You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1784)

PLAYS: (4562)

James Verini at the Daily Beast notices something we've been tracking here at C&L too: Neo-Nazis and far-right extremists are not only recruiting more openly, they're being much more public in their full-on expressions of racism, nativism, and xenophobia. Unlike David Duke, these characters aren't even trying to hide it:

A year after President Obama's election, hate groups are feeling bolder than they have in over a decade, and their usually insular anger is beginning to spill into the public realm. This weekend, the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi organization, held rallies in Arizona and Minnesota. Those demonstrations came on the heels of similar actions in Southern California, where epithet-spewing white supremacists were forced to disband by rock-throwing counter-protesters. The upsurge in visibility is more than anecdotal—law-enforcement officials are monitoring levels of agitation among extremist groups that they say are the highest since Timothy McVeigh’s deadly attack in Oklahoma City nearly 15 years ago.

The outcries of right-wing tea-partiers, death panellers, birthers, and the like are accompanied by increased activity all along the paranoid fringe.

“It’s sort of a beehive now,” says James Cavanaugh, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Cavanaugh was one of the agents at the standoff at David Koresh’s Waco, Texas, compound in 1993 (which McVeigh timed his terrorist act to commemorate, two years later, on April 19, 1995). Last October in Tennessee, Cavanaugh aided in the arrest of two white supremacists charged with plotting to assassinate Obama, and in 2007 he helped bring down members of the Alabama Free Militia, who were found with hundreds of hand- and rifle grenades and other explosives. The arrests had an unsettling familiarity. “We haven’t had that kind of activity since the 1990s,” Cavanaugh says.

“We believe there is a real resurgence,” adds Lieutenant David Hall, director of the Missouri Information Analysis Center, which tracks antigovernment extremist groups around the Midwest. “The atmosphere is ripe.”

That was obvious to anyone who was in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, this past weekend:

The Arizona Republic reports that, as is so often the case, the anti-Nazis outnumbered the actual Nazis by about 10-to-1:

Members of the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi group based out of Detroit, were met with a greater number of protesters.

Phoenix police kept the groups apart, as members from both sides shouted insults at each other.

Jeff Schoep, a NSM leader, said his group was standing in defense of America.

J.T Ready of Mesa also spoke at the America First Rally. He said the group was defending his country against invaders.

After about an hour, the neo-Nazis left the capitol to march down Jefferson Avenue before getting into their cars at 12th Avenue.

Andy Hernandez of Phoenix said he was surprised at the different types of people who showed up to protest the neo-Nazis.

"There's all kinds of people, from different races and colors," Hernandez said. "We represent America. We didn't shut them down, but we gave them a counter protest. We just oppose what Nazi represents."

Ironically, that was just what Ready himself whined to a reporter for Phoenix's Fox station in the video above:

Reporter: Do you consider yourself a National Socialist?

Ready: National Socialist? I am.

Reporter: Weren't Nazis considered National Socialists?

Ready: Well, there's a term that starts with an 'N' for calling black people too, uh, so I think that the 'N' term for National Socialists, calling them Nazis, is the same thing.

*Sniff* Gosh, we all should bow our heads in shame for having referenced National Socialists derogatorily. Lord knows they don't deserve it.

Anyway, it's true that the German National Socialists never called themselves "Nazis" because it was a indeed thought to be a derogatory term. On the other hand, American Nazis like George Lincoln Rockwell have always embraced the word. Why should anyone stop calling them what they plainly are?

[H/t Scarce.]

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1525)

PLAYS: (1936)

The latest campaign by Fox to smear another Obama appointee, it seems, is the Washington Times-based attack on Judge Edward Chen, who it seems is too liberal for their tastes. Or, as with Judge Sonia Sotomayor, not white enough.

Either way, they're trying to paint him as a radical for saying things like this:

In a speech on Sept. 22, 2001, he said that among his first responses to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America was a "sickening feeling in my stomach about what might happen to race relations and religious tolerance on our own soil. ... One has to wonder whether the seemingly irresistible forces of racism, nativism and scapegoating which has [sic] recurred so often in our history can be effectively restrained."

Bill O'Reilly, of course, was all over this like stink on smegma. He hosted Monica Crowley and Alan Colmes to chew it over.

