Thomas H. Naylor, the founder and leader of the secessionist Second Vermont Republic (SVR), has called on his former allies in the racist League of the South (LOS) to unequivocally distance themselves from racism and hatred. The LOS, which among other things believes slavery to be “God-ordained” and is against interracial marriage, has participated in two SVR meetings that gathered together secessionists of all stripes. SVR has also participated in LOS meetings.

In a letter dated July 4, Naylor writes, “[s]o long as the albatross of racism hangs around its neck, the LOS can never be a truly effective partner for SVR.” He adds that SVR “risks being tainted by the scourge of racism simply by associating with the LOS.”

Naylor’s letter comes in the wake of a recent Intelligence Report exposé, “North Meets South,” that examined SVR’s budding relationship with the LOS. In March, Naylor hotly defended the LOS, telling the Report that though the LOS is “not perfect,” it is “not racist.” He also told the Report, “I don’t give a shit what you write,” and that, “If someone tells me that I shouldn’t associate with the League of the South, it guarantees that I will associate with the League of the South.”
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Listen this week as Heidi Beirich and I discuss an article she wrote on the last man still donating money to the racist Pioneer Fund, which pays for controversial studies on race and intelligence, among other things. What you hear may genuinely surprise you.

Michael Hill (right, with convicted “Aryan” terrorist Michael Tubbs), president of the neo-secessionist League of the South, has long claimed angrily that his is no racist group and that he is no white supremacist — this despite his repeated calls for a return to “general European hegemony” in the South, his description of slavery as “God-ordained,” and, in a particularly tasteless attack on African Americans, his mocking of his former black university students’ names and people helped by affirmative action (“A quote from a recent affirmative action hire: ‘Yesta-day I could not spell ‘secretary.’ Today I is one”).

Now, Hill has returned to the kind of vulgar racist humor he apparently has a particular taste for. In the latest edition of his League of the South tabloid The Free Magnolia, Hill publishes a charming item bylined by one “LeShawn Jones” that reports a fantasy marriage between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as if it were fact. It then goes on to describe Obama, the first major party black presidential nominee in American history, as attending the “wedding” wearing “only the simple leather thong of an African tribe” with a single “accessory” — “a large, rubber spear.”

Despite being listed for years as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and even including a convicted “Aryan” terrorist in its leadership ranks, the league has managed to make some surprising allies of late — the allegedly “progressive” secessionists of the Second Vermont Republic (SVR), who have gone so far as to co-sponsor a major conference with the league. SVR leader Thomas Naylor has angrily denied that the league or its leader — who regularly describes egalitarianism as a left-wing “Jacobin” horror — are racist in any way. In the same breath, Naylor has claimed that he was always opposed personally to racism. ( continue to full post… )

Alabama State Sen. Charles Bishop (R-Jasper; photo at right) was the keynote speaker at the 2008 Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) Leadership Conference held on June 21 in Sheffield, Ala. The CCC was founded in 1985 using the mailing lists of the pro-segregationist White Citizens Councils that fought integration during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The CCC’s website and publications are filled with crude, racist attacks on immigrants, blacks and gays. The CCC is so extreme that in 1998 the then-head of the GOP, Jim Nicholson, took the unusual step of asking party members to resign from the group because of its “racist views.”

Bishop rose to national infamy last summer when he punched (above) Sen. Lowell Barron (D-Fyffe) on the Alabama Senate floor on June 7, 2007, the last day of the legislative session. Bishop told the CCC that his mother was the “sweetest, most wonderful woman” he ever knew and, when Barron called him a “son of a bitch,” he just lost it. Bishop told the CCC that he regretted punching out Barron on the floor of the legislature. Instead, he said, “I should have taken him outside and kicked the hell out of him.” Barron denied calling Bishop a son of a bitch.

Bishop was invited to the white supremacist conference by longtime racist activist and Alabama CCC chieftain Leonard “Flagpole” Wilson, who earned his nickname in 1956 when he was a key figure in violent demonstrations against the admission of Autherine Lucy as the first black student at the University of Alabama. Leading chants of “Keep ’Bama white!” from atop a flagpole and shouting racist jokes, Wilson led riotous students through two terrifying nights of racial unrest. Wilson’s activism didn’t stop there. He was prominent in the White Citizens Councils and, in 1985, became a founder of the CCC. ( continue to full post… )

Next time you find yourself stuck in traffic miles from work—or school or home or daycare—don’t blame poor urban planning, low carpooling rates or inadequate public transportation.

Blame immigrants.

That’s right, according to high-profile ads placed this month in The New York Times and The Nation by a new front group for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and two other anti-immigrant hate groups. The ads, which are based on dubious statistical analysis, claim that an immigration-fueled population boom will dramatically worsen traffic congestion and destroy pristine lands.

One ad shows a four-lane highway clogged with vehicles above the caption, “One of America’s Most Popular Pastimes.” The other depicts a bulldozer clearing forest above the words, “One of America’s Best Selling Vehicles.”

The ads were placed by an organization calling itself America’s Leadership Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Planning. “We’re the nation’s leading experts on population and immigration trends and growth,” boasts one of the ads.

