde species of humanity” — characterizes NCLR similarly.
It’s not much of a surprise that Derbyshire has taken up against NCLR, given his attachment to organizations like the anti-immigrant hate website VDARE , named after Virginia Dare, said to be the first white child born in the New World (see, for example, here , here and here for 2008 posts). In 2005, Derbyshire took up for the rabid British xenophobe Enoch Powell , who warned in his infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech that mass immigration would destroy the United Kingdom. Derbyshire also has called those who support multiculturalism “ pod people , whose nervous systems have been taken over by alien intelligences.”
In his latest diatribe, Derbyshire rages at the acceptance by the mainstream press and many corporate sponsors of NCLR. “How,” he fumes, “ do they get away with it?”
That question might well be directed to Derbyshire, a British native who became a naturalized American citizen in 2002 — after having illegally overstayed his own visa here by nearly five years.

Summary: In a recent posting to National Review Online, long-time columnist John Derbyshire (right) attacked the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), for the last two words in its name, which Derbyshire translated as “The Race.” With that, Derbyshire joined thousands of other Americans who use the organization’s name to claim — entirely without foundation — that NCLR is a race-based, supremacist organization. Said Derbyshire: “The idea, as I had it…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 8/30/18
August 30, 2018
Hatewatch Staff
A U.S. Senate candidate will speak alongside extremists; another Trump administration official has ties to white nationalists; climate change and systemic racism, and more.


Cleric Group Fights Hateful Immigration Rhetoric

A group of Arizona religious leaders is calling for local and state officials to end what Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform terms "hateful rhetoric" which conflicts with the Christian tradition of offering hospitality to strangers. Read full article


Hatewatch

A network of anti-LGBT churches used its “Make America Straight Again” conference to move beyond its stock fallacies and hate-filled rhetoric and call for the government to begin rounding up and executing homosexuals.


Minutemen Join White Supremacists In 'Co-Hosted' Strategy Session

The Council of Conservative Citizens , a white supremacist hate group, publicly announced earlier this week that it was co-hosting an anti-immigration strategy session with Americans4America, the official Las Vegas chapter of Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project .
Despite the Minuteman Project’s oft-touted anti-racist policies, the meeting took place June 24, offering some of the strongest evidence yet of direct ties between the Minuteman movement and overtly racist organizations.
“There’s a lot of overlapping between our two groups,” Nevada CCC leader Don Wassall told the Intelligence Report . “I met a couple of people from their group who are interested in trying to recruit more and get more people active in both of our groups.”
While a June 23 community calendar item placed by the CCC in the Las Vegas Review-Journal listed Americans4America and the CCC as “co-hosts” of the meeting, Wassall told the Report that, in fact, the Minutemen were more like special invited guests.
The relationship between the two organizations is “hard to explain,” said Wassall, but “we are working with them [the Minutemen].”
Wassall said the handful of Minuteman Project members who attended the meeting did not include Americans4America founder Kricket Telfer, who could not be reached for comment. Wassall called Telfer “an acquaintance.”
Like all Minuteman Project chapters, Americans4America declares on its website that it has, “no affiliation with, nor will we accept any assistance by or interference from, separatists, racists, or supremacy groups.”
Commingling with the CCC nullifies that assurance, as does joining forces with Wassall, whose long history of right-wing extremism is beyond dispute. Wassall, who booked the conference room where the joint CCC-Minuteman Project session was held, was the head of the Pennsylvania chapter of the CCC before moving to Las Vegas last December.
Wassall is a longtime member and current executive director of the American Nationalist Union (formerly known as the Populist Party), a radical-right organization started in 1983 by veteran anti-Semite and Holocaust denier Willis Carto. Since 1996 Wassall has been the editor of the group’s publication The Nationalist Times . The periodical’s online version contains blatantly racist articles and links to hate group websites including New Nation News and the Political Cesspool, as well as the International Conspiratological Association.
Wassall was also a prominent supporter of the American Friends of the British National Party , a group formed to raise funds for a neofascist political party in England. The group collapsed after its leader, Mark Cotterill, was deported back to England in the wake of an Intelligence Report exposé.
And now, apparently, he’s backing the Minutemen. Wassall said the next CCC meeting in Las Vegas is planned for the last Tuesday in July, and that it “may or may not” be co-hosted by Americans4America.