Crowley practically shrieked at Chen's concerns, and O'Reilly was appalled. Colmes, as he has become adept at doing, was the sole voice of reason:

O'Reilly: It sounds radical left, does it not? It sounds Phil Donahue.

Crowley: And that speech was delivered 11 days after Sept. 11, when this country was still so raw with the deaths of 3,000 dead Americans in the street, and Chen is worried about nativism -- he was essentially there accusing the United States of being a country of bigots and racists.

O'Reilly: But the thing that bothered me most about it, Colmes, is that didn't happen.

Colmes: Well, I have to disagree. We have seen nativism, we have seen racism. Just the other day, we saw the Broward County Republican Club, having their meeting at a gun club where they put up a likeness of Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, and a stereotypical --

O'Reilly: Wait wait wait wait wait wait. [Crosstalk] Are you going to sit there and tell me that eight years after 9/11, there has been rampant nativism, racism and scapegoating in this country?

Colmes: I didn't say rampant, but there's been several --

O'Reilly: That's what he said.

Colmes: There's been an element of that.

Actually, Bill, Chen never said nativism and racism was "rampant" -- he wondered whether these forces could be constrained in the then-current environment.

And let's be clear: Among the few things that the Bush administration did right in the wake of 9/11 was that, eventually, it did effectively constrain the forces of racism and reaction when it came to treatment of Arab Americans and Muslims.

But to claim that we haven't seen rampant nativism and racism since 9/11 is a joke -- we have, and everyone knows it. However, instead of the obvious targets after 9/11, it has been directed instead largely toward Latino immigrants, who the jingoists have in fact often connected to their post-9/11 fears.

After all, one of the favorite arguments of the Minuteman/GlennBeckistan crowd is that we need to "secure our borders" because that's what will keep us safe from terrorists like those who hit us on 9/11. (Note to nativist nimrods: The 9/11 terrorists came through airports with fake papers, like most skilled terrorists do. There has never been a record of a single Islamic terrorist entering the States

And so, eight years after 9/11, we do in fact have if not rampant at least a significant level of nativism and racism manifesting itself in America. We've provided some examples in the video above: Rabid Joe Arpaio fans who think we ought to shoot any man, woman or child who crosses the border. Neo-Nazi supporters of Arpaio turning out to harass Latino marchers. A violent counter-protest by white nationalists at a pro-immigrant March in Connecticut. And those are just in the past several months alone.

Moreover, if you look at the conditions that immediately followed the events of 9/11 -- including especially the 11 days leading up to Chen's speech -- his commentary was fully justified. Or have all those Fox folks somehow managed to scrub from their memories the horrendous outbreak of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the days immediately after 9/11?

Four days after hijacked planes tore into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, shopkeepers were shot to death in California, Texas and Arizona as an anti-Muslim backlash broke out across the country.

"It's an unbelievable situation," Laila Al-Qatami, a spokeswoman for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) told the Chicago Tribune.

"The incidents have ranged from hate mail to verbal assaults to crimes that have resulted in deaths. The number of calls we're getting is unprecedented."

By Oct. 11, one month after the terrorist attacks, the ADC had collected more than 700 reports of hate crimes. The Council on American-Islamic Relations had 785 reports.

At hate-crime hotlines set up by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the volume of calls per hour peaked at 70. In Los Angeles alone, the police and sheriff's departments reported 167 hate crimes in the first four weeks of the backlash.

The targets included a large number of Sikhs mistaken for Arabs. Five years later, it was still a big problem. In more recent years, anti-Muslim bias crimes have declined somewhat as anti-Latino crimes have skyrocketed.

And while the Bush administration may have done a good job of responding to the hate-crime outbreak and tamping down anti-Arab xenophobia, they did do without much support from the larger conservative community.

Recall, after all, that there was a chorus of right-wing voices calling for the immediate use of racial profiling as a national-security measure. Many of them were rabid and vicious, and they remain with us today. Michelle Malkin -- long a Fox favorite -- even wrote and published a book justifying the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as a way of defending the very concept of racial profiling.

Finally, the notion that Judge Chen evincing this concern in the days immediately following 9/11 is somehow a "far left" and "America hating" and "radical" thing actually tells us a lot more about the people arguing this -- people like O'Reilly and Crowley -- than anything else.

Because 9/11 immediately rang bells of alarm throughout the Asian American community -- Japanese Americans having been the primary targets of wartime hysteria last time around ... hysteria that eventually led to their incarcerated in miserable concentration camps in the interior U.S. for the war's duration.

