Calling All Thugs: Gas Line Cut After Tea Party Leader Posts Enemy’s Address

The latest news from the opponents of health care reform who like to suggest that supporters should suffer for their transgressions: A day after two Virginia Tea Party activists posted the address of the brother of a congressman who voted for the bill, authorities discovered that someone had severed a gas line at the man’s home.
According to The Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Va., Danville Tea Party leader Nigel Coleman was one of the two people who posted the address of Bo Perriello, the older brother of U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Ivy), who voted for the health care bill. “This is Rep. Thomas Stuart Perriello’s home address,” Coleman wrote Monday, going on to suggest that others who oppose the health care bill “drop by” and “express their thanks.” He added, “I ain’t holding back no more.”
According to the Politico website, Coleman, upon learning he had posted the wrong address, said on a blog: “Do you mean I posted his brother’s address on my Facebook? Oh well, collateral damage.”
Told by The Daily Progress of the severing of the line that connected a propane tank to a grill on Perriello’s screened-in porch, Coleman said he was “shocked” and “almost speechless.” He claimed innocently that he was against violence, and in any case wasn’t sure that the attack, which is under FBI investigation, was related to his post.
Coleman’s absolutely despicable actions were remarkably similar to those of American neo-Nazi leaders who in recent years have made a practice of posting their enemies’ addresses and other personal information. They, too, often suggested that their sympathizers drop by to let enemies know their feelings. But that certainly didn’t stop Coleman from engaging in his own mindless and dangerous provocation.
The news of Coleman’s post and its apparent result followed boasts earlier in the week from Mike Vanderboegh, a former Alabama militia leader who last Friday called on enemies of health reform to smash the windows of local Democratic Party headquarters around the country. Vanderboegh’s threatening blog post, which suggested that civil war could be around the corner, was followed by bricks or stones being thrown through party offices in three states. The offices of two Democratic congressmen in New York and Arizona were similarly attacked.
As if that wasn’t enough, opponents of health care legislation demonstrating in Washington, D.C., this weekend spit on a black congressman, shouted racial slurs at two others, and shouted an anti-gay epithet at yet another. A week earlier, a group at a Tea Party in Columbus, Ohio, taunted a man sitting on the ground with a sign saying he had Parkinson’s disease. “If you’re looking for a handout,” one of the protesters told the health care reform supporter in a scene captured on video and posted to YouTube, “you’re in the wrong end of town.”
These despicable attacks and those who help foment them are unworthy of any citizen of a democracy, let alone of those who pretend to be standing up for principled conservatism. What we are seeing is the infuriated response of thugs and those who like to encourage thugs. And what may be most appalling of all is the absolute temerity, not to say cowardice, of supposedly responsible leaders of those who opposed health care reform, almost none of whom have condemned the latest round of hate. It’s a sad commentary on America that this is what our political process has become.

Summary: The latest news from the opponents of health care reform who like to suggest that supporters should suffer for their transgressions: A day after two Virginia Tea Party activists posted the address of the brother of a congressman who voted for the bill, authorities discovered that someone had severed a gas line at the man’s home. According to The Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Va., Danville Tea Party leader Nigel Coleman was one of the two people who posted the address of Bo Perriello, the…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hate groups and extremists cheer President Trump as he vilifies migrant caravan
October 25, 2018
Swathi Shanmugasundaram
As thousands of migrants fleeing poverty and violence attempt to make their way to the United States, anti-immigrant hate groups and the radical right react with warrantless fear-mongering.


Hatewatch


After Call to Arms, Nativist Extremist Leader Calls it Quits

A major nativist group known for its armed border patrols is disbanding.
In a Monday E-mail to supporters, Minuteman Civil Defense Corps President Carmen Mercer said the MCDC will no longer exist as an organization, though she encouraged supporters to continue its work independently. “I predict Americans, on their own, will lock, load and do what the feckless cowards in Washington refuse to do — and frankly I hope Americans do take up arms to defend this great nation,” she wrote in the “urgent alert.”
MCDC is an offshoot of the Minuteman Project, a month-long civilian border patrol that was covered extensively by journalists five years ago. (Then-President George W. Bush called the Minutemen “vigilantes” in March 2005.)  In 2009, MCDC had at least 74 chapters in nearly 30 states, making it the biggest of the Minuteman spin-off groups. But MCDC and the larger Minuteman movement have been plagued by infighting, allegations of financial impropriety and civil litigation. In addition, the leader of Minuteman American Defense (MAD) was charged with the May 2009 murder of a 9-year-old Latina girl and her father during a home invasion in Arivaca, Ariz., setting off furious accusations and counter-accusations over who had supported MAD's Shawna Forde over the years.
The announcement of MCDC’s dissolution also followed an E-mail Mercer sent a week earlier , in which she urged supporters to bring their long arms to the border and to “forcefully engage” the “criminals” who try to cross without documentation. Mercer wrote on Monday that she received hundreds of responses to that E-mail, including some that sounded over-enthusiastic. “It was obvious that many had decided to return to the border who had tired of the sometimes futile watch and observe methods. It showed me that people are not willing to be silenced anymore; it also showed me that people will be less likely to follow the rules of engagement in a desperate attempt to stop the criminals who violate our borders every day. That is not what we want and we cannot take the responsibility for this.”
But Mercer contradicted herself when she told the Arizona Daily Star that “people are ready to come locked and loaded, and that’s not what we are all about.” In fact, the Tombstone, Ariz., restaurateur had repeatedly told supporters in the week-earlier E-mail to return to the border “locked and loaded.”  Mercer, a defendant in the Arizona attorney general’s recent lawsuit alleging a property tax scam , would not speak to Hatewatch. “I do not think anything I say would make it truthfully on[to] your blog,” she wrote in an E-mail. “I have followed the attacks of your organization against our organization. I think you would be wasting my time.”
In fact, attacks often came from former supporters within the anti-immigration movement, who heavily criticized MCDC founder and former leader Chris Simcox for failing to complete a promised “Israeli-style” border fence and for allegedly selling out his organization to a shadowy network of professional right-wing fundraisers. In 2007, Simcox fired 18 state, regional and national MCDC leaders because they had raised questions about his financial accountability. Two years later, Simcox quit himself to run unsuccessfully for Congress, leaving Mercer to run MCDC . Since then, other MCDC officials have resigned, including Vice President Al Garza, who said last summer that he was quitting to launch the Patriots Coalition because “the organization [MCDC] is now on a path that I cannot endorse.” This week, the Patriots Coalition announced that it would waive its application fee for Minutemen who joined the group.
Besides liability concerns, Mercer wrote that most of the organization’s leaders had left and would not support the more aggressive tactics outlined in the earlier E-mail. In addition, she said MCDC was having trouble raising money after separating from the Declaration Alliance, a right-wing advocacy group that handled some aspects of MCDC’s operations. The most recent tax forms show that MCDC received just under $209,000 in revenue during 2008, down from nearly $790,000 in 2007.
“I really think the demise of MCDC has very much more to do with the evaporation of the donations,” wrote Border Guardians founder Laine Lawless to a Minuteman E-mail group. “When all the money is gone, the higher-ups leave.”
Although the first Minuteman patrol garnered national headlines, MCDC’s break-up has received little media attention outside Arizona. Jim Campbell, who filed a lawsuit (later dropped) against MCDC after donating $100,000 for the border fence, also blames financial mismanagement for the fall of the organization whose mission he still supports. “In the past two years, the movement has gone so downhill,” the Air Force veteran told Hatewatch. “It almost doesn’t make a story anymore. For all intents and purposes, MCDC has been defunct.”

Summary: A major nativist group known for its armed border patrols is disbanding. In a Monday E-mail to supporters, Minuteman Civil Defense Corps President Carmen Mercer said the MCDC will no longer exist as an organization, though she encouraged supporters to continue its work independently. “I predict Americans, on their own, will lock, load and do what the feckless cowards in Washington refuse to do — and frankly I hope Americans do take up arms to defend this great nation,” she wrote in the “urgent…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Scores of Jewish Community Centers Received Bomb Threats in the Last Month
February 22, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
In just over a month, Jewish Community Centers across the country and abroad received anonymous bomb threats on five separate occasions.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
TRS Radio Network Member Arrested in Virginia for Stickers Linking to Hate Site
July 09, 2020
Hatewatch Staff
Police in Norfolk, Virginia, have arrested a man affiliated with The Right Stuff (TRS) podcast network, a white nationalist hate group and propaganda organ.


Hatewatch

QAnon is the umbrella term for a sprawling spiderweb of right-wing internet conspiracy theories with antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ elements that falsely claim the world is run by a secret cabal of pedophiles who worship Satan and are plotting against President Trump. Though some influential individuals are active in the movement, it is not an organized group with defined leadership.