Summary: The Council of Conservative Citizens , a white supremacist hate group, publicly announced earlier this week that it was co-hosting an anti-immigration strategy session with Americans4America, the official Las Vegas chapter of Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project . Despite the Minuteman Project’s oft-touted anti-racist policies, the meeting took place June 24, offering some of the strongest evidence yet of direct ties between the Minuteman movement and overtly racist organizations. “There’s a lot…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 11/17/2017
November 17, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Trump’s rhetoric felt in communities hit by hate crimes; DHS appointee suddenly steps aside; Inside the fake ‘Pizzagate’ scandal; and more.


Hatewatch

KrisAnne Hall, a self-described “constitutional attorney” who thinks states have the right to secede, recently addressed a neo-Confederate hate group whose goal is to create what the Civil War did not: a separate Southern nation.


Hatewatch

In early April, Congress held its first hearing on white nationalism since the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. What was supposed to be an opportunity to address the rising threat of far-right extremism was, at certain points, upended by conservatives who insisted the real threat came from the left.


MSU Hate Group Sponsors Bizarre Anti-Gay Lecture

The morning of Sept. 25, flyers posted across the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing blared “GAYS SPREAD AIDS.” They bore the insignia of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and invited students to attend a lecture that evening by anti-gay agitator Ryan Sorba entitled “The Born Gay Hoax.”
About 100 MSU students made it to the talk. At least two-thirds were anti-YAF demonstrators who silently protested Sorba’s message by wearing brightly colored “I Have a Story” T-shirts and holding signs aloft throughout Sorba’s 90-minute presentation. One male student’s placard read, “I made out with all the YAF boys.”
Sorba — pictured below with his arm around MSU YAF leader Kyle Bristow (thanks to East Lansing-based journalist Todd Heywood for the photo) — for the most part stuck to a standard anti-gay script of branding homosexuality a degenerate lifestyle “choice” rather than an innate trait, though he deployed a few of his own rather bizarre rhetorical flourishes. “When a male dog mounts another male dog, he simply desires to be stimulated … just as when he slavishly mounts a shrub or your dinner guest’s leg,” Sorba declared. “Would this dog consider himself homosexual? Does he bark with a lisp?”

Summary: The morning of Sept. 25, flyers posted across the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing blared “GAYS SPREAD AIDS.” They bore the insignia of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and invited students to attend a lecture that evening by anti-gay agitator Ryan Sorba entitled “The Born Gay Hoax.” About 100 MSU students made it to the talk. At least two-thirds were anti-YAF demonstrators who silently protested Sorba’s message by wearing brightly colored “I Have a Story” T-shirts and holding…