I describe this in the Epilogue of my book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community:

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1950)

PLAYS: (6783)

Logan already gathered most of the relevant early details about the remarkable case of Shawna Forde, arrested yesterday for ordering the murder of a 9-year-old girl and her father in Arizona.

My old friend Scott North, who has been around the block with reporting on the activities of the far right in Snohomish County -- where Forde is from -- reports this morning that Forde may have been involved in another violent home invasion in California already:

On Saturday, Arizona detectives were pursuing tips that members of Forde's group may have staged a home invasion robbery in Shasta Lake, Calif., on Monday.

The victims, friends of Forde's mother, reported being robbed at gunpoint of nearly $12,000 by two men who showed up at the door and presented badges claiming they were U.S. Marshals.

Truck driver Peter Myers, 48, said he recognized one of men who robbed him after he saw news reports about Forde's arrest and photographs of her co-defendants.

He said the man who directed the robbery in his home was Jason Eugene Bush, 34. The ex-convict from Eastern Washington is a Forde associate now accused of being the gunman in the Arivaca killings.

"That is the guy. He pointed a gun right at us," Myers said.

***

Arizona officials have said Bush is recovering from a gunshot wound received during the home invasion there. Myers said that description fits the tall man who bound him with zip ties and then took cash from the family's lock box.

"He was moving real slow," Meyers said.

Forde's mother, Rena Caudle, said her daughter recently visited the area. After Friday's arrest, Caudle said she made certain that Arizona officials knew about the suspected link to the California robbery.

This may just be the tip of the iceberg with this gang. Already Jim Gilchrist, the Minuteman leader with whom Forde has had a long association, is making the signs of the cross in her general direction and declaring he had nothing to do with her:

Jim Gilchrist, president of the California-based Minuteman Project and a longtime Forde ally, made it clear Saturday that his earlier support of Forde should in no way be construed as approving the actions now attributed to her.

"Am I going to come to her support at this time? Of course not. How can I?" Gilchrist said.

Forde ran her own organization, Gilchrist said.

"Unfortunately, some people in this Minutemen movement have used this movement to carry out sinister agendas," he said.

We'll see. Investigators may not be done making arrests yet.

Indeed, it's starting to look as though Forde may have been organizing basically a low-rent version of The Order: an ideological army turned into criminal moneymaking operation. Only this time, anti-immigrant nativism instead of white supremacy is the ideological driver. And when The Order crumbled in flames, it exposed all kinds of criminal dealings on the far right.

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (2914)

PLAYS: (7332)

Last week we reported on Sheriff Joe's recent photo op with a clutch of neo-Nazis who came out to counter-protest at a march held to raise a stink about Arpaio's racial-profiling ways.

Now Stephen Lemon, the Phoenix New Times reporter who dug much of this up, follows up with an amazing in-depth report on Arpaio and his associations with local white supremacists -- particularly an outfit called United for a Sovereign America.

USA is run by a fellow named J.T. Ready, whom you can see here, in the business suit:

You can read more about Ready here.

Lemon's story has a wealth of detail, but the most disturbing aspect is the extent to which he uncovers an actual operational relationship between Arpaio's office and these white supremacists:

Yet the sheriff's involvement with extreme hate groups is not incidental. The relationship has been prolonged and intentional, arguably helping him get re-elected last year in a county where much of the electorate is hostile toward Mexican immigrants.

Since 2007, Arpaio has appeared at nativist events, accepted awards from groups such as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, welcomed U.S.A. leader Rusty Childress into his immigration sweep headquarters, spoken at nativist meetings frequented by neo-Nazis, and used petitions circulated by extremists to justify his immigration dragnets.

... This May 2 dalliance with Coletto and J.T. Ready wasn't the first time Arpaio has associated with the neo-Nazis. In March 2008, the sheriff spoke before a United for a Sovereign America meeting at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Sunnyslope, where U.S.A. affiliate Elton Hall was in attendance. Hall, 75, is a legend in Arizona neo-Nazi circles, venerated by racist skinheads for his work as an organizer for George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party in the 1960s.

...

Despite its infamy, U.S.A. has drawn visits from such local, far-right luminaries as State Senator Pearce, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, and Arizona GOP Chairman Randy Pullen. But it's Sheriff Arpaio who arguably has the tightest ties to the organization.