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

Hatewatch
Neo-Nazi Murder Suspect  Tied to Jail Escape Attempt
February 15, 2017
Bill Morlin
A white supremacist awaiting trial on three murder charges was involved in a failed attempt to escape last weekend from the Clark County Jail in Vancouver, Wash., authorities say.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 11/30/2016
November 30, 2016
Hatewatch Staff
Why the Alt-Right is celebrating; Flynn is a big fan of Milo; A longer look at the data around hate crimes; and more.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 11/15/2016
November 14, 2016
Hatewatch Staff
Trump ‘surprised’ by attacks on minorities; White nationalists happy about Bannon; Confederate flags at California parade; and more.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 2/10/2017
February 10, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Deportations open with Arizona mother; White nationalists love Sessions win; Klan organizes openly in Ohio; and more.


Pentagon Tightens Ban on Supremacist Activity After Years of Denying Problem

Since the SPLC warned the U.S. military about extremist activity among active-duty personnel in 2006, the Pentagon brass has steadfastly denied that a problem existed and insisted that its “zero-tolerance” policy was sufficient to keep organized racists out of its ranks.
That changed this past November, when the Pentagon quietly tightened its policy on extremist activity, which formerly only banned “active participation” in extremist groups but did not define what that meant.
Under the new regulations , military personnel “must not actively advocate supremacist doctrine, ideology or causes” or “otherwise advance efforts to deprive individuals of their civil rights.” The new rules specify that “active participation” includes activities such as recruiting, fundraising, demonstrating or rallying, training, organizing and distributing supremacist material, including online posts.
The revision should give commanders ample new tools to root out racial extremists in their midst. The previous policy, in effect since the mid-1990s, could be interpreted to mean that military personnel were allowed to be “mere members” of hate groups or that they could engage in unaffiliated extremist activities — such as posting racist and anti-Semitic messages to social networking websites and e-mail lists or maintaining online profiles filled with racist materials. As the SPLC has repeatedly pointed out, the policy allowed numerous active-duty members to engage in a range of supremacist activities.
The policy change, which slipped under the radar for months, was reported Friday by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek . In a blog post, Isikoff examined the military backgrounds of two members of the Hutaree Militia, the radical Michigan group whose members were indicted late last month in a plot to murder a law enforcement officer and then attack the funeral procession with homemade bombs and missiles.
The SPLC has been urging the Pentagon to revise the regulations since 2006, when it published “ A Few Bad Men ,” a report revealing that large numbers of neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacists were joining the armed forces to acquire combat and weapons training – skills that could be used to commit terrorist acts against targets in the U.S.
The report cited the case of Matt Buschbacher, a Navy SEAL who attended the 2002 leadership conference of the neo-Nazi National Alliance while on active duty. The group’s late leader, who espoused murdering Jews in abandoned coal mines, was the author of The Turner Diaries , the race war novel used by Timothy McVeigh as a blueprint for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The SPLC alerted military officials to the fact that Buschbacher was producing neo-Nazi recruitment fliers via his Racialpride.com website, but he was allowed to complete his tour of duty in Iraq and even given an honorable discharge.
Another example in the 2006 report was the case of Robert Lee West, then an active-duty airman. When the SPLC informed military officials of West’s activities, which included posing in front of a swastika flag with two assault rifles and ranting about the “Zionist Occupied Government,” they said no action would be taken unless he recruited fellow extremists or committed a crime.
In a letter to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, SPLC President Richard Cohen urged the military to adopt a zero-tolerance policy with regard to extremists in the ranks. Forty members of Congress wrote a similar letter , as did Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican. But in his reply and in subsequent letters, Under Secretary of Defense David S. C. Chu dismissed the concerns as being unnecessarily alarmist. The military took no remedial action.
Two years later, in 2008, the SPLC reported new evidence that supported its initial findings. That report revealed that 46 members of the white supremacist social networking website Newsaxon.com had identified themselves as active-duty military personnel. The report quoted a racist skinhead who posted a comment to a neo-Nazi online forum, excitedly saying that he had joined the Army and specifically requested an assignment where he would learn how to make an explosive device. “I have my own reasons for wanting this training but in fear of the government tracing me and me loosing [sic] my clearance I can’t share them here,” wrote the poster, who called himself “Sobibor’s SS,” a reference to guards at a Nazi concentration camp.
After that report, Cohen reiterated his request to the Pentagon that the rules be tightened. Once again, Chu replied by saying the military already had such a policy in place and needed nothing more. “We are committed to sustaining a culture in which all personnel from diverse backgrounds serve together in defense of our great nation,” Chu wrote.
Meanwhile, an unclassified FBI Intelligence Assessment in Fall 2008 detailed more than a dozen investigative findings and criminal cases involving Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as well as other active-duty personnel engaging in extremist activity in recent years. “The military training veterans bring to the [white supremacist] movement and their potential to pass this training on to others can increase the ability of lone offenders to carry out violence from the movement’s fringes,” the FBI report warned.
In February 2009, the threat became even harder to ignore. Lance Corporal Kody Brittingham, a Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, was arrested and later charged with threatening the president after investigators found white supremacist materials and a journal containing a plot to assassinate President Obama among his belongings.
Then, in April 2009, a Department of Homeland Security report on the threat of domestic terrorism from right-wing extremists stated that the department “assesses that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat.”
With no apparent action being taken by the Pentagon, in July 2009 the SPLC appealed to Congress to investigate the problem. In a letter to committee chairmen with oversight over homeland security and the armed services, the SPLC presented dozens of additional profiles of active-duty military personnel on the New Saxon website. Those profiles included an individual who wrote that he was about to be deployed with the Air Force overseas and was looking forward to “killing all the bloody sand niggers!” Another poster listed Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his favorite books. Many of the profiles included pictures of the posters in military uniform.
Two months later, in September, SPLC officials were invited to brief staff members of Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
The Pentagon’s November rule revision, at long last, won’t eliminate all racial extremists or potential terrorists from the armed services. But it is a significant step forward and should make it much easier for commanders to investigate and discharge the likes of Matt Buschbacher and Robert Lee West.

Summary: Since the SPLC warned the U.S. military about extremist activity among active-duty personnel in 2006, the Pentagon brass has steadfastly denied that a problem existed and insisted that its “zero-tolerance” policy was sufficient to keep organized racists out of its ranks. That changed this past November, when the Pentagon quietly tightened its policy on extremist activity, which formerly only banned “active participation” in extremist groups but did not define what that meant. Under the new…


Since the SPLC warned the U.S. military about extremist activity among active-duty personnel in 2006, the Pentagon brass has steadfastly denied that a problem existed and insisted that its “zero-tolerance” policy was sufficient to keep organized racists out of its ranks.
That changed this past November, when the Pentagon quietly tightened its policy on extremist activity, which formerly only banned “active participation” in extremist groups but did not define what that meant.
Under the new regulations , military personnel “must not actively advocate supremacist doctrine, ideology or causes” or “otherwise advance efforts to deprive individuals of their civil rights.” The new rules specify that “active participation” includes activities such as recruiting, fundraising, demonstrating or rallying, training, organizing and distributing supremacist material, including online posts.
The revision should give commanders ample new tools to root out racial extremists in their midst. The previous policy, in effect since the mid-1990s, could be interpreted to mean that military personnel were allowed to be “mere members” of hate groups or that they could engage in unaffiliated extremist activities — such as posting racist and anti-Semitic messages to social networking websites and e-mail lists or maintaining online profiles filled with racist materials. As the SPLC has repeatedly pointed out, the policy allowed numerous active-duty members to engage in a range of supremacist activities.
The policy change, which slipped under the radar for months, was reported Friday by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek . In a blog post, Isikoff examined the military backgrounds of two members of the Hutaree Militia, the radical Michigan group whose members were indicted late last month in a plot to murder a law enforcement officer and then attack the funeral procession with homemade bombs and missiles.
The SPLC has been urging the Pentagon to revise the regulations since 2006, when it published “ A Few Bad Men ,” a report revealing that large numbers of neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacists were joining the armed forces to acquire combat and weapons training – skills that could be used to commit terrorist acts against targets in the U.S.
The report cited the case of Matt Buschbacher, a Navy SEAL who attended the 2002 leadership conference of the neo-Nazi National Alliance while on active duty. The group’s late leader, who espoused murdering Jews in abandoned coal mines, was the author of The Turner Diaries , the race war novel used by Timothy McVeigh as a blueprint for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The SPLC alerted military officials to the fact that Buschbacher was producing neo-Nazi recruitment flyers via his Racialpride.com website, but he was allowed to complete his tour of duty in Iraq and even given an honorable discharge.
Another example in the 2006 report was the case of Robert Lee West, then an active-duty airman. When the SPLC informed military officials of West’s activities, which included posing in front of a swastika flag with two assault rifles and ranting about the “Zionist Occupied Government,” they said no action would be taken unless he recruited fellow extremists or committed a crime.
In a letter to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, SPLC President Richard Cohen urged the military to adopt a zero-tolerance policy with regard to extremists in the ranks. Forty members of Congress wrote a similar letter , as did Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican. But in his reply and in subsequent letters, Under Secretary of Defense David S. C. Chu dismissed the concerns as being unnecessarily alarmist. The military took no remedial action.
Two years later, in 2008, the SPLC reported new evidence that supported its initial findings. That report revealed that 46 members of the white supremacist social networking website Newsaxon.com had identified themselves as active-duty military personnel. The report quoted a racist skinhead who posted a comment to a neo-Nazi online forum, excitedly saying that he had joined the Army and specifically requested an assignment where he would learn how to make an explosive device. “I have my own reasons for wanting this training but in fear of the government tracing me and me loosing [sic] my clearance I can’t share them here,” wrote the poster, who called himself “Sobibor’s SS,” a reference to guards at a Nazi concentration camp.
After that report, Cohen reiterated his request to the Pentagon that the rules be tightened. Once again, Chu replied by saying the military already had such a policy in place and needed nothing more. “We are committed to sustaining a culture in which all personnel from diverse backgrounds serve together in defense of our great nation,” Chu wrote.
Meanwhile, an unclassified FBI Intelligence Assessment in Fall 2008 detailed more than a dozen investigative findings and criminal cases involving Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as well as other active-duty personnel engaging in extremist activity in recent years. “The military training veterans bring to the [white supremacist] movement and their potential to pass this training on to others can increase the ability of lone offenders to carry out violence from the movement’s fringes,” the FBI report warned.
In February 2009, the threat became even harder to ignore. Lance Corporal Kody Brittingham, a Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, was arrested and later charged with threatening the president after investigators found white supremacist materials and a journal containing a plot to assassinate President Obama among his belongings.
Then, in April 2009, a Department of Homeland Security report on the threat of domestic terrorism from right-wing extremists stated that the department “assesses that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat.”
With no apparent action being taken by the Pentagon, in July 2009 the SPLC appealed to Congress to investigate the problem. In a letter to committee chairmen with oversight over homeland security and the armed services, the SPLC presented dozens of additional profiles of active-duty military personnel on the New Saxon website. Those profiles included an individual who wrote that he was about to be deployed with the Air Force overseas and was looking forward to “killing all the bloody sand n ------ !” Another poster listed Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his favorite books. Many of the profiles included pictures of the posters in military uniform.
Two months later, in September, SPLC officials were invited to brief staff members of Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
The Pentagon’s November rule revision, at long last, won’t eliminate all racial extremists or potential terrorists from the armed services. But it is a significant step forward and should make it much easier for commanders to investigate and discharge the likes of Matt Buschbacher and Robert Lee West.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 3/27/2017
March 27, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Fliers gives racist organizers a two-for-one deal; Hate cases rising, but will the court cases follow?; Milo’s tour was underwritten by Trump-backing billionaire; and more.


