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Back when Bill O'Reilly was semi-defending Lou Dobbs for promoting the "birther" conspiracy theories, he invited on Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Center -- which had called for Dobbs' firing -- to defend their campaign. And he made a bet with Cohen, kinda sorta:

O'Reilly: CNN is never going to fire him, you know that ...

Cohen: I'm not quite as cynical as you are, Bill. I think that if enough people speak out, CNN will listen and be more responsible in the future.

O'Reilly: You wanna bet? ... I've got ten grand for Habitat for Humanity on the table if you wanna bet me.

Cohen: How about ten grand for the Southern Poverty Law Center?

O'Reilly: But I’m not going to take your money. There’s no real bet there — he’s not going to get fired.

Of course, Dobbs was indeed fired. So last night on The O'Reilly Factor, he announced:

O'Reilly: I will pay that debt. I will donate $10,000 to Habitat for Humanity -- I don't know whether the Southern Poverty Law Center was responsible, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

But he still just didn't want to come to terms with the reality that Dobbs' firing was not about First Amendment free-speech rights, but about the responsibilities that come with those rights -- that is, it was about the role that Big Media play in a functioning democracy, and the civic necessities that lie therein.

Cohen: Bill, I don't think it was just us. It was a lot of people -- our supporters, our allies --

O'Reilly: But tell me what you did, because you were obviously involved. What did you do?

Cohen: Well, Bill, what we tried to do was point out the kind of lies and racist conspiracy theories that Dobbs propagated night after night on his show.

O'Reilly: How did you do that, though? Talk to people over there? Did you do a letter-writing campaign? Did you go to their house? What did you do?

Cohen: Well, the first thing that we did was we tried to talk to Dobbs, talk to his staff. And do that quietly, to try to get our point across. When that failed, we wrote to CNN and asked them to correct some of the crazy things that he said. Finally, this summer, we asked CNN to remove him from the air when he started giving credence to those crazy bogus theories, as you called them, about Obama's citizenship. So I think it was a combination of those things.

O'Reilly: But what I'm interested to know -- Look, anybody can ask, they ask Fox to remove me from the air every hour on the hour, OK? So anybody can ask. Aw, we don't like O'Reilly, we don't like Dobbs, get 'em off the air. But did you have a feeling CNN was actually listening to you? Or that they were gonna pull him off the air? You've gotta give me a little inside baseball here, Mr. Cohen.

Cohen: We had no secret pipeline to CNN, Bill. And you know, the truth of the matter is, you played an important role in the campaign. I appreciate your having me on in July, and I appreciate your acknowledging on the air to your viewers that the things that Dobbs was saying about the birthers were bogus and absurd --

O'Reilly: Well, some of them were bogus, but here's where we differ. And everybody should know it, Mr. Cohen. I don't want Lou Dobbs off the air. I think he's a voice that should be heard. You want him off the air. See look -- I feel that you, and your organization, while you do do some good, are fascist in your approach to people with whom you disagree. Because Lou Dobbs shouldn't have been pulled off their for his opinion -- challenged, yes. I disagree, I say it! Pulled off the air? No! You shouldn't even want that. You should want, in a democracy, people to have freedom of speech and put stuff out there. If you disagree, or you think that he's inaccurate, get -- that's why I give you airtime! You're welcome to come on, and say look, this is what we do, that's what we do here!

Of course, no one is infringing on Lou Dobbs' free-speech rights, because having a network-TV show is not a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. No one is preventing Dobbs from enjoying the same speech rights enjoyed by everyone else in the country. What they are insisting upon, instead, is that the people in charge of dispensing mass information to the public uphold the responsibilities inherent in holding a powerful position in setting the direction of our democratic discourse.

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CNN's Jim Acosta this morning filed the first part of a three-part report on the return of the militia movement, something we've been tracking regularly here at C&L.

The piece, unfortunately, is like a lot of mainstream reportage on the movement -- that is to say, reporters "parachute" in to a location (in this case, southeastern Michigan) and provide a facile report that's about toe deep in content. As with so many such reports, it's typically susceptible to swallowing whole the mythology that militia members like to toss up for mainstream consumption.

In this case, Acosta willingly transmits the main purpose of the militia movement -- which is to say, remaking genuinely extremist belief systems as mainstream and legitimate. Lee Miracle, the Michigan group's leader, is portrayed as just a gee-shucks ordinary guy concerned about his constitutional rights.