Much of this was already known about Arpaio. But what we didn't know is that his office was coordinating things with a liaison with the USA faction:

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1345)

PLAYS: (752)

The pressure is mounting on President Obama's Justice Department to take on the case of Luis Ramirez, the Latino man whose killers were set free by a rural Pennsylvania jury that likely indulged in classic race-based nullification -- and Exhibit A in the debate over why we need a federal bias-crime law.

Yesterday, Latino advocates held a news conference outside the Capitol to make the push:

Joined at a news conference outside of the Capitol by U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, and Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., members of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Anti-Defamation League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said the federal government should press civil rights charges against Brandon Piekarsky, 17, and Derrick Donchak, 19.

... "This trial sends a message that the Department of Justice and our congressional leaders should be very concerned with," said John Amaya, legislative staff attorney at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. "If you are Latino in America, if you are brutally attacked because of your ethnicity, if you died as a result of that brutal beating that is senseless and unjust, there is no justice for you."

The Justice Department has acknowledged it has an open investigation in the case, but has declined to be specific.

Gladys Limón of MALDEF has a piece up at CNN explaining in more detail why the case needs a closer examination -- at least, the sound legal reasons.

But there are larger reasons. As the Editors at The Sanctuary put it, murders like Ramirez's are an essential building block "in the process of establishing a subhuman class":

The third, overarching, shocking reality thrown into sharp relief by the murder of Luis Ramirez is how easily an environment of violently xenophobic rhetoric and targeted hate has normalized a modern-day lynching to the point that it is absorbed and diluted with barely a blip into the everyday news cycle and into public consciousness. How effortlessly a subhuman category of being is constructed and subsequently reviled. How a verdict has been passed on just how to deal with this synthesized Creature, and how effective that virulent messaging has been evidenced in a death like this one and in a pattern that plays out in various towns, cities, and states across the country. Seemingly unconnected cells of hatred hammer the dominant culture's sentence down upon a targeted group, and the system nods and winks when all is done.

The populace nods and winks along with them, too. This is particularly the case in rural areas, where bias crimes are rarely reported, rarely investigated or prosecuted, and even more rarely ever produce a conviction. As you can see in the above news reports, back in Schuykill County, the denial is layered on thickly:

Continue reading »

DOWNLOAD (1265)

PLAY (713)

Pat Buchanan is promising a "bloodbath." Brad Blakeman is vowing that Republicans will line up against it en masse. But according to the New York Times, President Obama is planning to push for comprehensive immigration reform this year anyway:

Mr. Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Muñoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.

Mr. Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration groups, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.

Some White House officials said that immigration would not take precedence over the health care and energy proposals that Mr. Obama has identified as priorities. But the timetable is consistent with pledges Mr. Obama made to Hispanic groups in last year’s campaign.

He said then that comprehensive immigration legislation, including a plan to make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, would be a priority in his first year in office. Latino voters turned out strongly for Mr. Obama in the election.

The legislation that Obama favors, in fact, sounds pretty familiar:

In broad outlines, officials said, the Obama administration favors legislation that would bring illegal immigrants into the legal system by recognizing that they violated the law, and imposing fines and other penalties to fit the offense. The legislation would seek to prevent future illegal immigration by strengthening border enforcement and cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, while creating a national system for verifying the legal immigration status of new workers.

If this sounds an awful lot like the immigration-reform legislation, promoted by then-President Bush, that died in 2007 because Rush Limbaugh's flying monkeys descended upon it, that's because largely it is. In other words, it's not very different from what a Republican President recently proffered -- but which died at the hands of the rabid nativist wing of his party.

So there was Pitchfork Pat today on MSNBC's Morning Joe:

They will face a bloodbath if he tries try to legalize 12 million illegal aliens when the unemployment rate is rising, and it is huge among working-class Americans.

Republican strategist Brad Blakeman came on MSNBC today to discuss it, and said Republicans will line up against it because: "It's just bad policy." One wonders if he thought so back in 2007.

He went on to suggest that John McCain, who's championed this kind of legislation for many years, may be the lone Republican this time out:

Continue reading »

DOWNLOAD (54)

PLAY (120)

On Friday's O'Reilly Factor, BillO dragged on Edward Schumacher-Matos, who'd had the audacity to recently pen the following words in an op-ed piece:

The fury of Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs and other nativists in response to the news that the prime suspect wanted for the murder of Chandra Levy is an illegal immigrant from El Salvador could easily be dismissed as racism.