NYT College Profile Omits Some Key Facts

This Sunday, The New York Times Magazine ran a 3,000-plus-word piece on one Doug Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho, pastor described as trying to “reinvent conservative Protestant education” with his New Saint Andrews College. The story, a major feature in the magazine’s annual “college issue,” suggests that Saint Andrews is home to “a band of cultured missionaries,” a place that “tries to unite faith and reason.”
Well, sort of. “Onward, Christian Scholars,” by Molly Worthen, does describe Wilson’s religious empire as “radically conservative” and notes that Wilson (pictured, right) would like to see Jefferson Davis, late president of the Confederacy, as president. But Worthen, a student of American religious history, omits a few critical points ( here and here and here ).
In fact, Doug Wilson is co-author of a piece of sorry scholarship, entitled Southern Slavery, As It Was , that argues that “[s]lavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence.” “There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world,” the book continues. And then: “Slave life was to them [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.” No serious scholar of slavery or the Civil War accepts these ludicrous assertions.
Incredibly, Worthen completely missed this fact — hard to understand, given that the book produced a raging 2003-2004 controversy, including demonstrations by hundreds of University of Idaho students against Wilson, anti-racist statements by two local university presidents, and a damning anti-Wilson essay by two academic historians, that convulsed the entire community around Moscow for months. Instead, Worthen concentrates on the “Latin textbooks” and “Greek vocabulary” that the hardworking Saint Andrews students pore over as part of their “classical Christian education.”
That’s not all. Saint Andrews treats as a foundational Western thinker, right up there with Plato and Aristotle, a 19th-century theologian named Robert L. Dabney — a Confederate Civil War chaplain who described blacks as “a morally inferior race,” a “sordid, alien taint” marked by “lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, waste.” Wilson also argues that cursing one’s parents is punishable by death; that children of parents who don’t believe in Jesus Christ are “foul” and “unclean”; that women were created to be submissive to men; and that if a woman is raped, the rapist should pay her father a bride price and then, if the father approves, marry his victim.
None of this makes it into Worthen’s article. In fact, when she does give a three-word quote to a Wilson critic, she uses the occasion to sarcastically describe how the woman took “two hours to detail Wilson’s crimes” — almost none of which are mentioned. Instead, Worthen refers lightly to Saint Andrews’ “chronic spats with liberals in town.”
One last thing you might have expected to see mentioned in a magazine that purports to explore the pros and cons of various colleges and approaches to education: In 2004, a retired philosophy professor at the University of Idaho exposed the fact that at least 22 passages from Wilson’s tendentious book on slavery were plagiarized from a 1974 book. Wilson scornfully derided his critics, saying he and his co-author were guilty only of a “citation problem” that he would fix up in later editions. His upbeat take on "biblical slavery," however, would not change.

Summary: This Sunday, The New York Times Magazine ran a 3,000-plus-word piece on one Doug Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho, pastor described as trying to “reinvent conservative Protestant education” with his New Saint Andrews College. The story, a major feature in the magazine’s annual “college issue,” suggests that Saint Andrews is home to “a band of cultured missionaries,” a place that “tries to unite faith and reason.” Well, sort of. “Onward, Christian Scholars,” by Molly Worthen, does describe Wilson’s…


Hatewatch

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.


Neo-Confederate Movie Director Takes on New Cause

Movie director Ronald Maxwell (below, right) — the writer, director and producer of the god-awful 2003 movie
“Gods and Generals,” a wildly pro-Confederate and ahistorical take on the Civil War — has adopted a new cause: the threat allegedly posed to right-thinking Americans by undocumented Mexican immigrants. In a Sept. 17 interview with Jeff Mellott of the Daily News Record of Harrisonburg, Va., Maxwell declared that Mexican immigrants’ ultimate goal was “outright annexation” of the Southwestern United States. Adopting the so-called reconquista conspiracy theory widely touted by the radical right, Maxwell explained to Mellot that “they [Mexican politicians and intellectuals] see it as a re-conquering.” “The American people are funding their own suicide,” Maxwell said. “If we stop paying taxes, this craziness stops.”
Maxwell also last month stumped for anti-immigrant hard-liners running for Republican offices in Virginia. The Washington Post reported on Sept. 23 that Maxwell wrote in to the Loudoun Times-Mirror , which covers the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., to ask: “Why on earth would we want to create the conditions in the American Southwest, or for that matter all across America, for future civil strife, or in a worst case scenario, civil war?” Similarly, in an open letter to President Bush last year, Maxwell referred to immigration as an “invasion masquerading as immigration.” He told Bush that his legacy would be described “as the President who saved (or lost) the South-West of the United States.”
Maxwell has suggested he’s working on an immigration movie before. Last year, he told the highly conservative National Review magazine that he was at work on a satire called “Armada.” While there is no reference to a film by that name in the International Movie Data Base, the Daily News Record reported that Maxwell has scheduled his new film for a December release. It is financially backed, the newspaper said, by $100,000 from Walter Curt, a major campaign contributor to hard-line Republican immigration opponents, including Virginia State Rep. Virgil Goode and former U.S. Sen. George Allen of Virginia. Curt was once the chief operator of Shenandoah Electronic Intelligence Inc., which had as one of its clients the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. He’s reported to have sold SEI Inc. for $75 million. He has donated over $700,000 to conservative political causes including the rabidly anti-gay Restore America PAC and the anti-tax group Virginia Conservative Alliance, to whom he’s contributed over $277,000.
Since “Gods and Generals” flopped at the box office, Maxwell has had trouble finding money for his work. Last year officials in Washington County, Va., threatened to sue him when he failed to repay their $300,000 loan for “The Last Full Measure,” a film that was supposed to complete the Civil War trilogy of which “Gods and Generals” was a part. Maxwell began repaying the loan this May after news reports made the lawsuit public.