Actually, America’s Leadership Team is a public relations front group for a coalition of five anti-immigration organizations, three of which—FAIR, American Immigration Control Foundation and the Social Contract Press—are listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center for their links to white supremacists and publication of bigoted materials.

All five of the groups behind America’s Leadership Team—the other two are Californians for Population Stabilization and NumbersUSA—are financed by John Tanton the puppet master of the modern anti-immigration movement.

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The Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist hate group, publicly announced earlier this week that it was co-hosting an anti-immigration strategy session with Americans4America, the official Las Vegas chapter of Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project.

Despite the Minuteman Project’s oft-touted anti-racist policies, the meeting took place June 24, offering some of the strongest evidence yet of direct ties between the Minuteman movement and overtly racist organizations.

“There’s a lot of overlapping between our two groups,” Nevada CCC leader Don Wassall told the Intelligence Report. “I met a couple of people from their group who are interested in trying to recruit more and get more people active in both of our groups.”

While a June 23 community calendar item placed by the CCC in the Las Vegas Review-Journal listed Americans4America and the CCC as “co-hosts” of the meeting, Wassall told the Report that, in fact, the Minutemen were more like special invited guests.

The relationship between the two organizations is “hard to explain,” said Wassall, but “we are working with them [the Minutemen].”

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The “Hapless neo-Nazi of the Month” award goes to Paul Anthony Palmer, Jr.. The former Pittsburgh police officer was sentenced June 20 to 52 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to possessing an unregistered explosive device—namely the homemade bomb that blew off Palmer’s left hand last May.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, police responded to Palmer’s mobile home park after neighbors called 911 to report a “kaboom type” explosion.

When officers arrived, the Post-Gazette reported, “They found that windows had been blown out of the trailer, and an awning ripped off. Mr. Palmer was sitting on a step out front with singed hair, burns to his upper chest and a severely damaged left hand, which later had to be amputated.”

In conducting a search of the premises, investigators found “numerous components for improvised explosive devices, including tubes, black powder, red phosphorous and a green pyrotechnic fuse.”

They also discovered a large amount of white supremacist literature, including 15 Aryan Nations pamphlets and two flags bearing the neo-Nazi organization’s insignia. Investigators further noted that Palmer had several Aryan Nations tattoos.

Palmer, 39, pleaded guilty and faced up to 63 months in prison. His lawyer argued at last week’s sentencing hearing that Palmer deserved a break because he’d served more than 10 years on the Pittsburgh police force. This means he’ll be a marked man behind bars, his lawyer said, especially since Palmer only has one hand for self-defense.

But the story behind Palmer’s departure from the Pittsburgh P.D. is hardly one to inspire leniency. Palmer was fired after he was convicted in 2006 of aggravated assault for firing seven bullets into a semi-trailer in a road rage incident while off duty.

Still, the judge cut Palmer a little slack, shaving 11 months off the maximum sentence. “There’s already been some punishment imposed, not by the court, but by himself,” the judge said.

Sometime after the accidental detonation, Palmer had yet another Aryan Nations symbol tattooed over the amputee nub of his left forearm, making him a living testament to the group’s motto: “Violence solves everything.”

This week, Heidi Beirich and I discuss her fascinating Intelligence Report story about supposedly “progressive” Vermont separatists teaming up with racist Southern secessionists. It’s an extraordinary tale of left meeting right — or, as our story headline has it, “North Meets South.”

In December 2007, the Intelligence Report revealed that Latino gang members, acting on orders from Mexican Mafia “shot callers” inside California prisons, were terrorizing and murdering blacks in Los Angeles basely solely on the color of the victim’s skin — not because he or she was a member of a rival gang.

Last week, the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) announced that the Report’s exposé of racially motivated “ethnic cleansing” campaigns in gang-ridden L.A. neighborhoods is the sole nominee, and therefore de facto winner, of this year’s national NABJ “Salute to Excellence” award in the “Magazine-Investigative” category. One day later, the Report’s groundbreaking reporting was validated by no less an authority than Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca.

“Some people deny it,” the veteran Latino sheriff wrote in a June 12 Los Angeles Times opinion column entitled, “In L.A, race kills.” “They say that race is not a factor in L.A.’s gang crisis; the problem, they say, is not one of blacks versus Latinos and Latinos versus blacks but merely one of gang members killing other gang members… . But they’re wrong. The truth is that, in many cases, race is at the heart of the problem. Latino gang members shoot blacks not because they’re members of a rival gang but because of their skin color. Likewise, black gang members shoot Latinos because they are brown.” ( continue to full post… )

Can the man sink any lower?

After all, we’re talking about a fellow who pickets the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, shouting that they are being punished by God for somehow helping America in its “fag-enabling” ways. A man whose own children have accused him of beating them viciously with a mattock handle. A “pastor” who has celebrated the deaths of coal miners trapped beneath the earth, children killed in school bus accidents, even the thousands murdered on Sept. 11, 2001. The language he employs in his sermons attacking homosexuality — versions of which have been hissed at passing children by his followers — is so disgusting that it is unprintable in the major media.

But now Fred W. Phelps, who runs the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas, and the infamous GodHatesFags website, has taken another step down into the slime. His latest, posted last week on Friday the 13th, is “Thank God for Dead Boy Scouts.” The WBC Video News production opens to the strains of a hymn. ( continue to full post… )