Former Neo-Nazi Leader Sentenced to Prison for Threats

Former neo-Nazi leader Bill White will spend 2½ years in prison for threatening his perceived enemies.
U.S. District Judge James Turk sentenced White to 30 months on each of three counts, according to a federal court filing. The sentences will be served at the same time, with credit for time served. The judge also imposed three years of supervised release.
According to The Roanoke Times , Turk said he doesn’t often sentence defendants at the upper end of federal guidelines but thought White deserved the lengthier sentence for terrorizing some of his victims. The newspaper quoted Turk telling White that upon his release from prison, “You can have any thoughts you want to have, but you ought to keep them to yourself.”
On Dec. 18, after an eight-day federal trial in Roanoke, Va., the 32-year-old White was found guilty of making threats against a Citibank employee and a University of Delaware professor and of intimidating tenants of a Virginia Beach apartment complex. (The judge later dismissed a fourth conviction for threatening a Canadian human rights lawyer.) White targeted his victims through E-mail, his website, the telephone and the U.S. mail. On Monday, Turk denied White’s request for a new trial.
White, who did not speak during the hour-long sentencing hearing, was leader of the now-defunct American National Socialist Workers Party, a neo-Nazi organization that in 2008 had 35 chapters in 28 states. He had a long history of using the Internet for harassment. In 1996, while a student at the University of Maryland, he posted the phone number of a woman he believed was abusing her teenage daughter.
Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez said in a news release that the jury last winter rejected White’s contention that his speech was protected under the First Amendment. “[T]his sentence demonstrates that all threatening and intimidating behavior, no matter how a perpetrator tries to mask it, will be subject to the same punishment under the law,” he said.
White will likely serve the remainder of his sentence at a prison in Beckley, W.V. Even after he gets out of jail, it’s unlikely he will have a chance to vilify people on the Web. As part of his conditions of release, White will be barred from posting information online or using the Internet for a job or hobby.

Summary: Former neo-Nazi leader Bill White will spend 2½ years in prison for threatening his perceived enemies. U.S. District Judge James Turk sentenced White to 30 months on each of three counts, according to a federal court filing. The sentences will be served at the same time, with credit for time served. The judge also imposed three years of supervised release. According to The Roanoke Times , Turk said he doesn’t often sentence defendants at the upper end of federal guidelines but thought White…


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.


Hatewatch

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


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 1/6/2017
January 06, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
White nationalism filling a political vacuum; Hate crimes ease, but remain high; ‘Wall’ is now a fence, paid for by USA; and more.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Florida Man Arrested for Racist Threats Once Attacked an African American Police Officer
June 28, 2019
Rachel Janik
A long string of felony charges and a tip-off from the Department of Homeland Security led to the arrest of a Florida man for racist and antisemitic threats posted to Gab and Bitchute.


Hatewatch


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
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
Hatewatch Headlines 2/3/2017
February 03, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Bannon’s dream an of American gulag; Miller’s Islamophobia revealed; Wildlife, land managers fear for lives; and more.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
White Nationalist Threats Against Transgender People Are Escalating
June 26, 2019
Cassie Miller
Transphobic rhetoric, some of it violent, appears to be increasing among white nationalists and neo-Nazis as the fight for transgender rights gains visibility and public support.


Neo-Nazi Official Patrolling Arizona Border Lauds Violence

As if Arizona wasn’t already unfriendly enough territory for immigrants, now they have to face angry, armed neo-Nazis. Incredibly, a small group of heavily armed racists patrolled for migrants and drug cartels last week on the Southern border.
Led by J.T. Ready — a recent member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) — the group, who call themselves Ready’s Rangers, took to the desert armed with semi-automatic rifles and clad in fatigues, military style helmets and Kevlar vests. The “rangers” ended up holding 11 immigrants at gunpoint, according to participant Harry Hughes, NSM’s media spokesman.
It wasn’t the first time out on the border for the group, which is mostly made up of NSM members. In June, Ready reported on the neo-Nazi forum New Saxon, which is run by NSM, having “captured” a total of “[t]hree live UDA’s (Undocumented Aliens) … and one UDA corpse” in Pinal County’s Vekol Valley. And we should expect more patrols. NSM Region 11 Director Jeff Hall promises “future large scale missions” in both California and Arizona.
Ready is a racist and an anti-Semite. His frequent postings on New Saxon are remarkably crude. Among other things, he has written that “the Jew is a two-headed cancer which corrupts and putrefies all that is natural and noble upon this earth.” Today, Ready made incendiary comments to Gawker about the Judge who placed an injunction on Arizona's anti-immigration law SB1070, saying, "Perhaps [Judge Bolton] should step her ass outside the air-conditioned courtroom sometime and see what is really happening as Rome burns and barbarians with AK-47s are in gun battles twenty miles from the gates of Phoenix."
But as scary as J.T. is, his pal in this endeavor, Harry Hughes, might be scarier. Hughes really, really doesn’t like Mexicans, citing approvingly on his blog an article that says: “Mexican illegal aliens are revolting. And they know it. It is their purpose to disrupt us, interfere with us and give us diseases that we haven’t had in this country for 100 years.” In September 2007, in a thread on the racist forum Stormfront.org that was devoted to getting Mexicans to move out of a neighborhood, Hughes provided the following observation: “Back where I’m from they would just get into a hunting accident but that might not work here as there are too many of them.”
Hughes’ anger, by his own account, sometimes spills over into action. In July 2007, Hughes posted under his moniker “vandal52900” to Stormfront that he had shot a Mexican family’s dog. “The dog with the bullet belonged to Mexicans. I legally shot it, but was arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon because I yelled at the Mexicans.” Hughes said the charges were later dropped and “the Mexicans [sic] home mysteriously burned down.” In a September 2007 post that was later removed from Stormfront, Hughes wrote: “Does getting arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for shouting at a latrino neighbor count? I was unarmed at the time and the cop was a spic.”
The “mysteriously burned” house also came up earlier, in a June 2007 Stormfront post, when Hughes contributed to a thread entitled “I’m the only white in my neighborhood that cares.” The thread was about a Mexican family supposedly living on his street. “There used to be a place [where Mexicans lived] in my neighborhood until it mysteriously burned down,” he wrote, adding happily, “The lot was cleared and these nice white people built a home there.”
A call to the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office’s public information officer about whether or not a house burned down on Hughes’ street was not immediately returned.
Hughes sounded just as ominous in March 2006 on a forum run by racist New Jersey radio host Hal Turner . At the time, Turner was suggesting that his followers arm themselves and then protest pro-immigrant rallies that were scheduled to take place across the U.S. “Let April 10, 2006 go down in history as the day Americans took up arms against tens of thousands of third-world-savages who invaded our land. Clean your guns. Have plenty of ammunition,” Turner implored. “This is the perfect scenario, opportunity and obligation for LONE WOLF action,” he said, referring to terrorist acts undertaken by individuals acting on their own. That all sounded good to Hughes: “I would like to smell smoke on the tenth,” he wrote. “Arizona could use a real good cleansing.”
And it’s not just immigrants who anger Hughes. In November 2007, he suggested that a list of so-called race traitors be compiled. “We will need a directory of some sort prior to the ‘Day of the Rope,’” Hughes wrote, referring to a scene in the racist novel The Turner Diaries. (The book, written by the late neo-Nazi leader William Pierce, describes how revolutionary whites murder Jews, non-whites and, especially, white women who have slept with men of color, on “the day of the rope.”) Hughes added, “A website would make this data easily accessible for use by local units.”
All of which makes you wonder: Is it really a good idea to have men like J.T. Ready and Harry Hughes detaining anyone at gunpoint?

