Eight days after a Meade County, Ky., civil jury delivered a potentially crippling verdict against the Imperial Klans of America (IKA), including $1 million in punitive damages against IKA leader Ron Edwards, the unrepentant imperial wizard had this to say to “IKA Members and Supporters”:

I quit.

Oh, and please send money.

In an open letter dated Nov. 22 and posted on the IKA website, Edwards declared that he was resigning effective immediately. “I need time off because I have not had any in many years,” wrote Edwards, who founded the IKA, now the third largest Klan group in America, in late 1996.

Edwards further explained that he was stepping down in order to “focus my efforts” on preparing an appeal of the $2.5-million judgment in a lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on behalf of a teenager who was assaulted by IKA members at a county fair in rural Kentucky in 2006.

Although Edwards represented himself during the recent three-day trial, he claimed in his letter that an unnamed Louisville, Ky., lawyer had offered to represent Edwards on appeal for the cut rate of $10,000. “That is GREAT!” Edwards wrote. “While this lawyer does not share our beliefs, he … seems to be determined to put up a serious fight in court. So, anyone who can send anything in, please do! In the memo area, please write ‘Lawyer.’ Thank you so much!” Later in the letter, Edwards reiterated his plea for money: “Again, anyone who can help with donations for the appeal, please do. This is very important, not just for myself, but all Pro-European American groups and our people as whole.”

Unfortunately for Edwards, potential donors to his purported cause are likely to consider the damning testimony of former IKA members who said in the Meade County trial that Edwards routinely lines his own pockets with IKA membership fees and “defense fund” donations. One of them, Joshua Cowles, a former IKA recruiter under Edwards, described a typical occasion where Edwards paid his own bills with a $400 donation that Edwards had solicited on behalf of an IKA member facing a criminal assault charge. “The IKA is about one man and one man only—and that’s Ron Edwards,” Cowles said on the witness stand. “It’s about his greed, his want to have money, his desire to get by without working, his desire to trick people into giving him money to support him.” ( continue to full post… )

While most political analysts say that John McCain lost the presidential election because of the sorry state of the economy and the unpopularity of President Bush, Peter Brimelow sees a different villain: Immigration.

“The fact is that white voters – what 50 years ago would have been called Americans because 50 years ago this country was 90 percent white – they went for McCain 55-45,” Brimelow told the inaugural meeting of the H.L. Mencken Club at a Baltimore hotel last Friday night. “It wasn’t overwhelming, but it was a sizeable victory. It’s not clear to me that the American people really supported Obama.” The president-elect only got a majority of white votes among 18-to-30-year-olds, according to Brimelow. “What this election shows is that whites vote one way and everybody else votes the other way.”

A former senior editor at Forbes magazine, author and founder and editor of the white nationalist hate website VDARE.com Brimelow blames the 1965 Immigration Act for a host of problems. (The Immigration Act greatly reduced the percentage of immigrants from Europe while allowing for huge increases in Asian and Hispanic immigration.) Until its passage, Brimelow said Friday, the United States had the option of being more like Switzerland – a relatively small population, stable birthrates, homogeneous and highly educated – or Brazil, which he characterized as “diverse” and “chaotic.” He added, “We’re in the process of becoming Brazil with gated communities and so forth.”

Brimelow’s comments came during his keynote address at the first conference of the newly formed Mencken Club. About 60 mostly male, entirely white people attended. While the turnout was modest, it included several luminaries of the academic racist movement, including Jared Taylor, editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, which features stories about eugenics – the pseudo-science of weeding out human ‘genetic inferiority’ through selective breeding, and carried a column by Taylor after Hurricane Katrina in which he agued that “when blacks are left entirely to their own devices—civilization disappears.”

The club will provide a forum for the “intellectual right” and be full of “young thinkers and activists,” said founder and president Paul Gottfried, 67, a speaker at past American Renaissance conferences.

Also a humanities professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and contributor of essays to VDARE.com, Gottfried and many others at the gathering are self-described paleoconservatives whose sharpest barbs are often aimed at neoconservatives rather than liberals. “We are convinced we are right – while those who have quarantined us are wrong,” Gottfried said in introductory remarks. Ultimately, he added, we will “do to them what they have done to us.”

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Last night, CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” aired a segment criticizing the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) for holding a news conference earlier in the day calling attention to the link between anti-immigrant rhetoric and hate crimes against Latinos. The groups were reacting to the recent murder of Marcello Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant, who was fatally attacked in early November by seven high school students in Suffolk County, New York.

“Suffolk County is a particularly good example of elected officials stoking the fires of anti-immigrant sentiment,” NCLR head Janet Murguia said during the press conference. She spotlighted the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, saying he had been “notably hard line against immigrants in his county.” Earlier, Levy stated that the Lucero murder would have been a “one-day story” if the media hadn’t chosen to hype it. Levy later apologized for the remark.