But then there were the other members, and it was clear there was the usual undertow of unhinged paranoia present -- along with clear statements that they were motivated by fear of a Democratic president, and particularly Obama:

ACOSTA (voice-over): Training for what depends on who you ask, but this militia member, who didn't want to give his last name, worries the government will eventually take away his gun rights.

"BRIAN", SOUTHEAST MICHIGAN VOLUNTEER MILITIA: Well, any time we get a Democratic president in the office, people become concerned, including myself and we get a resurgence out here.

ACOSTA: Others just don't like President Obama. So, you don't trust him?

MICHAEL LACKOMAR, SOUTHEAST MICHIGAN VOLUNTERR MILITIA: In short, I think he could be dangerous for the nation.

While overall it gives a pretty warm and fluffy view of the militias, it's not a thoroughly bad report; it at least manages to quote the SPLC's Mark Potok, who points out how they are driven by a combination of anti-liberal animus and wingnutty paranoia:

MARK POTOK, SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER: The truth is, is that these groups are popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain.

ACOSTA (voice-over): Earlier this year, Mark Potok with the Southern Poverty Law Center put out a report warning of a surge in militia activity that came with the election of President Obama. Since that report was issued, Potok says his staff has counted 100 new militia groups across the country.

POTOK: There really is this kind of terrible fear mixed with fury about the idea that President Obama is somehow leading a kind of socialistic, you know, takeover of America.

In Acosta's on-air segment after the report, he talked it over with John Roberts and Kiran Chetry, and noted that, as it was in the 1990s, the militias are being driven by fear about both gun rights and Obama generally:

ROBERTS: All right. Is it all about gun rights then?

ACOSTA: A lot of it is about gun rights. A lot of it is about distrust. They just don't trust this president. They think he is out to peel back rights and the gun issue is their big ones. You know, we should mention that the gun control issue specifically is really unrealistic in many ways. Because the Obama administration knows and Democrats know that it will be political suicide for them to go after gun control measures. In fact, the attorney general indicated just recently that he's not even going to go back to the assault weapons ban that was enacted during the Clinton administration.

Then they ran one of their phone-in polls:

CHETRY: We also want to know what you think. Are militia members patriots or are they extremists? And o you think that your rights are slipping away or do you think that these militias go too far? Join us tomorrow and we're going to have part two of Jim's piece.

At the CNN/amFix blog, Acosta described what the next two parts will look like:

Not to worry, says the group's leader Lee Miracle. A military veteran and postal worker, yes postal worker, Miracle says he urges respect for the president.

He's out to change the way the world views militia groups. We get an up-close look at his family in part two of our series. A family Miracle refers to as "Lee and Kate plus eight plus a gun rack." That's because they have eight kids and 22 guns in the house. And the kids take part in militia day.

In part three of our series, we go to Las Vegas to go behind the scenes with an organization called "Oathkeepers." It's a group of ex-law enforcement officials and military veterans who say they've sworn an oath to the Constitution, not the president. The president they're referring to, of course, is Mr. Obama.

The ADL released a report today about the growing rage in the American landscape, of which the militia movement is a significant part:

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Chris Matthews decided to take seriously Nancy Pelosi's choked-up discussion of concern about the violent undertone of recent right-wing rhetoric -- which of course has the right-wing a-holosphere chortling in blithe dismissal -- on Hardball earlier this week. So he brought on author Gerald Posner and the SPLC's Mark Potok to talk about it.

It prompted an interesting discussion about the relationship between the wild rantings of right-wing talkers and the ugliness that is manifesting itself on the street in our discourse -- especially now that we have right-wing nutcases who attend churches where the preacher tells them killing Obama would not be murder showing up at presidential rallies with AR-15s.

MATTHEWS: ... The question here is very serious. What is it in the atmosphere that allows a person to feel comfortable showing up at a political event carrying a gun, in some cases two guns, and letting people know they're armed? What is it in the atmosphere that lets a person bring a sign that compares the president of the United States to an animal or to a Nazi? What is it makes them feel comfortable doing that kind of crap in public? I wonder if it isn't the atmosphere of language that's being used today. Your thoughts, sir, Mark.