Summary: Movie director Ronald Maxwell (below, right) — the writer, director and producer of the god-awful 2003 movie “Gods and Generals,” a wildly pro-Confederate and ahistorical take on the Civil War — has adopted a new cause: the threat allegedly posed to right-thinking Americans by undocumented Mexican immigrants. In a Sept. 17 interview with Jeff Mellott of the Daily News Record of Harrisonburg, Va., Maxwell declared that Mexican immigrants’ ultimate goal was “outright annexation” of the…


Hatewatch
Hispanic Group Offers Compromise In Minuteman Dispute
October 16, 2007
Hatewatch Staff
A national Hispanic organization said it will hold its annual convention here if a city parks board member agrees to cut her ties to an anti-illegal immigration group.
Read full article


Investigators Debunk Supposed Plot To Assassinate Sheriff

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office spent an estimated $500,000 during the past six months protecting Joe Arpaio from an assassination that supposedly was designed to cause a furor in the United States over illegal immigration.
Read full article


Latino Gang Members Indicted for 'Cleansing' Operation

More than 60 members and associates of a Latino street gang carried out a campaign of racially motivated violence targeting African Americans in South Los Angeles, according to a 53-count federal racketeering indictment unsealed Oct. 17.
Leaders of the Florencia 13 street gang, which operates in a racially mixed district of South Los Angeles, engaged underlings in “cleansing their neighborhood of … members and associates of African-American street gangs,” according to federal prosecutors.
“The most disturbing aspect of the case is that … gang members allegedly engaged in a series of attacks on rival African-American gangs that extended to innocent citizens who ended up being shot simply because of the color of their skin,” said U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien.
Like most Latino street gangs in Southern California, Florencia 13, or “F-13,” swears allegiance to the Mexican Mafia, a prison-based criminal syndicate. The Intelligence Report revealed in January that Mexican Mafia shot callers have issued a “green light” for Latino gang members to harass and attack any African American found in a neighborhood claimed by a Latino gang.
Four members of the Avenues, a Latino gang in the Highland Park neighborhood, were convicted of federal hate crimes in 2006 for terrorizing and murdering black residents.
According to the latest indictment, in one case F-13 leaders ordered attacks on African Americans in retribution for black gang members supposedly shooting at Latino children in the neighborhood. The L.A. Sheriff’s Department attributes 80 shootings — 20 of them fatal — to warring between F-13 and black gangs since January 2005.
An Oct. 18 Los Angeles Times article by Sam Quinones, headlined “Gang rivalry grows into race war,” details how gang wars and increasing racial tension in a working class neighborhood that was once predominately black but is now mostly Latino have merged to create “a gangland version of racial profiling.” The article quotes one Florencia gang member describing how the Mexican Mafia ordered his gang to “kill this black guy just because he’s black.”
U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Thom Mrozek said he couldn’t yet comment on whether federal prosecutors would charge F-13 gang leaders with hate crimes in addition to racketeering.
According to gang expert Alex Alonso , F-13 is the largest single Latino gang in Los Angeles, “in terms of turf size and membership.”