Summary: As if Arizona wasn’t already unfriendly enough territory for immigrants, now they have to face angry, armed neo-Nazis. Incredibly, a small group of heavily armed racists patrolled for migrants and drug cartels last week on the Southern border. Led by J.T. Ready — a recent member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) — the group, who call themselves Ready’s Rangers, took to the desert armed with semi-automatic rifles and clad in fatigues, military style helmets and Kevlar vests. The…


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.


Black-on-Latino Hate Crimes Broil Staten Island

It has been an agonizing summer for Latino residents of Staten Island. Since April, there have been 11 known instances of racially motivated violence against Latinos in the New York City borough, most of it taking place in the economically depressed Mexican-immigrant neighborhood of Port Richmond. This past Saturday, an 18-year-old Mexican immigrant named Christian Vazquez became the latest victim when he was attacked and beaten by three young African-American assailants who yelled anti-Mexican slurs and accused him of belonging to a Mexican gang. (In fact, Vazquez is active in a local group working against bias crime and gang activity, called Eye Openers: Youth Against Violence.) Currently one of the assailants, a 15-year-old Liberian immigrant, is in police custody and facing hate-crime charges of assault, robbery and aggravated harassment.
The most recent attack follows a rising pattern of black-on-Latino bias crime in the borough. In another representative case, on April 25, 46-year-old Rogerio Vazquez (no relation to Christian) suffered lacerations to his head during a slur-laden assault and robbery at the hands of a 19-year-old Asian woman and 21-year-old African-American man.
The rash of attacks in the area has led to the construction of a “police skywatch tower” to better monitor the streets, as well as the involvement of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Mexican Consulate, which have participated in a growing number of community forums on the problem.
But some local community leaders say that much more is needed.
“While the City has dramatically increased police presence in Port Richmond, where many of these attacks have occurred, this surge in police presence fails to address the root causes of this violence,” said Ana Maria Archila, spokeswoman for Make the Road New York, a Latino advocacy group. “We can’t continue to wish discrimination and bias away. New York City must take concrete steps to promote tolerance and expand opportunities for young people.”
The steps proposed by Archila’s and allied groups include more public town halls and hearings; public awareness campaigns about hate crimes and how to anonymously report them; and educational programs for teenagers, who make up a large proportion of the perpetrators.
Though violence between black and Latino populations is generally associated with gang activity in Los Angeles and high school conflicts there and elsewhere in California, the recent events on Staten Island illustrate that the problem is national in scope, especially when the communities border each other and are in direct competition for scarce local jobs. Attacks on Latinos have risen in recent years, as anti-immigrant rhetoric ratcheted up across the country. According to the FBI, anti-Latino violence shot up 40% between 2003 and 2007, dropping back slightly in 2008. The FBI has yet to release hate crime statistics for 2009.

Summary: It has been an agonizing summer for Latino residents of Staten Island. Since April, there have been 11 known instances of racially motivated violence against Latinos in the New York City borough, most of it taking place in the economically depressed Mexican-immigrant neighborhood of Port Richmond. This past Saturday, an 18-year-old Mexican immigrant named Christian Vazquez became the latest victim when he was attacked and beaten by three young African-American assailants who yelled…


Hatewatch

Wielding M-4s and a warrant, with one of their helicopters sputtering overhead, U.S. Border Patrol agents last week raided the so-called “Byrd Camp” of the humanitarian group No More Deaths (NMD) located near Arivaca, Arizona, about 10 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, taking four Mexican migrants into custody.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 5/22/2017
May 22, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Study finds right-wing terror a significant threat; New Orleans takes down its last Confederacy monument; Black congressman gets lynching threats; and more.


Hatewatch

A Kansas man is in jail on murder and attempted murder charges after allegedly shouting “get out of my country” and racial slurs before firing a handgun Wednesday evening in a crowded sports bar in suburb of Kansas City.


Hatewatch

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


Hatewatch

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.


Prime Islam-Basher Pam Geller Outdone by Colleague

As head of New York-based Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), “Atlas Shrugs” blogger Pamela Geller has certainly gotten her share of publicity, thanks to her inflammatory rhetoric and stunts like wearing a bathing suit four years ago to make a videotaped harangue about Palestinian terrorists.
Geller is a leader in the opposition to the Islamic center and mosque proposed for a site near that of the 9/11 attack in New York.  She has said — without any evidence at all to back her up — that funding of the center could be “tied to jihad or terror” and added that building it would be “repugnant,” a “kick in the head” to Americans and equivalent to “stab[bing] Americans in the eye.” In May, she spent $10,000 for anti-Islam ads to be placed for a month on 40 New York City buses. Among other things, the ads directed Muslims to a website urging them to leave the “falsity of Islam.” Not surprisingly, many Muslims were offended.
Nobody on the far right, it seems, has been able to surpass Geller for anti-Obama epithets with a Muslim-bashing twist. She has called the president  “a third worlder and a coward” who is anxious to “appease his Islamic overlords.” On another occasion, she wrote that Obama “wants jihad to win.” But now a founding board member of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) — a group founded by Geller, apparently to act as an umbrella for the SIOA she co-founded — is doing his best to be even more vitriolic than her. His rants, coupled with his apparently close relationship to Geller, cast new doubt on Geller’s already extremely doubtful claim to be a reasonable critic of Muslims and Islam generally.
According to the Daily Kos , AFDI board member John Joseph Jay recently has posted a series of truly vicious anti-Muslim rants — apparently without the benefit of a capital letter function on his computer.  “if islam kills non-believers as a matter of religious doctrine, then why should muslims expect to be free of retribution in the name of those islam kills?” he wrote. “why should muslims get a free pass? if it is right for muslims to kill non-believers, then why is it no less right for the rest of us to kill muslims?”
In another screed, the Daily Kos said Jay wrote: “there are, friends, no ‘innocent’ muslims. they obey. and they obey the dictates of the koran on jihad. and, they obey the commands of local clerics. in this, they have no choice. because, friends, there is no ‘free will’ in islam, one obeys  the dictates of allah.”
Last month, Jay expanded on his advocacy of violence against Muslims to include people in positions of power. He commented on his blog about a magazine article regarding America’s “ruling class” as follows: “friends, if you wish to retain and preserve individual virtue, you are going to have to kill in order to do so. if we are to excise the ruling class, it will be with violence. they used violence to attain their privilege, they use it nakedly in the form of the s.i.e.u. [an apparent reference to the SEIU, the Service Employees International Union] and black panther thugs in elective politics to maintain it, they contemplate relocation camps to preserve it. … buy guns. buy ammo. be jealous of your liberties. and understand, you are going to have to kill folks, your uncles, your sons and daughters, to preserve those liberties.”
Jay, 62, says he lives in a tiny town in northern Oregon, just south of Walla Walla, Wash. He says he was a lawyer in Washington for 25 years, mostly in criminal defense, but also including a stint as a prosecutor that lasted for nearly six years. “you will find out that I am interested in weapons, that I have some proficiency in them, and that I am very jealous of my liberties and will defend them.”
Jay seems to relish the small furor his writings have caused since Daily Kos and then LoonWatch published some of his musings. He claims his critics are pro-abortion, and therefore also violent. “i advocate  violence, if necessary, to retain liberty,” he wrote. “they espouse, advocate and support the annual murder of millions as an actual fact, as a matter of social expediency. i speak only the truth. if it is too unpleasant or unpalatable for your consumption, that is your problem and not mine.”

Summary: As head of New York-based Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), “Atlas Shrugs” blogger Pamela Geller has certainly gotten her share of publicity, thanks to her inflammatory rhetoric and stunts like wearing a bathing suit four years ago to make a videotaped harangue about Palestinian terrorists. Geller is a leader in the opposition to the Islamic center and mosque proposed for a site near that of the 9/11 attack in New York.  She has said — without any evidence at all to back her up — that…


Hatewatch

After several violent protests at the University of California, Berkeley, the 'alt-right' has turned its attention to the home of the Free Speech Movement as a focus to recruit students to the radical right.


Hatewatch

On Monday, August 14, the Daily Caller very quietly removed white nationalist Jason Kessler’s contributions to the publication after the violence and chaos in Charlottesville. The white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally was organized by Kessler.