MARK POTOK, SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER: I think it is the atmosphere, the language that's being sort of ejected into the atmosphere, I think that, you know, what we're hearing, in particular from our—quote, unquote—“leaders,” from both political leaders and commentators.

I mean, you know, yesterday Rush Limbaugh was on the air talking about an incident in which black kids attacked a white kid on a school bus, an incident that police said was not racially motivated, and saying that what we need are segregated buses, that this is the only way, I suppose, that white people can be protected from black people.

I think when we have characters like Limbaugh saying that on the air to millions of Americans, many of whom actually revere the man, you know, it's not surprising that people feel that, you know, the race war is around the corner and that we're allowed to say these kinds of things.

...

GERALD POSNER: ... Chris, you have hit the nail on the head. It's a license that allows somebody who's on the edge to cross the edge from thinking about acting out to actually crossing the line and being violent and thinking they can change history with a single bullet. And we have shown time and time again that that's possible.

It's not simply the overt threat to the well-being of the president that's important here. There's also the threatening nature of packing heat openly at a public meeting where the presence of guns is highly likely to be interpreted by your fellow citizens as an implied threat to their well-being should they happen to disagree. That is, they not only threaten the president, these guns intimidate and silence your fellow citizens.

The flip side of this was Glenn Beck, responding also to Pelosi's remarks, and insisting that we pay it no mind, because the people she's concerned about are just crazy, and there's nothing we can do about them.

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Beck: Look -- Timothy McVeigh -- nutjob! Nutjob! On the fringe of the right! That, President Clinton tried to blame on Rush Limbaugh. It was ridiculous then, and it's ridiculous now. Harvey Milk -- killed by a guy who was hepped up on Twinkies. It was ridiculous then -- it's ridiculous now. The shooter -- and Timothy McVeigh -- crazy people! It's madness.

This was largely the position taken by Jesse Walker at Reason earlier this week, when he drew up what appears to be the first serious attempt at critiquing my book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.

When panicky centrists aren't willing to draw an unbroken line from peaceful conservatives to the violent fringe, they posit a somewhat subtler link. The killers, they acknowledge, aren't taking their marching orders directly from Fox News and AM radio. But by giving serious attention to theories associated with the fringe right—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is preparing concentration camps, that Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen—Glenn Beck and other broadcasters are validating the grievances of potential killers, giving them the impression that they aren't alone. This validation is buttressed by the sweeping, sometimes violent rhetoric about "liberals" that you hear from partisan celebrities, such as Ann Coulter's joke that McVeigh should have blown up the New York Times building instead. In The Eliminationists and on his blog, David Neiwert tries to establish a chain linking "eliminationist" behavior in American history (lynchings of blacks and Asians, the slaughter of American Indians), eliminationist rhetoric on the mainstream right (the Coulter wisecrack), and von Brunn–style efforts to eliminate people directly.

The theory is interesting, but it has two enormous problems. The first is that it ignores the autonomy of people on the fringe. Not just the radicals who commit the crimes, but the radicals who don't commit crimes. There's a complex ecology at work here, one demonstrated most clearly in those cases when militiamen alerted authorities to terrorist plots in their midst. Words have influence, but they influence different people in different ways; you can't reduce media effects to simple push-pull reactions. Accusing Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly of validating right-wing violence isn't so different from accusing pornography of validating rape, Ozzy Osbourne of validating teen suicide, or Marilyn Manson of validating school massacres.

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[Members of the James Younger Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2006.]

Looking into the background of Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, after his heckling of President Obama last night, I came across this:

Joe also has been a member of the Columbia World Affairs Council, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Sinclair Lodge 154, Jamil Temple, Woodmen of the World, Sons of Confederate Veterans, ....

This is an organization that, as the SPLC has detailed assiduously, has been taken over in the past decade by radical neo-Confederates who favor secession and defend slavery as a benign institution. Leading the takeover is a radical racist named Kirk Lyons, who's been an important legal figure on the far right for some years.* [More below]

In more recent years, the takeover has led to an outright internal civil war. Andrew Meacham at the St. Petersburg Times detailed the internal rift last year:

Experts say the divisions within the Sons vary between two extremes. On one side are the traditionalists, members who focus on cleaning up Confederate grave sites and conducting Civil War re-enactments.

On the other side are the so-called Lunatics, up to 2,000 members who deride traditionalists as "grannies'' and belong to camps named after notorious Southern figures such as John Wilkes Booth and Jesse James.