Dobbs denounced NCLR’s use of the Lucero murder to call attention to hate crimes. Dismissing concerns about anti-immigrant rhetoric leading to hate violence, Dobbs called the groups “advocates of open borders” and mocked them for being “long on rhetoric and absolutely, absolutely devoid of facts or respect for them.”

Dobbs, who has a long track record of defaming immigrants by linking them to crime, disease and other horrors, would probably like to pretend that immigrant bashing doesn’t lead to hate crimes. But the facts of the Lucero case show otherwise. The teens implicated in Lucero’s murder specifically declared that they were going to “go jump a Mexican” and went out hunting in the ethnically diverse village of Patchogue. Latinos in Suffolk County have long reported being threatened and physically harassed and there have been other highly publicized attacks there, including the near-beating death of two Mexican day laborers in 2001 and the burning of a Mexican family’s house in 2003.

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Kyle Bristow, der Führer of the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, or MSU-YAF, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a hate group, announced last Saturday that he planned to take the organization’s notoriously bigoted and mean-spirited blog, The Spartan Spectator, permanently offline “in a few days time.”

“I have decided that I will not blog anymore after I graduate from the communist-infested hellhole of Michigan State University,” stated Bristow, a senior international relations major. “I am moving on to bigger and better things, and I unfortunately will not have the time to continue blogging about the decline of Western civilization.”

As of this morning, the Spartan Spectator remained online.

Bristow’s announcement came just six days after YAF-Watch, a blog that tracks the activities (“antics” might be a better word) of MSU-YAF, reported that Bristow had updated the blog’s homepage banner with a red-white-and-blue Othala rune, a popular symbol with neo-Nazis, racist skinheads and practitioners of Wotanism, a racist variant of the neo-pagan Odinist religion.

The Spartan Specator’s most recent “poll” offered readers the option of selecting “Untermenschen” as the word that “best describes leftists.” Literally translated as “sub-human,” Untermenschen is a term from Nazi ideology used to describe Jews, Gypsies and any other persons who didn’t meet Hitler’s standards of Aryan purity.

In Bristow’s latest survey of the Spartan Spectator faithful, Untermenschen beat out “stupid,” “evil” and “degenerate” with 54 percent of the vote.

As the anti-Obama backlash continues to play out, with new reports of effigy lynchings, racist graffiti and other disturbing incidents surfacing daily, a number of voices on the far-right fringe are calling for a revival of the militia movement, a loose confederation of hyper-survivalist paramilitary groups that claim legitimacy under the Militia Clause of the Second Amendment.

Characterized by “black helicopter” paranoia and militant opposition to government regulation, especially concerning the purchase and possession of firearms, the militia movement has dramatically declined since peaking in 1996. Law enforcement crackdowns, arrests for weapons violations, and frustration among those waiting for the revolution that never came all contributed to that collapse.

But now, with the election of the nation’s first black president, some conspiracy theorists and fringe “Patriot” radio hosts are seeking to reverse that course by calling on their friends and countrymen to arm themselves, organize and head for the hills in preparation for a fast-approaching second Civil War. Their language is remarkably similar to that employed by the more notorious militia leaders of the 1990s.

“My fellow patriots, constitutionalists and citizens of the failing Republic, HELL is staring you in the eyeballs,” said Greg Evensen, a militia sympathizer and former Kansas state trooper whose essays and radio broadcasts are widely disseminated on apocalyptic Christian and militia websites, as well as the nominally mainstream right-wing Web forum NewsWithViews.

“We will no longer argue amicably about politics,” Evensen said. “Those of you who have anointed this socialist, Muslim sympathizing, gun rights hating, Mexican illegals embracing, abortion loving charmer POTUS [President of the United States] … I see you as my enemy. Am I picking a fight? Pretty much. Might as well, one’s coming down the street anyway. You have been warned.”

Evensen’s screed, which first appeared online Oct. 31, five days before the election, concluded with an outright call to arms: “American patriots you need to decide what your battle plans are. You cannot wait any longer. Are you stored up? Are you prayed up? Have you stayed up all night figuring it out? Have you decided that the time has come? Will you stand firm when they shut off your supplies? Will you resist in the cold and the dark? Will you go all the way to constitutional victory? Minuteman and militias were responsible for their own arms, ammunition and supplies. Can you muster with others and provide the essentials? Can you sleep with your back to a tree on cold, wet ground? Can you shoot and then seek good cover so you can survive another shot? When martial law is declared, can you and will you do these things or will you be rounded up by the hundreds of thousands each day? This is the new reality, friends.”