Summary: More than 60 members and associates of a Latino street gang carried out a campaign of racially motivated violence targeting African Americans in South Los Angeles, according to a 53-count federal racketeering indictment unsealed Oct. 17. Leaders of the Florencia 13 street gang, which operates in a racially mixed district of South Los Angeles, engaged underlings in “cleansing their neighborhood of … members and associates of African-American street gangs,” according to federal prosecutors. “The…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 9/1/2017
September 01, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Why Islamophobia has never been stronger; Clarke expected to take Trump admin post; Stormer tries, and fails, to get back online in Albania; and more.


Hatewatch


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 9/8/2017
September 08, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Trump sends up flares to white supremacists; Carlson defends Perkins’ hate group; Right-wing extremists stalk their enemies online; and more.


Hatewatch

Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions , one of President-elect Donald Trump’s closest advisers during his campaign and his selection for U.S. attorney general, has longstanding and extensive ties to both anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim extremist groups.


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

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.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Three Richard Spencer supporters arrested for attempted murder
October 20, 2017
Rachel Janik
At the University of Florida, a protester urged Richard Spencer to take responsibility for the violence he inspired at Charlottesville.


Minuteman Mayoral Appointee Refuses To Resign

A woman whose presence on the city's park board has two national groups threatening to pull their conventions from Kansas City unless she steps down says she doesn't intend to resign.
Read full article


Rival Skinhead Clans Declare Truce

Hammerskin Nation and the Vinlander Social Club have negotiated a truce ending a bloody three-year feud between America’s two largest coalitions of racist skinhead gangs, according to a remarkable declaration published last week by Vinlanders co-founder and Hoosier State Skinheads leader Brien James on the Vinlander Social Club website.
“I salute the people on both sides who had the courage to initiate this peace, and the people who had the maturity to look past our egos and our grudges,” James stated. “We will die fighting together for self-determination and self-respect in a world that has turned its back on natural law and common sense.”
James and another infamous thug, Eric “The Butcher” Fairburn formed the Vinlander Social Club in 2004 as a direct challenge to the authority of Hammerskin Nation (HSN), a nationwide skinhead syndicate that has asserted dominion over U.S. skins since 1988. HSN’s power has waned in recent years as growing numbers of local skinhead “crews” have declared allegiance to the Vinlanders, a skinhead “warrior clan” devoted to drinking, fighting and a racist variant of the Viking pagan religion Odinism. A detailed history of the feud and its impact on the criminal sub-culture of racist skinheads is available here .
James offered no explanation for the sudden and unexpected cessation of hostilities. “Vinlanders and the Hammerskin Nation have been conducting meetings and parties on both sides have decided to declare peace,” he wrote. “Nothing official has been written up and signed, and we all understand that there may be individuals that will feel they still have grievances they can’t let go,” he wrote. “These people may choose to handle these problems as individuals, but as far as the ‘crew war’ or ‘gang war’ that has brought our enemies so much pleasure all these years, it is over.”
The full Vinlanders statement can be viewed here .

Summary: Hammerskin Nation and the Vinlander Social Club have negotiated a truce ending a bloody three-year feud between America’s two largest coalitions of racist skinhead gangs, according to a remarkable declaration published last week by Vinlanders co-founder and Hoosier State Skinheads leader Brien James on the Vinlander Social Club website. “I salute the people on both sides who had the courage to initiate this peace, and the people who had the maturity to look past our egos and our grudges,”…


Hatewatch

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.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 11/17/2017
November 17, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Trump’s rhetoric felt in communities hit by hate crimes; DHS appointee suddenly steps aside; Inside the fake ‘Pizzagate’ scandal; and more.