John Wilkes Booth members have been known to put pennies in urinals, making sure to leave the Lincoln side face-up. Other Lunatic groups have removed the U.S. flag from their halls and banned the Pledge of Allegiance, says Walter Hilderman, who several years ago created an anti-Lunatic group called Save the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

"The problem is it's supposed to be a patriotic organization," says Hilderman, 59. "You are either that or you let guys in who want to secede."

As Heidi Beirich at the SPLC reported, this rift has led to Lyons himself coming under harsh attack from his own right flank. The SCV is a serious mess.

Now, add this to the fact that Joe Wilson, as a state legislator, was one of only seven Republicans to go against their own party and vote to keep the Dixie Rebel flag flying over the South Carolina capitol:

The flag came down that year after Republicans in both houses went for a compromise that would put it on Statehouse grounds at the Confederate Soldier’s monument. The “Magnificent Seven” of Senators who voted to keep the flag up included current Congressman Joe Wilson (who I served with in the 218th Infantry Brigade of the National Guard.)

A clearer picture of why this congressman might so virulently breach protocol and loudly interrupt an African-American president's speech to Congress by calling him a liar does start to emerge, doesn't it?

So inquiring minds want to know:

Is Joe Wilson still a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans?

If so, does he condone the activities of the "Lunatic" faction that now controls the SCV?

Does Joe Wilson consider the Republican Party "the Party of Lincoln"?

Does Joe Wilson support secession?

Blue Texan at FDL has more.

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Conservatives have been working like mad to whitewash out of public view the existence of violent right-wing extremists, only to run into one problem: They keep popping back up again, time after time. Darned reality intrudes again.

So when the Southern Poverty Law Center recently confirmed what we've been reporting at C&L for awhile now -- that the far-right "militia" movement of the 1990s was roaring back to life -- it really wasn't a big surprise when Fox ran a story quoting a bunch of various right-wing officials dismissing it:

"I think it's utter nonsense to say it's racial," said Carter Clews, spokesman at Americans for Limited Government. Clews said Obama's "doctrinaire socialistic approach to government" has triggered a populist backlash, but "it's inappropriate to use the word militia."

The SPLC report came just four months after the Department of Homeland Security issued a controversial report on "right-wing extremists." That assessment carried many of the same themes and warnings as the new "militia" report, also warning that the election of the first black president could be exploited as a recruiting tool.

According to data ALG obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the DHS relied in large part on news articles, questionable Web sites and several already-public SPLC reports -- not official government sources -- in writing its "right-wing extremists" report.

William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, said the latest SPLC report suggests that DHS and the law center are relying largely on the same pool of information to make their claims about the rise in right-wing extremism.

"They are attempting to brand all right-of-center protesters as potential domestic terrorists or extremists," he said. "They are painting whole swaths of people as hate groups and extremists."

This is, of course, pure bunk of a sort: The report specifies that the key to considering someone under the influence of the Patriot movement is their willing adoption of the various conspiracy theories and provably false "facts" that form the bedrock of the movement's belief systems. Things like, for instance, believing Obama is actually a non-citizen born in Kenya.

So to the extent that the SPLC is branding "whole swaths" of people, that's only true as far as these kinds of far-right beliefs spread. Unfortunately, as we've seen with the adoption of "birther" beliefs by nearly half of all Republicans, that now includes a much broader swath of society than we'd heretofore suspected.

But that is not the SPLC's fault. Rather, all that point raises is serious questions about the direction that movement conservatism is now taking.

After all, all those Obama-hating crazies are not coming out of the woodwork in a vacuum.

Earlier this week, Keith Olbermann explored this in depth with the SPLC's Mark Potok. It's an enlightening discussion.

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We've been reporting steadily on the return of the militia movement in post-Bush America, and now that reportage has been confirmed by a disturbing report from the Southern Poverty Law Center describing a "Second Wave" of militiamen organizing across the countryside.

The AP has the story:

Bart McEntire, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told SPLC researchers that this is the most growth he's seen in more than a decade.

"All it's lacking is a spark," McEntire said in the report.

It's reminiscent of what was seen in the 1990s — right-wing militias, people ideologically against paying taxes and so-called "sovereign citizens" are popping up in large numbers, according to the report to be released Wednesday.