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BRANDENBURG, Ky. — In a blow to one of the nation’s largest Klan groups, jurors yesterday awarded more than $2.5 million to a teenager who was assaulted by Klansmen at a county fair in rural Kentucky.

The verdict is expected to shut down the Imperial Klans of America (IKA), which has 16 chapters in eight states. “We intend to collect every dime we can on the judgment and do everything within our power to put the Imperial Klans out of business,” said Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen at a press conference after the verdict announcement.

The SPLC sued IKA leader Ron Edwards of Dawson Springs, Ky., contending that members of his Klan group attacked a 16-year-old U.S. citizen of Panamanian descent because they thought he was an “illegal spic.” Also named as a defendant was Jarred Hensley of Cincinnati, who served nearly three years in state prison for assaulting the teenager at a county fair in northwest Kentucky.

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BRANDENBURG, Ky. — A teenager gave an emotional account of his assault by Klansmen during the final day of testimony in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s trial against the Imperial Klans of America.

Jordan Gruver, who was 16 when he was attacked by IKA members at the Meade County Fair, told the jury that he was about to buy a drink from a concession stand when several Klansmen called him a “spic,” spat at him and threw whiskey in his face. Then Klansman Jarred Hensley struck a blow to his jaw that knocked him off his feet. Gruver showed the jury how he curled up in a fetal position and tried to protect his head with his arms. While he lay on the ground, Klansmen kicked him with steel-toed boots.

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BRANDENBURG, Ky. — In dramatic testimony today, a former white supremacist told the court that the head of the Imperial Klans of America (IKA) instructed him to assassinate Southern Poverty Law Center founder Morris Dees (below).

“[IKA leader] Mr. [Ron] Edwards is a very dangerous man to me,” said Kale Kelly, who was once a trusted member of Edwards’s inner circle. “He promotes violence and hatred [toward] anybody who he feels threatens him: minorities, Jews, blacks. I’ve lived with him. I know this.”

Kelly’s testimony, which came during the second day of SPLC’s trial against Edwards, struck a blow to the heart of the Klan leader’s defense: That he does not encourage his members to commit violent acts. It also contradicted Edwards’ earlier testimony that he never told Kale to kill anyone.

The SPLC sued Edwards of Dawson Springs, Ky., in civil court, contending that members of his Klan group attacked and severely injured a 16-year-old boy of Panamanian descent because they mistakenly thought he was “an illegal spic.” Also named as a defendant was Jarred Hensley of Cincinnati, who served two years in state prison for assaulting Gruver at a county fair in northwest Kentucky. The SPLC hopes to win damages large enough to shut down the IKA, one of the largest Klan groups in America.

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A former member of the Imperial Klans of America (IKA) testified today that the group’s leader led a plot to kill the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), according to The Associated Press.

The AP said that Kale Kelly, who is testifying for the SPLC in a lawsuit against the Kentucky-based IKA, testified that IKA leader Ron Edwards wanted to kill the SPLC’s Morris Dees. Edwards was said to be infuriated by an SPLC lawsuit tried by Dees against another white supremacist group, the Aryan Nations, in 1999.

The SPLC sued the IKA, Edwards, and several IKA members over the beating of a 16-year-old boy at a county fair by two IKA members.

Hatewatch will report fully on these developments later in the day.

David Duke revealed this about himself last Saturday: He’s no whiz at math. Or logic.

Speaking to the faithful at a conference of his European American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), Duke said that while nobody is for lynching, liberals have falsely portrayed the history of the gruesome practice. Contrary to popular belief, Duke said, most of the roughly 5,000 people he said were lynched in this country were white. Then he said as many as half of the victims were black.

Either way, he’s wrong.

Between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States, and 3,446 of the victims were black, according to the Archives at Tuskegee Institute. That means nearly 73 percent of those lynched were black.

None of the diehards at the EURO conference questioned Duke’s figures. They were too busy congratulating one another for even having a conference. For a while last week it appeared that Duke’s fans might not get to hear his wisdom on lynching and other racial issues. It even appeared Duke might end up sleeping on a bench at a Greyhound station or under a tree in a city park.

EURO initially scheduled a conference Nov. 7-9 at a hotel and resort in Olive Branch, Miss., near Memphis. The hotel booted the group out on Nov. 4, citing safety concerns as a result of the furor created by the Duke group’s planned appearance.

Duke’s co-organizer of the event, James Edwards (pictured with Duke below), host of radical-right Memphis radio show “The Political Cesspool,” was so traumatized by this development that “my body literally went into a convulsive state,” he wrote on his program’s website. “I can remember gagging while I was on the phone with David as we tried to determine what our options were. The stress was nearly more than I could bear.” Meanwhile, Duke’s notoriety got him ejected from three hotel rooms, according to Edwards.

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