Southern Heritage Group Offers Kids Unusual History Lessons

Each summer, a few lucky young folks, whose parents presumably have neo-Confederate sympathies, spend a week at a Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) Sam Davis Youth Camp. The camps are inspired by the words of a Confederate officer warning that a Southern loss in the Civil War meant its history would be “written by the enemy. ”
Now in their seventh season, the Southern heritage group’s youth camps are supposed to help parents take “responsibility” for teaching “our Southern history and culture.” They feature a week-long reeducation of sorts, one that is needed, says the SCV, because today’s youth run a “terrible gauntlet” and “many are struck down along the way by one or more of the politically correct influences which flourish in our schools.” The youth camps are meant to harden these youngsters so they can withstand “the liberal, politically correct view of history.”
The camps are heavily indebted to Kirk Lyons , a white supremacist lawyer who led a decade-long effort to recruit hate group members to the SCV (Lyons was at one time a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance ). Lyons, who said in 2000 that his goal is “a majority European-derived society,” serves on the SCV committee that oversees the camps. He has lobbied to have SCV funds dedicated to camp scholarships and his own children have participated in the events.
Also serving on the camp’s oversight committee is Ron G. Wilson , a former SCV commander-in-chief (2002-2004) who once served on the board of Lyons’ legal firm . Working closely with Lyons during his tenure as commander, Wilson appointed racists and anti-Semites to key SCV posts, purged some 300 SCV members and leaders who opposed racism, and worked to turn the SCV into an actively neo-Confederate organization. The Sam Davis Youth Camps, which are programs held in various venues rather than specific physical locations, were inaugurated under Wilson’s leadership.
So what does the SCV teach today’s youth? Campers are exposed to various “truths” about what the SCV calls “the War for Southern Independence” and are given “thoughtful instruction” in a whole host of topics: “Southern history, the War Between the States, the theology of the South during the War, lessons on Southern heroes, examples of great men of the Faith, and for the first year, special programs and sessions for our Southern ladies!”
The first camp of the 2010 season was held in Clifton, Texas, during the third week of June. According to the Waco Tribune-Herald , the campers were taught that the Civil War was not about slavery. “Too many people have bought into that notion,” Texas SCV Commander Ray W. James told the newspaper, “and wrongly exalt then-President Abraham Lincoln as wanting to end slavery.” Lincoln was actually “a bigger racist than I ever knew,” James said of the author of the Emancipation Proclamation.
The campers also enjoy some interesting musical entertainment. This year, campers were serenaded by the Farnum Family, a singing group that puts on the annual “Songs for His People” gathering in Branson, Mo., which has often featured Christian Identity pastors. Christian Identity is a virulently racist and anti-Semitic religion that claims Jews are biologically descended from Satan and minorities are not human and do not have souls, having been created by God on the same day as “the beasts of the field.”
At the 2000 Songs for His People, for instance, Pastor Charles Jennings reportedly called himself “a strong racist” and said that he was pleased at “the quality of our race is in this room.” Identity Pastor Ted Weiland was similarly strident, telling the audience, “There is a Jewish agenda against Christianity.” Weiland claimed, “They [the Jews] are not the true Israel. They say we are the haters, but the Jews are the enemies of Christ.”
When asked about Weiland and Jennings’ comments, Norm Farnum told Hatewatch, “They were taken out of context.” When asked if he was a Christian Identity adherent, Farnum said, “not in the context that the Southern Poverty Law Center means.” He declined to elaborate.
The Farnums have some other unusual acquaintances. Their website links to Pastor John Weaver, whose 2001 defense of American slavery caused a firestorm after a newspaper reported that his tract was being sold at Piggie Park, a South Carolina barbecue institution. Weaver’s publication claimed, among other things, that “many ... African slaves blessed the Lord for allowing them to be enslaved and sent to America.” Weaver has also been identified as a member of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). Earlier this decade, Weaver served as chaplain-in-chief of the SCV.
Lyons is a big supporter of the Farnums, writing on Facebook that “this band MADE the western Sam Davis camp.” Lyons solicited $3,000 on Facebook to bring the Farnums to the Sam Davis Youth Camp that was held in early July in South Carolina. When asked by Hatewatch whether he had concerns about the Farnums, given their connections to Christian Identity pastors, Lyons said, “They are a wonderful family and they have been a blessing to the camp.” (Click here to see a video of Lyons speaking in early July at a confederate flag rally in Columbia, S.C., that also featured the CCC’s Kyle Rogers).

Summary: Each summer, a few lucky young folks, whose parents presumably have neo-Confederate sympathies, spend a week at a Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) Sam Davis Youth Camp. The camps are inspired by the words of a Confederate officer warning that a Southern loss in the Civil War meant its history would be “written by the enemy. ” Now in their seventh season, the Southern heritage group’s youth camps are supposed to help parents take “responsibility” for teaching “our Southern history and…


Hatewatch


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Florida Man Arrested for Racist Threats Once Attacked an African American Police Officer
June 28, 2019
Rachel Janik
A long string of felony charges and a tip-off from the Department of Homeland Security led to the arrest of a Florida man for racist and antisemitic threats posted to Gab and Bitchute.


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.


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
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.


Shirley Sherrod and the Right: A Day That Will Live in Infamy

The entire Shirley Sherrod affair is so disgusting, such a stomach-churning episode of right-wing lies, propagandists posing as “journalists,” and craven political cowardice and gullibility, that it’s hard to know who to be most enraged at.
Andrew Breitbart, a particularly vile propagandist of the American right who presented a severely edited videotape of a speech by the Agriculture Department official to falsely label her an anti-white racist? Fox News, several of whose miserable excuses for journalists relentlessly plugged the entirely false story before and after Sherrod was fired? Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who had a minion call Sherrod on a cell phone and insist that she pull over to the side of the road and text in her resignation before any of the relevant background facts about the “scandal” emerged? The White House, which, apparently frightened of appearing in any way linked to black racism, stood by the forced resignation even when it became clear that Sherrod’s speech was nothing like what Breitbart suggested? Even the NAACP acted poorly in this sorry episode, saying it was "appalled" by Sherrod’s words and later "concurring" with her firing. (To its credit, the civil rights group quickly recognized its error, retracting its comments yesterday and saying it had been “snookered” by Breitbart and Fox’s falsehoods.)
Here’s the story in brief, for those few people who still don’t know about it. On Monday, Breitbart — the same loathsome character who publicly called Ted Kennedy a “pile of human excrement” a few hours after the senator’s death — aired a video of Sherrod speaking to an NAACP banquet in Georgia last March. In his edited version, Sherrod is shown talking about initially not wanting to help a white man who was facing the loss of his farm because of her anger toward white racists. But the tape presented by Breitbart, who was furious about the NAACP’s recent criticism of racism within the ranks of the Tea Parties, left out the crucial conclusion of what was really Sherrod’s tale of redemption — that in the course of the 1986 case she was discussing, she came to realize that “the struggle is really about poor people,” and that her anti-white feelings were wrong. She said the case changed her entire outlook. (And in fact the farmer and his wife were all over the media yesterday, saying that Sherrod had saved their farm, was a fine and caring woman, and should get her job back.)
FoxNews.com and Fox Nation, both parts of Fox News, immediately picked up Breitbart’s fairy tale and began plugging it, as did Fox News' Bill O'Reilly (who demanded Sherrod's resignation in taped comments run after she quit) and a number of other right-wing media outlets. (Many of these reports, following Breitbart, claimed that Sherrod’s actions in the 1986 case had occurred while she was an Agriculture employee — a complete falsehood.) That prompted Vilsack to have her thrown out of her job as the department’s director of rural development in Georgia (to the applause of an array of Fox hosts and guests) — an act that Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen rightly described today as pure political “cowardice.” Vilsack didn’t bother to hear Sherrod’s side of the story first, and he didn’t watch the full videotape. Incredibly, even as the true story began to emerge, Vilsack said he was sticking by Sherrod’s ouster, because, “rightly or wrongly,” perceptions about her comments could make her job more difficult. Then, early this morning, the Associated Press quoted an unnamed White House official saying President Obama had been briefed on the situation but was supporting Vilsack’s decision.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of wilting of White House officials under pressure from the political right. They fired Van Jones, a White House environmental advisor, after Fox’s Glenn Beck made false claims that he was a “black nationalist” and former “radical communist” who was using green jobs as a form of “stealth reparations.” They repudiated an accurate 2009 Department of Homeland Security report that was leaked and then attacked by right wingers for supposedly defaming conservatives — a charge that was patently false.
Let’s take a closer look at a couple of the other actors in this nasty little episode.
Andrew Breitbart is a former editor for the right-wing Drudge Report (which also participated in the plugging of Breitbart's video) and a columnist for the arch-conservative Washington Times who sometimes substitutes for Michael Savage, a radio talk show host who regularly makes racist remarks on the air (and who, I should say in the interest of full disclosure, has attacked me personally many times). It was one of Breitbart’s websites that aired videos made by right-wing activists of ACORN employees giving advice concerning prostitution, and that later suggested that ACORN was destroying incriminating documents. (California Attorney General Jerry Brown investigated, concluding there was no criminal activity depicted on the “severely edited” tapes Breitbart aired.) Breitbart also has claimed that Congressmen John Lewis and Andre Carson “made up” a story about being repeatedly called “niggers” during a walk through a Tea Party rally. His evidence? There was no videotape of the insults.
Breitbart recently blogged about the “insufferable assholes” he claims populate the mainstream media. Ironically enough, given the revolting role he played in the defaming of Shirley Sherrod, John Lewis and others, he described “the racket that is modern journalism,” saying that journalists “lie when they claim to be objective.” Elsewhere, in his first column about Sherrod, he crowed that “the new media will not be silenced.”
Which brings us to Fox News, that infamous purveyor of falsehoods, wildly skewed reporting and propaganda posing as real facts (some of Fox's "journalists" even later suggested that Fox had never plugged the Sherrod tape story). As my colleague Alexander Zaitchik wrote on this blog Monday, the network has “a long history of crude and transparent race-baiting.” And Zaitchik wasn’t even talking about the Sherrod spectacle — he was writing about Fox’s current obsession with the “scandal” of the Justice Department dismissing part of a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party, a black racist hate group. On MSNBC last night, Rachel Maddow did a serious takedown of Fox’s rantings about Sherrod.
The United States faces many serious problems in the year 2010, from a crashed economy to the largest oil spill in our history. But no American should ignore another serious threat to our integrity as a nation and a culture: the far-right propagandists, their media and political enablers, and the political cowardice that allows complete falsehoods to destroy perfectly innocent human beings.