You can read the report here [PDF file]:

They’re back. Almost a decade after largely disappearing from public view, right-wing militias, ideologically driven tax defiers and sovereign citizens are appearing in large numbers around the country. “Paper terrorism” — the use of property liens and citizens’ “courts” to harass enemies — is on the rise. And once-popular militia conspiracy theories are making the rounds again, this time accompanied by nativist theories about secret Mexican plans to “reconquer” the American Southwest. One law enforcement agency has found 50 new militia training groups — one of them made up of present and former police officers and soldiers. Authorities around the country are reporting a worrying uptick in Patriot activities and propaganda. “This is the most significant growth we’ve seen in 10 to 12 years,” says one. “All it’s lacking is a spark. I think it’s only a matter of time before you see threats and violence.”

A key difference this time is that the federal government — the entity that almost the entire radical right views as its primary enemy — is headed by a black man. That, coupled with high levels of non-white immigration and a decline in the percentage of whites overall in America, has helped to racialize the Patriot movement, which in the past was not primarily motivated by race hate. One result has been a remarkable rash of domestic terror incidents since the presidential campaign, most of them related to anger over the election of Barack Obama. At the same time, ostensibly mainstream politicians and media
pundits have helped to spread Patriot and related propaganda, from conspiracy theories about a secret network of U.S. concentration camps to wholly unsubstantiated claims about the president’s country of birth.

As you can see, the report also details how nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment has been an important undertow in the reborn "Patriot" movement and the associated militia-organizing activity. Some of this is built on the bones of the now-moribund Minuteman movement:

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Bill O'Reilly seems to have a little trouble understanding how the First Amendment works.

Free-speech rights mean the government can't stop citizens from saying things it doesn't like. Every citizen has that right.

But having a radio show or a network anchor's job is not a right. It's a privilege, one that people work very hard to achieve, and only a relative handful actually get. Who gets the privilege is decided by people holding the media pursestrings.

Nonetheless, O'Reilly seemed to think last night on his Fox News show that the Southern Poverty Law Center not only was "overreacting" to Lou Dobbs' promotion of the "Birther" conspiracy theories, but that they were attacking Dobbs' First Amendment rights in demanding that CNN remove him. He had on the SPLC's Richard Cohen to discuss it:

O'Reilly: Look, I still disagree with you calling for his head. I don't mind you coming out and saying you disagree with him, that it's totally absurd, it's wrong to exploit it, he's playing upon fears, there might be a racial component, although I don't think Lou Dobbs is a racist at all -- ah --

Cohen: When's enough, Bill? When's enough, enough? I mean, Lou's been doing this for years.

O'Reilly: It's never enough, enough. And in a free-speech society, Mr. Cohen, it's never enough's enough. Freedom of speech allows you to go up to the line without -- if Lou Dobbs was causing danger to someone, then you would be legitimate in calling for his firing. But he is not. All he's doing is bloviating. It's just bloviating.

O'Reilly's confused. If Lou Dobbs were indeed endangering someone -- one of several points at which the First Amendment does not protect speech -- then the authorities would be justified in shutting him down.

We citizens, however, have the right to demand that CNN take Dobbs off the air at any time, given that his position as an anchor there is purely at the pleasure of CNN executives and is not a matter of his right to free speech. No one is saying Dobbs can't go stand on a street corner and hand out pamphlets like the rest of his Birther friends do. They're just saying he hasn't the right to abuse his position as a major anchor at one of the cable networks by spreading false information and right-wing hatemongering.

Though certainly, one can see why O'Reilly might be touchy about that subject.

It's starting to look like it may actually have been a good thing that Pat Buchanan spouted off so nakedly about Sonia Sotmayor this week -- not so much that he did it, but that in doing so, he's finally provoked a serious response to the meaning of his ongoing presence in our national discourse.

People are finally starting to ask the question I asked back in 2006:

How much longer, one has to wonder, will our mainstream press continue to pretend that Pat Buchanan has not gone completely around the bend? That he is no longer the avuncular conservative from old episodes of Crossfire but a full-fledged extremist trying to resurrect the once-discredited ethos of white supremacism?

The evidence was more than abundantly clear back then, with the publication of his book State of Emergency, which was a vehicle for essentially a regurgitation of warmed-over eugenics theory from the 1920s. Buchanan was all over TV as well, spouting nonstop the fear that white people were losing their majority and with it their political power, swept away by a tide of brown people from Latin America.