No Exit: ‘Exodus’ Group Founder Still in California

Four years ago, a 27-year-old Valley Springs, Calif., resident named Cory Burnell announced a project to eventually move tens of thousands of families to South Carolina in a bid to transform the super-conservative state into a kind of theocracy. It wasn’t long before questions came up about Burnell’s Christian Exodus group — Burnell had been a leader in the white supremacist League of the South, and was in fact pushing for the possible secession of South Carolina; he claimed that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the post-Civil War guarantee of the right to vote and equal protection for all Americans, had never been legally ratified and was not the law of the land; and he wanted to end public education, forbid the teaching of evolution, and enforce “Christian” morality through the power of government — but Burnell gamely continued to insist that he was carrying through on his admittedly ambitious project.
In ensuing years, Burnell told reporters that he and some 2,500 “Christians” would move to the state by 2006, and claimed that a half a dozen families had already done so. Later, he said that 15 families had moved, and that he would soon be joining them. After that, he said that the movement would concentrate on Anderson County, probably the most conservative county in the state, and that a dozen more families were heading that way. By early last year, he was saying he was planning an FM radio station that would start up any day. In June, he claimed another 15 Exodus families would arrive in the state by 2008 and repeated that he and his family were coming to South Carolina, only to concede days later that the job he’d found there had fallen through. Then, in July, he said that while he still wanted to move to the state, it was now up to God.
Apparently, the deity has spoken. According to the Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail News , which has done most of the serious reporting on Christian Exodus, the group is now focusing on a totally different state — Idaho — because, it said, several of its families now “realize … they will not be moving to South Carolina.” Heading the effort in that northwestern state will be Paul Smith, who ran for Congress in 2006 on the ticket of the far-right Constitution Party of Idaho. Smith, the Independent-Mail reported, said during his campaign that the 9/11 attacks were the result of God’s judgment against America.
As to Cory Burnell, he and his family remain in California, where they've been throughout. No word yet from those Burnell followers who took their leader’s advice and moved to South Carolina. If the past is any guide, they may be waiting on their young leader for a good long time.

Summary: Four years ago, a 27-year-old Valley Springs, Calif., resident named Cory Burnell announced a project to eventually move tens of thousands of families to South Carolina in a bid to transform the super-conservative state into a kind of theocracy. It wasn’t long before questions came up about Burnell’s Christian Exodus group — Burnell had been a leader in the white supremacist League of the South, and was in fact pushing for the possible secession of South Carolina; he claimed that the 14th…


Hatewatch

Between Wednesday, November 9, the day after the presidential election, and the morning of Monday, November 14, the Southern Poverty Law Center collected 437 reports of hateful intimidation and harassment.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 11/23/2016
November 23, 2016
Hatewatch Staff
Trump disavows the ‘alt-right,’ sort of; Are media normalizing racist beliefs?; Identity pastor wants crackdown on Jews; and more.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Mar-a-Lago Pulls Plug on Anti-Muslim Hate Group’s Gala
October 07, 2019
Hatewatch Staff
The Trump Organization says the anti-Muslim hate group
ACT for America
’s Nov. 7 gala is no longer welcome at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort.


Hatewatch
Business Leaders Accuse Minutemen Of Bringing "Terror" To Neighborhood
January 15, 2008
Hatewatch Staff
Members of a northeast Phoenix group of business leaders and residents say their neighborhood is suffering from intimidation tactics from those protesting an area day-labor center.
Read full article


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Neo-Nazi, Klan Leader Thomas Metzger Dies in California
November 19, 2020
Brett Barrouquere
Thomas Linton Metzger, a neo-Nazi former Ku Klux Klansman who later formed the White Aryan Resistance, died early this month, according to his website.


Hatewatch

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger joined Tony Perkins, president of anti-LGBTQ hate group Family Research Council (FRC), on the Sept. 9 episode of Perkins’ radio show “Washington Watch” to discuss his office’s investigation into allegations of double voting.