Summary: The entire Shirley Sherrod affair is so disgusting, such a stomach-churning episode of right-wing lies, propagandists posing as “journalists,” and craven political cowardice and gullibility, that it’s hard to know who to be most enraged at. Andrew Breitbart, a particularly vile propagandist of the American right who presented a severely edited videotape of a speech by the Agriculture Department official to falsely label her an anti-white racist? Fox News, several of whose miserable excuses for…


Hatewatch

Notorious Muslim-basher and pretend expert on Islam Robert Spencer faced a tough crowd earlier this week at Stanford University . Hosted by the Stanford College Republicans, Spencer was unprepared for a peaceful student walkout.


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
El Paso Shooting Suspect May Have Authored Manifesto Containing White Nationalist Talking Points
August 03, 2019
Brett Barrouquere and Hatewatch Staff
The suspect in a shooting that left 20 people dead at an El Paso Walmart may have posted and liked anti-immigrant leaning remarks on what appears to be his Twitter account.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 1/19/2017
January 19, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
Trump praises bikers attending inauguration; More bomb threats hit Jewish centers; Whitefish is giving the green light to Nazi march; and more.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Suspect in Canadian Mosque Shooting Expressed Right-Wing Views Online
January 31, 2017
Hatewatch Staff
A suspect in custody for a
deadly mosque shooting over the weekend
in Quebec City, Canada, left a trail of right-wing extremist rants online and in social networks.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Minuteman organizer: volunteers want to 'shoot the taco meat'
September 20, 2005
Hatewatch Staff


Hatewatch

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


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
White Supremacist Believed Linked  to Violent Crimes in Northwest
March 07, 2017
Bill Morlin
Authorities say a white supremacist arrested last week near Olympia, Washington, may be part of a larger group of racists involved in a “number of violent crimes” in the Pacific Northwest.


Hatewatch

The Trump administration announced that Julie Kirchner, former executive director of the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is the new Ombudsman for the Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Neo-Nazi Boasted of Murder Plan in “Manifesto Video”
May 08, 2017
Bill Morlin
A neo-Nazi who boasted he was “doing my race a favor” by killing an openly gay college instructor has been convicted of first-degree murder by a North Carolina jury.


Hatewatch

Originally a MAGA supporter but now an emerging MAGA star, Marjorie Taylor Greene has deftly leveraged social media and confrontations in public to increase her visibility. Now she’s entering politics as a GOP candidate for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District.


Hatewatch


Hatewatch

As President Trump is pressured to substantively respond to the rise in anti-Semitic incidents since his election, a new analysis reveals that Breitbart News under Trump's chief strategist Stephen Bannon fostered a comment section — a sample of Breitbart’s readership — that increasingly reflected language specific to the white nationalist “alt-right” movement, including anti-Semitic sentiment.


Hatewatch

Washington state Rep. Matt Shea has been vocal about his support for antigovernment and anti-public lands activists in the West, and a new report alleges those activities pose a threat of “political violence” against the U.S. government.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Roundup of anti-LGBT activities 12/13/18
December 13, 2018
Hatewatch Staff
The following is a list of activities and events of anti-LGBT organizations. Organizations listed as anti-LGBT hate groups are designated with an asterisk.


League of the South Slammed by Former Board Member

Ray McBerry, the longtime head of the Georgia chapter of the racist and secessionist League of the South (LOS), turned in his resignation this past Friday after being asked to quit the group’s board. In a long letter where he described loyally serving the league for 15 years, McBerry, sounding hurt, wrote that he had “willingly given thousands of hours” and “thousands of [his] own dollars” to the cause. Then he offered a few stinging criticisms of the group whose praises he once sang.
The spat apparently broke out after McBerry, a two-time failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate , set up his own far right outfit, Tenth Amendment Solutions (TAS), this past year to educate the public, as McBerry had it, on the importance of state’s rights. That mission is remarkably similar to the LOS’s, where state’s rights are a main emphasis, and TAS events regularly featured LOS speakers and distributed speeches by LOS leaders. Also, McBerry runs DixieBroadcasting , which features programs by prominent neo-Confederates , including many who serve in LOS leadership positions.
McBerry called the decision to ask him to quit the board, which he said was made without consulting him, “indicative of the kind of paranoia that will forever prevent the success of the League.” (His letter suggested that he had been booted off gthe board because LOS leaders saw TAS as directly competing with the LOS.) McBerry also accused the LOS’s president, Michael Hill , of being power- and money-hungry — ironic charges, given that the LOS incessantly attacks the so-called “Northern Leviathan ” for exactly the same kind of “materialism,” to use Hill’s word.
“What it comes down to is that Dr. Hill, as the League’s national president, was afraid that a few dollars would go to some other place than to the League’s national office,” is how McBerry put it in his Oct. 1 resignation letter. McBerry also criticized Hill for deciding that “anyone who achieves success and popularity” is a threat and for placing “a higher priority on maintaining the small principality the League has built” than reaching the Southern masses.
“The truth is that I was bringing members to the League; I had not ‘taken’ any members from the League,” McBerry wrote. “I have often wondered why so many former League members, especially those in leadership positions, left the League,” McBerry said in closing. “I now understand why many of them have made that decision and why it appeared that the League had burned bridges with so many quality people over the last few years.”
E-mails requesting comment from Hill on McBerry were not answered.
During his two attempts to secure the GOP’s Georgia gubernatorial nomination, McBerry certainly did toe the LOS’ line, refusing to salute the American flag while tirelessly defending state’s rights. He was also attacked in the press for his position with the LOS, which has been listed as a neo-Confederate hate group for the past decade by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Among its many sins, the LOS thinks the South should be ruled by “Anglo-Celts” (meaning white people), opposes racial intermarriage, and defends slavery as “God-ordained.”
McBerry has had other disappointments this year. During the GOP primary, it was reported by The New York Times that he had his teaching certificate suspended in 2004 after findings by the Georgia Professional Standards Commission that he had conducted an inappropriate relationship with a student and deliberately misrepresented his actions to school investigators. He later resigned his teaching position. It was also reported that he had an affair with a former campaign manager. Since his primary loss, McBerry has concentrated his efforts on TAS and DixieBroadcasting, which currently advertises a show by longtime LOS activist Walter “Donnie” Kennedy.
It’s been a bad few weeks for the neo-Confederates. Besides this rift, in early September, the LOS’s longtime board member Jack Kershaw died at age 96. Kershaw was a hardcore segregationist who represented James Earl Ray following his conviction for the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Kershaw served from the beginning on the LOS’s board and the group had a foundation named after his wife, Mary Noel. Never shy about his racism, in 1998 Kershaw said: “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?”
And just this past week, Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell put an end to that state’s tradition of calling April “Confederate History Month.” “One hundred and fifty years is long enough for Virginia to fight the Civil War,” the governor told an academic conference, where he apologized again for omitting any mention of slavery from his proclamation earlier this year of Confederate History Month. McDonnell had quickly reissued the proclamation last April with a new reference to the “abomination” of slavery.
The text of McDonnell’s original resolution was largely written by another neo-Confederate group, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), which has been embroiled for years in a vicious internal conflict for control between members demanding the group explicitly denounce racism and expel racists and those who disagree. LOS members have been prominent in those battles.
The SCV is clearly not happy with the governor. Bragdon Bowling, a former leader of the SCV’s Virginia chapter and long its spokesman, accused the governor of selling out the state’s confederate descendants. “I think it’s cowardly of him,” Bowling told The Washington Post . “He didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to his political enemies or the media.”