Alexander Zaitchik's report for the SPLC hit the nail on the head:

To put it plainly, State of Emergency is a white nationalist tract. The thesis is that America must retain a white majority to survive as a nation. It is rooted in a blood-and-soil nationalism more blood than soil. The echoes of Nazi ideology are clear and chilling. As Buchanan helpfully explained to John King, who was interviewing him in one of his several CNN appearances: "We gotta get into race and ethnic questions."

Indeed, Buchanan has a not-inconsiderable role in the history of white nationalism in America in the past 20 years -- particularly the role he has had in mainstreaming supremacist beliefs, many of which are either fallacious or crudely racist. Leonard Zeskind devotes a sizable chunk of his marvelous history of the movement, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, to dealing with Buchanan and his sizable impact.

After all, he's been at this a long time. In a columm he wrote back in 1989 defending David Duke and chiding the GOP for overreacting to him, he counseled movement conservatives thus:

"Take a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles, [such as] reverse discrimination against white folks." (syndicated column, 2/25/89)

At the time, Duke had just finished running for president on the Populist Party ticket. His chief platform position in that campaign: stopping immigration before Latin Americans overwhelm the country. A couple of years later, Buchanan tried to claim that Duke was copying him, but it's clear from the chronology that it worked the other way around.

The good thing about the attention Buchanan has brought on himself is that it may finally shine a spotlight on the persistent and malignant influence of white nationalism on our national discourse and our body politic. Looking as we are at pan-racial, multicultural future, our success is going to hinge on our abilities to find ways to break down the old racial barriers that were erected by white supremacists -- whose worldview was dominant in the USA for decades -- a century ago and more. And as Pat Buchanan has been demonstrating, they will only go kicking and screaming.

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Those upstanding nativists and xenophobes employed by the John Tanton Network -- and particularly the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which was designated a hate group by the SPLC awhile back -- have been complaining vigorously about how unfairly they are being treated. Why, they have nothing to do with the manifest racism swirling around the immigration debate -- so they claim.

But the recent arrest of Minuteman offshoot leader Shawna Forde for the murder of an Arizona man and his 9-year-old daughter -- part of a broader plan to rob drug dealers and use the money to finance their Minuteman operations -- has ripped the veneer off the fake walls these nativists use to pretend that they have nothing to do with the racists who seem to swell their ranks as though they belonged there naturally. (Funny thing, that.)

Back in 2006, you see, Forde appeared at a public "town hall" forum on immigration in Yakima, Wash., a central-Washington city whose main economy is agricultural, particularly apple orchards. As Jackie Mahendra at America's Voice notes, she was presented as a "spokesperson for FAIR" as well as the Minutemen.

As you can see from the video above, Forde was outrageously incendiary, accusing immigrants of bringing crime and disease to the state and costing taxpayers in health-care costs, particularly for their "anchor babies."

At one point, host Enrique Cerna asked Forde:

Cerna: Shawna, let me ask you about the issue of economics. You've heard constraints from growers, you know, that the apple harvest is very important in this state, particularly in this region. What do you say to the growers?

Forde: We've got a prison system. Let's utilize it.

She later wrapped up with this:

Forde: I'd like to see two things on there. Not just about the people who came here legally, and are here legally, but how about the Americans who have been affected and died because of the illegal invasion in our country? How about our sovereignty?

And securing our borders and protecting our nation is extremely important. And I know the Minutemen and many organizations will not stop -- we will start at the local level and work our way up -- we will not stop until we get the results that we need to have.

However, it was unclear to me if Forde really was a FAIR representative or whether she had just lied about that, as seems to be her pattern in many instances.

But in untangling the puzzle, what emerged was a clear portrait of FAIR officials commingling freely with Minutemen and the many seedy characters who occupy their ranks -- so much so that what they become is a "respectable" front organization for a ragtag bunch of thuggish nativists.

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When President Obama visited Camp Lejeune this morning, you have to wonder if this story was somewhere in the back of his mind:

A federal grand jury indicted a former Camp Lejeune Marine on Wednesday on charges that he threatened the life of Barack Obama, the U.S. Attorney's Office confirmed today.