Minutemen Pressure Utah Legislature

Hatewatch
Minutemen Pressure Utah Legislature
January 22, 2008
Hatewatch Staff
When the Utah Legislature convenes today, lawmakers will be facing more than a dozen measures related to immigration, the highest number of bills ever brought forward on the issue.
Read full article


Minutemen Crow as State OKs Cleanup at Border Checkpoint

California’s Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has approved an application by the in-your-face San Diego Minutemen (SDMM) group, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a “nativist extremist” group, to "adopt" a stretch of highway for cleanup on I-5. That might not be so extraordinary — if it weren’t for the fact that the section the group was awarded responsibility for includes the Border Patrol’s
San Clemente checkpoint, an area where undocumented immigrants have been killed crossing the freeway to avoid being detained. El Grupo, a coalition of several civil rights organizations including the North County chapter of the NAACP and the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, is protesting the decision.
Jeff Schwilk (right), the SDMM’s leader, was thrilled about the stretch of highway his group was awarded. In a gloating message to his members, he put it like this: “How great is that!”
The SDMM have a track record of aggressive anti-immigrant activity and Schwilk likes to refer to undocumented Latinos as “free-loaders,” “w-------” and “Julios.” Members of the SDMM also have had ties to white supremacists, including the neo-Nazi group White Aryan Resistance. And some SDMM members have had run-ins with the law. In 2007, the San Diego Police Department searched the homes of Schwilk, his ex-girlfriend and former group member Christie Czajkowski, and an associate in connection with unsolved vandalism of local migrant camps. No charges have been brought, though video of what seems to be one such incident (and in which Schwilk participated) has surfaced.
The SDMM’s section of freeway, which is eight lanes wide, has seen some 150 deaths since the 1980s of immigrants trying to avoid the checkpoint by running through traffic. It also features several signs warning of the danger of crossing the road on foot, famously depicting a silhouette of a mother, father and little girl running against a yellow background. At SDMM rallies, members display typically vulgar parodies of the warning signs in which a grizzly bear, California’s official state animal, chases down the family.
El Grupo sent a letter to Caltrans in January pointing out that the department’s guidelines state that “entities that advocate violence, violation of the law, or discrimination based upon race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical handicap, medical condition, marital status, age, sex, or sexual orientation may not participate in the Adopt-A-Highway Program.” Caltrans officials told The San Diego Union Tribune that the section of freeway around the checkpoint was not purposely awarded to SDMM, saying it was the only one available at the time and that the department does not “promote the agenda” of any group. El Grupo is asking that the SDMM be given a different stretch of highway.
SDMM is not the first noxious group to adopt highways for cleanup as part of an apparent bid to clean up its public image. In fact, the Arkansas-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan pioneered the idea in the 1990s, winning, after several court battles, the right to participate in Arkansas’ and Missouri’s cleanup programs.
For those unsure about whether or not Minuteman groups in San Diego County are physically aggressive toward those they do not like, a new website, Minutemen Unvarnished , provides some evidence. The site carries several videos showing Minutemen calling immigrants “w-------” and pushing and shoving day laborers. Other videos include Minutemen shouting obscenities and threatening those protesting them.

Summary: California’s Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has approved an application by the in-your-face San Diego Minutemen (SDMM) group, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a “nativist extremist” group, to "adopt" a stretch of highway for cleanup on I-5. That might not be so extraordinary — if it weren’t for the fact that the section the group was awarded responsibility for includes the Border Patrol’s San Clemente checkpoint, an area where undocumented immigrants have been killed…


Hatewatch

Three members of the Shieldwall Network (SWN), an Arkansas-based white nationalist group founded by longtime movement leader Billy Roper, were arrested last week in connection with second-degree battery.