Summary: Ray McBerry, the longtime head of the Georgia chapter of the racist and secessionist League of the South (LOS), turned in his resignation this past Friday after being asked to quit the group’s board. In a long letter where he described loyally serving the league for 15 years, McBerry, sounding hurt, wrote that he had “willingly given thousands of hours” and “thousands of [his] own dollars” to the cause. Then he offered a few stinging criticisms of the group whose praises he once sang. The spat…


Antigovernment Dad, Son Blame Each Other in Bank-Bombing Trial

The trial of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge begins its sixth day of testimony in a Salem, Ore., courtroom today, where the father and son face nearly 20 counts ranging from aggravated murder to assault stemming from a December 2008 bank bombing that killed two police officers and seriously injured two others.
According to prosecutors, at least one of the two men – who have turned on each other as the trial has unfolded – began planning the bombing shortly after the election of Barack Obama, fearing the new president would restrict their gun rights upon taking office.
On the opening day of the trial last week, Marion County deputy district attorney Katie Suver told the jury that the election served as a “catalyst” for the bombing. She stated further that the father, Bruce, 59, attempted to start his own militia following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, fearing a similar crackdown on guns.
It remains unclear exactly why the two men thought planting a bomb outside and robbing a bank in suburban Oregon would strike a blow against federal power. What is known is that on Dec. 12, 2008, an employee at a Wells Fargo Bank in Woodburn received a call from a man instructing her and her fellow employees to leave the building. When her manager told her to hang up, she did so and notified the police, who arrived and found a suspicious green metal box outside an adjacent bank.
William Hakim, a bomb technician with the Oregon State Police, thought the box was a hoax and brought it into the other bank for dismantling. When it went off, Hakim was killed along with Woodburn Police Capt. Thomas Tennant. Woodburn Police Chief Scott Russell survived but lost his right leg in the blast; a bank employee was also wounded. Authorities believe a passing trucker talking on a CB radio inadvertently triggered the remote-controlled device.
The father and son have acquired separate legal counsel and are at odds over who bears responsibility for the failed plot. Steven Krasik, the younger Turnidge’s attorney, stated last week that his client is innocent and had no idea that his father was actually going to follow through on one of his schemes. The father’s lawyer, meanwhile, has called 34-year-old Joshua Turnidge a liar, and pointed out that some of the elements in the failed plot, such as two throwaway cell phones, are linked to the son.
Whatever the truth, the elder Turnidge has never been discreet about his politics. “When the FBI went to Bruce Turnidge’s house the first time, he struck up a conversation with one of the agents ranging from his support of the Second Amendment to the origin of a racist slur against African Americans,” prosecutor Suver told the court, according to the Oregonian. “Turnidge then told the agent, ‘Now we have one in the White House.’”
The trial is expected to last into December. If either defendant is convicted, prosecutors are expected to push for the death penalty.

Summary: The trial of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge begins its sixth day of testimony in a Salem, Ore., courtroom today, where the father and son face nearly 20 counts ranging from aggravated murder to assault stemming from a December 2008 bank bombing that killed two police officers and seriously injured two others. According to prosecutors, at least one of the two men – who have turned on each other as the trial has unfolded – began planning the bombing shortly after the election of Barack Obama, fearing…


Hatewatch

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


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.


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
Ex-Mayor Beth Van Duyne, Known for Anti-Sharia Crusade, Running for Congress
September 03, 2019
Hatewatch Staff
Beth Van Duyne, a former Texas mayor who stoked hysteria around an Islamic tribunal and has associated with anti-Muslim hate groups, is running for U.S. Congress.


Hatewatch

Jon Feere, a longtime staffer with the nativist think tank Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), is set to join the Department of Homeland Security in an “immigration-related position,” according to The Washington Post.


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.


On Third Try, Prosecutors Convict Neo-Nazi Blogger of Threats

After two attempts to convict Hal Turner of threatening federal judges ended in mistrials, the government last Friday finally made it stick — despite the fact that the neo-Nazi blogger had served as an FBI informant for years. A sentencing date was not set, but Turner faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Turner, who worked as an FBI informant between 2003 and 2007, consistently insisted that his June 2009 Internet threats were merely political hyperbole of the sort that he claimed his FBI handlers had once encouraged. And in two earlier trials, in December 2009 and last March, jurors failed to convict him. They were apparently confused by testimony that left it unclear if Turner was acting at the behest of authorities and whether or how real his threats were.
But on Friday, jurors took only two hours to decide that Turner was guilty of making serious threats against three federal appeals court judges who upheld a ban on handguns in Chicago. Unlike in the earlier trials, Turner’s direct FBI supervisor, Steven Haug, testified, denying that he had told Turner to “ratchet up his rhetoric” to help the FBI find the killer of a federal judge’s family in another case. Haug said Turner was a “control” problem for the FBI, but also testified that he was an important asset because of his star status in the white supremacist world.
When Turner’s relationship with the FBI was first disclosed in January 2008, the agency was sharply criticized for running an informant who seemed to be creating far more danger to the public than he was averting. Those comments were published on this blog, which also was the first to confirm Turner’s informant status .
In the postings that drew the federal charges, Turner, who was already widely known for his vitriolic Internet postings and threats, said of the three judges, “If they are allowed to get away with this by surviving, other judges will act the same way.” He also wrote: “Let me be the first to say this plainly: These judges must die. Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty.” The next day, Turner updated the post to include the names, work addresses, phone numbers, and photographs of the three judges. He also added a photograph of their courthouse that was modified to show the locations of “anti-truck bomb barriers.”
Turner, who showed little reaction to the verdict, was immediately returned to custody. His wife, Kathy Diamond, told reporters, “There goes the First Amendment for everybody.” His 16-year-old son said, “I love you, Dad.”

Summary: After two attempts to convict Hal Turner of threatening federal judges ended in mistrials, the government last Friday finally made it stick — despite the fact that the neo-Nazi blogger had served as an FBI informant for years. A sentencing date was not set, but Turner faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. Turner, who worked as an FBI informant between 2003 and 2007, consistently insisted that his June 2009 Internet threats were merely political hyperbole of the sort that he…


Hatewatch

The website for the Daily Stormer, the white supremacist, neo-Nazi and antisemitic racist group, has lost access to a critical piece of web infrastructure that allows the general public to access its hate propaganda easily.


Hatewatch

A judge has ruled that a civil rights-era law forbidding the removal of “war memorials” applies to Confederate statues that became flashpoints during a deadly Virginia gathering of white nationalists and neo-Nazis.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Greyhound reveals 'Transportation of Illegal Aliens' policy
September 27, 2005
Hatewatch Staff


Hatewatch

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


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Is Chief of Staff John Kelly Trying to Stop Trump from Reading Infowars?
August 25, 2017
Bill Morlin
The White House chief of staff—retired Marine Gen. John Kelly—may have just given the most difficult directive of his career.