Kody Brittingham, 20, formerly a lance corporal with 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, was accused of making threats against Obama while he was president-elect, said Robin Zier, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office for the eastern district of North Carolina.

Brittingham was arrested by the Jacksonville Police Department on breaking and entering charges in mid-December 2008.

Naval investigators discovered a journal allegedly written by Brittingham in his barracks after his arrest by civilian authorities in December. The journal contained plans on how to kill the president, as well as white supremacist material, a federal law enforcement official said.

This incident is just one of many that are bubbling up across the American landscape right now. The right-wing race haters are not only motivated and out recruiting heavily, they're getting angrier by the day, especially the more Obama successfully advances his agenda. We've been writing about this for awhile now.

CNN's Rick Sanchez had on Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center yesterday to discuss this. The main point revolved around the SPLC's annual report on the State of Hate, written by David Holthouse:

From white power skinheads decrying "President Obongo" at a racist gathering in rural Missouri, to neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen hurling epithets at Latino immigrants from courthouse steps in Oklahoma, to anti-Semitic black separatists calling for death to Jews on bustling street corners in several East Coast cities, hate group activity in the U.S. was disturbing and widespread throughout 2008, as the number of hate groups operating in America continued to rise. Last year, 926 hate groups were active in the U.S., up more than 4% from 888 in 2007. That's more than a 50% increase since 2000, when there were 602 groups.

As in recent years, hate groups were animated by the national immigration debate. But two new forces also drove them in 2008: the worsening recession, and Barack Obama's successful campaign to become the nation's first black president. Officials reported that Obama had received more threats than any other presidential candidate in memory, and several white supremacists were arrested for saying they would assassinate him or allegedly plotting to do so.

At the same time, law enforcement officials reported a marked swelling of the extreme-right "sovereign citizens" movement that wreaked havoc in the 1990s with its "paper terrorism" tactics. Adherents are infamous for filing bogus property liens and orchestrating elaborate financial ripoffs.

The SPLC has an interactive map that lets you see where each of these hate groups is based and just who they are. As usual, California again leads the nation as the state with the most hate groups with 84; Florida is a distant second with 56.

Sanchez and Potok also discussed the recent case of the would-be dirty bomber in Bangor, Maine, whose plans were nipped in the bud when his angry wife shot him to death.

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As always, the remarkable thing about these cases is that these would have led the broadcasts at Fox and CNN (not to mention set off weeks' worth of obsessive posts at Michelle Malkin's joint) had the suspect been Muslim, Arab, or otherwise had brown skin.

As I noted previously:

In other words, hate groups are almost certainly going to be exploiting fresh opportunities for recruitment, both ideological and actual. The stage has been set by the past decade's demographic shift, but the Bush Recession will in any event give them a big jug of gasoline for their bonfire. Obama's election will give them a figure upon whom they can focus their hate, and the immigration debate will give them an issue to recruit and organize around.

Eventually, innocent bystanders in the general public will be the ones who pay the price.

We've known for some time -- ever since the Southern Poverty Law Center first reported it back in 2002 -- that there was a web of interests and backgrounds that connected some of the most prominent conservative anti-immigration "think tanks" to white-supremacist organizations, all revolving the activities of an environmentalist-turned-nativist named John Tanton.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, though, that this was the case, these groups -- particularly the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA -- have continued to enjoy mainstream respectability, in large part because they have continued to deny the connections to Tanton and to each other.

Now, the SPLC has definitively established the connections, thanks in large part to reporter Heidi Beirich's intrepid investigative work digging through Tanton's own papers and examining the groups' leaders records. One can only hope the report will finally persuade genuine conservatives and thoughtful Republicans that they would want nothing to do with either these organizations or their largely fabricated disinformation, which disguises a hateful, white-supremacist agenda.

Together with the immigration-reform group America's Voice, the SPLC held a press conference this morning in Washington to discuss the report and its ramifications -- particularly for Americans interested in advancing a rational debate about immigration, free of racist scapegoating.

The result of the activities of groups like these has been profound -- a grotesque distortion of the immigration debate in America. As AV's Frank Sharry said at the conference, most people on the side of immigration reform in the past decade went in believing they were going to be engaged in a rational policy discussion, but instead found that for these groups on the right, the only interest was in finding more bodies to throw on the culture-war bonfires.

It's played a huge role in providing fuel for right-wing talkers like Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, and their hosts of imitators.

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