Hatewatch


News Update: Fire, Feces and Freeways

FIRE IN THE HOLE: The double-wide mobile home of imprisoned Klan leader Charles Barefoot, who was recently declared incompetent to stand trial for allegedly arranging the murder of a fellow Klansman, burned to the ground on Tuesday in Dunn, N.C. “When I got home, ammunition was exploding everywhere and flames were shooting through the roof of his house,” one neighbor told the local newspaper, The Daily Record .  “There were bullets going off, shotgun shells exploding and popping everywhere.” Barefoot’s Klan group and its many alleged crimes were detailed in a 2007 article in the Intelligence Report . Barefoot is being held indefinitely until his competency is restored. Local authorities say their investigation into the cause of the fire at his home is ongoing.
THE POOP ON POOP: Janis Dzelme, an assistant to a Latvian member of parliament, has been convicted of throwing a “stinking substance” at the car of a gay-rights demonstrator in July 2006 in Riga, the Latvian capital. And what was that stinking substance? That same month in 2006, members of Watchmen on the Walls, a U.S.- and Latvia-based virulently anti-gay outfit, gathered in Riga to “protect the city from a homosexual invasion.” As the Intelligence Report has noted , gay rights supporters at that rally were met by “a gauntlet of ultranationalists, neo-Nazi skinheads, elderly women and youths wearing ‘I Love New Generation’ T-shirts. They were pelted with eggs, rotten tomatoes and plastic bags full of feces.” Alexey Ledyaev, leader of the Riga-based New Generation Church and co-founder of the Watchmen on the Walls, attended Dzelme’s sentencing. Dzelme, along with his boss, parliamentary deputy Dainis Turlais, are members of Ledyaev’s New Generation Church. Dzelme was sentenced to 100 hours of “compulsory labor,” which is widely seen in Latvia as a more severe punishment than the alternative of paying a $3,400 fine.
SECOND THOUGHTS ON HIGHWAY OF HATE: Earlier this week, Hatewatch reported that the San Diego Minutemen (SDMM), a nativist extremist group, had been allowed to “adopt” a stretch of I-5 for cleanup that included the Border Patrol’s busy San Clemente checkpoint. No way, the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) says now, following a rash of negative publicity. Instead, officials say the SDMM will be offered a stretch of State Route 52, more than 30 miles north of the border checkpoint. Caltrans District Director Pedro Orso-Delgado told The San Diego Union-Tribune that he was concerned about public safety, not about the appearance of having favored the Minutemen by giving them that particular stretch of I-5 to keep clean. “It basically creates a lightning rod. ... Really, we don’t need that kind of issue on a freeway where we have so many cars traveling and there’s potential for having an accident or getting into a safety issue,” he explained.  Howard Kaloogian, a former state assemblyman who is legal counsel for the SDMM, called the decision political and vowed to challenge CalTrans in court.

Summary: FIRE IN THE HOLE: The double-wide mobile home of imprisoned Klan leader Charles Barefoot, who was recently declared incompetent to stand trial for allegedly arranging the murder of a fellow Klansman, burned to the ground on Tuesday in Dunn, N.C. “When I got home, ammunition was exploding everywhere and flames were shooting through the roof of his house,” one neighbor told the local newspaper, The Daily Record .  “There were bullets going off, shotgun shells exploding and popping everywhere.”…


Utah Minutemen Back In-State Tuition Repeal

With about 100 people waiting to hear the debate on a bill that would repeal in-state college tuition for undocumented students, the House Education Committee on Tuesday started its meeting 30 minutes late and then only allowed for 10 minutes of public comment on it.
Read full article


Court Upholds Fine Against Bible College Owner

The Arizona Appeals Court recently affirmed a decision by the Cochise County Board of Supervisors to fine a man who rented housing to the Minutemen Civil Defense Project without a permit in 2005.
Read full article


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 6/2/2017
June 02, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Hate is tearing America apart; Noose shows up at African American museum; American Guard is just another extremist front; and more.


Hatewatch

Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions , one of President-elect Donald Trump’s closest advisers during his campaign and his selection for U.S. attorney general, has longstanding and extensive ties to both anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim extremist groups.


Hatewatch

KrisAnne Hall, a self-described “constitutional attorney” who thinks states have the right to secede, recently addressed a neo-Confederate hate group whose goal is to create what the Civil War did not: a separate Southern nation.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 2/17/2017
February 17, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
‘Telephone terrorism’ hits Jewish centers; Supremacist planned Roof-style rampage; Militia vows to protect congressman; and more.


Hatewatch

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.


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.