Hatewatch


The Sick Farce of Glenn Beck’s ‘Restoring Honor’ Rally

America, the first step in your spiritual and political redemption is finally at hand.
Or so Glenn Beck would have us believe. After an eight-month build-up that began at an Orlando retirement community last November, Beck is now making the final preparations for his “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall, scheduled to begin early on Saturday morning with a salute and a prayer in front of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of the Fox News host’s loyal fans.
On a stage at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, Beck will headline a bevy of conservative guest speakers familiar to his radio and television audiences. Most notable among them will be Sarah Palin, whose political career received early and enthusiastic support from Beck. Despite the event’s sponsorship by the NRA, the host maintains the rally will be a “non-political” event, meant to honor American troops overseas and grounded in the nonpartisan themes of “faith, hope, and charity.”
Since Beck first announced the event, much critical attention has been paid to the date. This Saturday is the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” a landmark event in the history of the civil rights movement that is also enshrined in the national mythology as one of the finest expressions of American ideals. Beck claims that the scheduling is mere coincidence. But he has eagerly claimed King’s legacy, and the meaning of Aug. 28, as his own. On the May 24 edition of his radio program, he described himself and his conservative-activist legions as “the inheritors and the protectors of the civil rights movement”; liberals, he claimed, “are perverting it.” He said he “wouldn’t be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us go to jail — just like Martin Luther King did — on trumped-up charges. Tough times are coming.” Two days later, he reiterated his intent to “reclaim the civil rights movement,” since “we were the people that did it in the first place.” More recently, he has described the alleged scheduling coincidence as “divine providence”—as God’s way of telling Beck he walks in King’s footsteps.
If this is true, and a supreme being did in fact decide that Beck should hold his self-branded Tea Party rally in the shadow of Martin Luther King, then we should take this as proof that God has a very dark sense of humor.
Far from being a civil rights icon, Glenn Beck has built his empire and fame in part by being a master divider along racial lines. Especially since the inauguration of Barack Obama on the eve of his Fox News debut, Beck has emerged as the media’s boldest manipulator of white racial anxieties, fears and prejudice. His willingness “to go there” has even earned him grudging respect from hardcore white nationalists who usually have little patience for major media.
Most people are aware by now that more than 100 sponsors have fled Beck’s program since his June 2009 claim that President Obama was a racist “with a deep-seated hatred of white people.” But this is only the best known event in a 30-year career in broadcasting that has been partly defined by racist humor, racially charged venom, and advocacy for far-right foes of the civil rights movement.
Throughout his career in Top 40 radio, Beck was known for his imitations of “black guy” characters and racist tropes. According to Beck’s former colleagues in the late 90s, this included mocking unarmed blacks shot and killed by white police officers. Such was the case of Malik Jones, the victim of a controversial killing that took place in 1997.
“After the shooting, Beck sometimes did a racist shtick,” remembers Paul Bass, a former radio host and Beck colleague at a Clear Channel station cluster in New Haven. “Glenn did routines about Jones’ grandmother being on crack. Generally he made fun of his family and the loss of life—as joke routines.”
Beck’s racially tinged tirades did not disappear after he switched formats in 1999. During his first talk radio stint in Tampa, he often referred to the Rev. Jesse Jackson as “the stinking king of the race lords.” Most recently, Beck has worked to resuscitate the names of famously anti-civil rights figures from the history of his adopted Mormon faith. He has respectfully played tapes of Ezra Taft Benson, who thought Martin Luther King was a communist agent out to destroy the Mormon Church (and who once wrote the foreward to a book of race hate whose cover illustration featured the severed, bloody head of an African American). Beck has also implored his viewers to read the “divinely inspired” books of W. Cleon Skousen, another John Birch Society fantasist who believed that the civil rights movement was part of a worldwide Communist (and, later, “New World Order”) conspiracy.
The above gives some sense, but barely scratches the surface of, Beck’s long and disgraceful record on race. The Fox News host has also played a key role in the conservative attempts to whip up white opposition to Barack Obama by painting the president’s health and environmental agendas as Trojan horses for “stealth reparations” for black Americans. For much of the summer of 2009, Beck ranted about the alleged “black nationalism” of Van Jones, a White House environmental official who resigned last September after what Jones described as conservatives’ “vicious smear campaign” against him. Beck also helped lead the racially charged cavalry charges against ACORN and Eric Holder’s Justice Department (for its handling of the New Black Panther Party “scandal” .)
So, no, Glenn Beck is not the inheritor of Dr. King’s mantle. Had the two men been contemporaries, it is a very safe best that Beck would have excoriated King for being a “progressive cockroach”—an enemy of the Constitution who sought to destroy America by spreading the “virus” of social justice. We know he would have done this because it’s the same playbook he uses every day on radio and television. That’s just who Glenn Beck is and always has been. It’s a fact that all the deranged posturing in the world can’t hide, regardless of the date printed on his coveted event permit.

Summary: America, the first step in your spiritual and political redemption is finally at hand. Or so Glenn Beck would have us believe. After an eight-month build-up that began at an Orlando retirement community last November, Beck is now making the final preparations for his “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall, scheduled to begin early on Saturday morning with a salute and a prayer in front of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of the Fox News host’s loyal fans. On a stage at…


Hatewatch

After just over 20 years as the premier online gathering place for white Supremacists, Stormfront.org lost its crown to the unruly, meme-fueled neo-Nazi propaganda shop, the Daily Stormer, in July of 2016.


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
Hatewatch Headlines 8/21/2018
August 21, 2018
Hatewatch Staff
Protesters tear down ‘Silent Sam’ on UNC campus; ADF’s record of hate speaks for itself; ‘Fox & Friends’ sanitizes antigovernment extremists; and more.


Suicides and Gay-bashings: More Violence for LGBT People

The violence never seems to end. This past month has been downright horrifying, with at least five teenagers nationwide committing suicide as a result of anti-gay bullying. There were also two attacks against gay victims in New York City communities normally considered LGBT-friendly.
A patron was gay-bashed in the restroom of Manhattan’s legendary Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village – a site considered the very birthplace of the gay-rights movement – on October 3. Police say Matthew Francis, 21, and Christopher Orlando, 17, both of Staten Island, accosted Ben Carver, 34, in the restroom of the Stonewall about 2:30 that morning. According to Carver's account – which he posted on his blog – Francis asked him if he was gay. Thinking Francis was joking, Carver responded, "Where are you, buddy?" Francis answered by saying "In a gay bar. Don't pee next to me, faggot." The men then demanded money, but Carver refused. Francis subsequently punched Carver in the face and Orlando tackled him and pinned his arms, Carver said. Carver, however, fought back, freeing an arm and striking one attacker several times with his elbow. “It was a pretty intense fight,” Carver told the New York Post.
Francis and Orlando fled, but were pursued by bar employees and patrons. The suspects were quickly caught by police and arrested.
Earlier the same weekend, a group of gay men were confronted and assaulted in the nearby Chelsea neighborhood. Six men allegedly confronted the group using anti-gay epithets, and one – later identified as Andrew Jackson, 20 – allegedly threw a trashcan into one victim's head. Jackson was arrested; the five suspects remain at large.
These incidents highlight a distressing, on-going problem of violence directed against the LGBT community. To address the issue, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance program has just released a new film, Bullied: A Student, a School and a Case that Made History , that highlights the destructive power and the tragic consequences of anti-gay bullying.
The irony of the Greenwich Village attack was not lost on the media and the blogosphere. The Stonewall Inn became the flashpoint for the modern gay rights movement on June 28, 1969, when a police raid triggered an uprising in an era when gay men and women generally stayed deeply closeted. That night, Stonewall patrons fought with officers and several days of demonstrations followed, creating the impetus for a new movement.
Last weekend’s attacks came at the end of period during which at least five teenagers nationwide committed suicide after being bullied or taunted as being homosexual. Two youths, 13-year-old Seth Walsh of Tehachapi, Calif., and 15-year-old Billy Lucas of Greensburg, Ind., hanged themselves after cruel and relentless anti-gay harassment. Thirteen-year-old Asher Brown of Houston fatally shot himself after similar treatment. Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi , 18, leaped off the George Washington Bridge to his death after his roommate allegedly posted video on the Internet of him having sex with another man. And in Providence, R.I., openly gay Johnson and Wales University student Raymond Walsh , 19, hanged himself in his dormitory room, although all the circumstances of his death are not yet known. All the deaths happened during the last three weeks of September.
The suicides and the reported New York City attacks have left anger, sadness, and frustration in their wake among LGBT people and their friends, relatives and supporters, and intensified a national dialogue on bullying in schools and beyond and the climate that allows and encourages acts of violence against LGBT people.
Stonewall Inn co-owner Stacy Lentz called the attack “an isolated incident” and “not something that has happened here before.” New York City District 3 Council Member Christine Quinn, who lives in Chelsea and is gay, stated that the incidents over the weekend are "jarring," but that they're "not something that typically happens in Chelsea and Greenwich Village in one weekend."
Still, said Sharon Stapel, executive director of the New York City-based Anti-Violence Project, the danger of homophobia-driven tragedies is an ongoing reality. "I get asked a lot about why there is a sudden spike in violence and my answer is: there is not,” Stapel said in an October 6 editorial . “Instead there has been a sudden spike in attention about this violence. Every day LGBT people endure bullying from our classmates, our families, our employers, our neighbors and strangers. Every day we face judgment because of who we are.”
“[O]ur society treats being gay or transgender as bad, or weird, or … sick, and collectively denounces gay and transgender people,” Stapel said. When that message is the primary message heard in schools, churches, at home and at work, “the conclusion has to be that we, as LGBT people, do not have a place in this society or in this world.”
The threat of violence is ever-present to many LGBT people, even in a place like the Stonewall Inn. “You always expect it,” said Eric Wilson, who attended an October 5 rally at the landmark establishment. “Whenever there's some sort of gain in the gay rights movement, there is always some retribution.” Wilson expressed his thoughts in a New York Daily News video posted on the Internet .
Stonewall beating victim Carver wrote in his blog that when attacked, one should fight back and eliminate the threat, but only to the extent one needs to escape from harm. That’s because, Carver says, “We must be better than these bullies, and we must not give away our power to them by entertaining thoughts of fear and violence. While righteous anger is acceptable, we cannot let them take our peace.”
Carver says he forgave the men immediately and says he'll respect whatever decision the legal system makes. He also extended condolences to the families of Francis and Orlando, saying he's sure it's a difficult time for their mothers.

Summary: The violence never seems to end. This past month has been downright horrifying, with at least five teenagers nationwide committing suicide as a result of anti-gay bullying. There were also two attacks against gay victims in New York City communities normally considered LGBT-friendly. A patron was gay-bashed in the restroom of Manhattan’s legendary Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village – a site considered the very birthplace of the gay-rights movement – on October 3. Police say Matthew Francis,…


Hatewatch

Hatewatch
White Nationalist Threats Against Transgender People Are Escalating
June 26, 2019
Cassie Miller
Transphobic rhetoric, some of it violent, appears to be increasing among white nationalists and neo-Nazis as the fight for transgender rights gains visibility and public support.


Hatewatch

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


Hatewatch

A Kansas man is in jail on murder and attempted murder charges after allegedly shouting “get out of my country” and racial slurs before firing a handgun Wednesday evening in a crowded sports bar in suburb of Kansas City.


Hatewatch

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