O'Reilly indeed tried to blame the Levy murder on illegal immigration (perhaps as a way to deflect attention from the fact that BillO's longtime favorite suspect, Gary Condit, was now clearly innocent).

Having the nativist quality of this kind of "reportage" quite accurately pointed out nonetheless infuriated O'Reilly, who began arguing with Schumacher-Matos that all he's ever argued for is a system in which illegal immigrants busted for crimes in the USA be deported.

But as Schumacher-Matos pointed out in his Miami Herald column this week, O'Reilly's agitation has gone well beyond such limited measures. Indeed, it's a major component of how he slags the "liberal media":

In the Levy case, television-editorialist Bill O'Reilly and other immigration restrictionists were harshly critical of the AP story, accusing it and The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and network news shows of ''blatant press dishonesty'' for omitting that status from their stories. He accused them of pursuing an agenda to give amnesty to the country's 12 million illegal immigrants, who, he added, are responsible for ``millions of serious crimes over the past 10 years.''

Indeed, O'Reilly has gone after the New York Times in particular on these grounds.

Of course, if O'Reilly really only wanted to reform deportation procedures for undocumented immigrants busted for committing crimes, no one would be calling him a racist. But we all know the reason he keeps bringing up illegal immigrants and crime: It's an easy way of demonizing the people O'Reilly has at other times declared are going to swamp "white culture."

Media Matters has the goods on this:

Continue reading »

It's fairly astonishing, really, how little coverage the horrendous shooting rampage in Florida earlier this week has gotten in the American press: Someone walks up to a townhouse meeting room full of Chilean college students and opens fire on them -- after having warned neighbors earlier not to have any immigrants in her home, and asking one of them if they wanted to join him in his "revolution."

Two kids (including Racine Balbontin, 22, left) dead, five hospitalized. This is just a mundane story? Well, it's a major, front-page news story in Chile, at least, and in much of the rest of Latin America.

Northwest Florida Daily News reports:

Cooperative Radio reporter Stephanie Hunt spoke to the Daily News via phone from Santiago, Chile, Friday morning. She said Chilean Government Minister Francisco Vidal called the crime "macabre" and "brutal."

Hunt said Chile's Deputy Consul General is working to get family members to the United States so they can be with the injured students and bring back the bodies of those who didn't survive. Families traveled from all over Chile Thursday to Santiago to meet with officials in an attempt to expedite the process of getting passports and visas.

Although the case is sensitive because it involves foreign nationals and 14 victims total, The Walton County Sheriff's Office released some new information.

"It was a tremendously horrific scene," said Sheriff Mike Adkinson. "Even the survivors are victims."

Adkinson said the shooting happened about 1:45 a.m. when Dannie Baker, 60, approached Unit 12 in the Summer Lakes townhome complex and opened fire through a window. When he was done, Adkinson said, he went back to his home at Unit 25.

We're gradually learning more about the shooter, Dannie Baker -- but a heap of questions remain unanswered. It appears that he used to campaign for Republicans, but they dropped him when he sent some e-mails in 2007 that apparently frightened them.

According to one news story:

Not much is known about Baker or his lifestyle yet, according to the Sheriff's Office.

He was a volunteer at the Walton County Republican Headquarters during the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in 2004.

"He volunteered the same time I did," said Pat Magee, a member of the Walton County Republican Executive Committee. "I was shocked. The person I knew would have never done anything bad to anyone."

Magee said Baker answered phones and did general office work during the campaign. Although she didn't remember much about his personal life, she said he had mentioned he was from Alabama and had attended Auburn University.

Jim Anders, another member of the Republican Executive Committee, said Baker was very active during the 2004 election but added that he was very eccentric. He said Baker traveled to Atlanta once a year to assist in some sort of music ministry there.

Baker did not volunteer during last year's election, but local Republicans said they began to receive disturbing e-mails from him about national political issues, said Anders.

"Dannie had some emotional problems, it seemed," said Anders, who added that that many e-mails were "radical" and "inappropriate."

The e-mails were so disturbing they were reported to the Sheriff's Office, the Republican volunteers said.

The Sheriff's Office said the e-mails did not target any individuals, but would not reveal any more details about them.

Continue reading »