It’s been another sorry year in the world of hate, as knuckle-dragging white supremacists and their fellow travelers did their best to make our country a little worse with each new passing day. Here at Hatewatch, we’ve been hard at work trying to winnow away the garden-variety savagery that habitués of our blog know so well in favor of truly extraordinary examples of asinine activities from the benighted denizens of the radical right. It hasn’t been easy for members of the Hatewatch 2nd Annual Smackdown Awards Committee, who’ve had to wade heroically through the sewers and cesspools to produce our list. But now they’ve returned from that underworld, muddied but unbowed, to offer our readers, without further ado, Hatewatch’s year-end countdown of the very, very worst of 2008:

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Every year on Dec. 8, white supremacist groups in the U.S. and sometimes in the U.K. and Germany hold “Martyr’s Day” parties to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Robert Matthews, the founder of the infamous – though long defunct – neo-Nazi domestic terrorist organization The Order, also known as the Silent Brotherhood or Bruders Scheweigen.

Matthews died in a shootout with FBI agents on Dec. 8, 1984.

A Martyr’s Day gathering hosted in a Florida rental hall earlier this month by the Confederate Hammerskins (CHS), a regional division of the Hammerskin Nation, was typical in many respects: it drew 100-150 skinheads who drank a lot of cheap beer and slam-danced to live hate rock bands.

But this Martyr’s Day party was more noteworthy than usual for two reasons.

First of all, it was co-sponsored by the American Front, a resurgent national skinhead syndicate modeled after Britain’s National Front, along with Volksfront, a Portland, Ore., skinhead gang. This marked a high level of cooperation between the three skinhead groups.

Even more remarkable, however, was the keynote speaker: Richard Kemp, the youngest member of The Order, who called in from the Federal Correctional Institute in Sheridan, Ore., to deliver his “Martyr’s Day Address,” amplified through loudspeakers.

“Let each of us be so inspired by the devotion of our fallen comrades that we lift their standards as we march into the future,” Kemp said.

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Antigovernment scofflaw Robert Fox used to make big money teaching clients how to outwit the legal system. But last week, Fox — a fugitive wanted in Texas on a felony charge since July — stumbled into the arms of law enforcement when he actually showed up for a court appearance related to a completely different case.

“It was in an act of great hubris that he was arrested,” Jacksonville, Texas, Police Detective Jason Price told Hatewatch.

Fox led the House of Israel, which masqueraded as a church but in fact served as a crash pad for “sovereign citizens” — members of an extreme-right movement whose adherents believe they are not citizens of the United States and therefore not subject to many of its laws, including the tax code.

Believed to be in his late 50s, Fox went on the lam around the time he was charged with barratry, or improperly trying to solicit business for his legal practice, a felony under Texas law. He had previously posted bond after being charged with four counts of possessing dangerous drugs and two counts of practicing law without a license, all misdemeanors.

After more than four months of eluding police, Fox arrived at the Cherokee County Courthouse on Dec. 3 for an administrative hearing related to the drug charges. Although Fox knew there was a warrant for his arrest, Price suspects he showed up anyway because otherwise he would have faced a failure to appear charge and risked forfeiting his bond. As it happened, the judge who signed the barratry arrest warrant back in July was also scheduled to preside over Fox’s December court hearing. The judge remembered Fox and asked a member of his staff to alert the Jacksonville Police Department. Court personnel detained Fox until Jacksonville police got to the courthouse to arrest him. Fox was accompanied by several people who appeared to be supporters and wished him well as he was taken into custody. ( continue to full post… )

Federal prosecutors announced today that Bill White, arguably the most important neo-Nazi leader in America, has been indicted on seven counts related to making Internet and other threats that could bring him 55 years in prison and $1.75 million in fines.

White was already being held in a federal holding facility in Chicago, where he faces an earlier charge of obstructing justice for publishing personal information about a jury foreman on his website. White suggested in that posting that the juror had committed a crime by voting in 2004 to convict another neo-Nazi leader, Matt Hale, for soliciting the murder of a federal judge. (The judge was not harmed.) Trial on that charge has been set for March 3 in Chicago federal court.

Bond was denied to White in two earlier hearings. In the most recent, on Dec. 5, a judge said White would be held “to ensure the safety of the community.”

In recent years, White has developed a reputation as a blustery threatmaker, posting personal information such as home addresses and phone numbers of many individuals — including the author of this blog posting — and, in some cases, suggesting that it would be good to kill them. He was known for pushing First Amendment protections to their absolute limit, although the indictments suggest that he was not careful enough to prevent the lodging of extremely serious charges.

Prosecutors in Roanoke, Va., where White lives and where the new indictments were brought, suggested that the additional charges would help stem the tide of Internet threats. “The Internet has proven to be a powerful force in our daily lives. It has made information from across the globe available at the click of a mouse,” Acting U.S. Attorney Julia Dudley said today. “The law enforcement community cannot allow individuals to unlawfully threaten anyone, in any manner. When violent threats are made, legal action must be taken and justice must be served.” ( continue to full post… )

Four years after a neo-Nazi record label provoked a nationwide outcry by distributing hate rock to middle and high school students, one of the men behind that ambitious recruitment drive is at it again.

White power music broker Bryant Cecchini, who uses the alias Byron Calvert, recently announced on his website that he had begun distribution last week of 30,000 CDs. The campaign is dubbed “Project Schoolyard Volume II” and targets teenagers with a 25-song sampler that features tracks such as “White Power” and “Some Niggers Never Die.” “Remember,” he wrote, “we don’t just entertain racist kids, we create them.”

The CDs are on sale for 30 cents each, but Cecchini is including several free with each order from Tightrope, his Arkansas-based website that offers hate music and other racist merchandise. Cecchini’s website features a fist clasping a noose and the motto, “It’s not illegal to be White … yet!”

Cecchini told the Intelligence Report that he has already shipped a few thousand of the CDs in batches of 50 to longtime acquaintances who, he says, will hand them out to children at malls, concerts, skate parks and schools. He said the CDs he’s mailed in bulk have gone to at least seven states — Alaska, Arkansas, California, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Pennsylvania — while the ones he’s packaged with customer orders have been sent nationwide. Cecchini said he also uses multiple MySpace accounts that are not overtly racist to reach white students at schools where racially charged incidents have occurred. ( continue to full post… )

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the most important anti-immigration group in America, recently issued an angry press release denouncing those who suggest that demonizing nativist rhetoric leads to hate violence. FAIR said that this “outrageous behavior” was part of “a calculated strategy” aimed at “silenc[ing] legitimate immigration policy debate” and added that those who suggest such a link between rhetoric and hate crime “provide no proof whatsoever.” FAIR and its leader, Dan Stein, were particularly incensed that Latino rights organizations had “cynically” suggested that the recent murder of Marcelo Lucero on Long Island, N.Y., by white teenagers who had gone hunting for “Mexicans,” was related to the demonization of Latino immigrants that had been particularly heavy there.

FAIR accused the National Council of La Raza, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), and unnamed other organizations of “manipulat[ing] the data” on hate crimes. But the fact is that it is FAIR that dishonestly manipulated data as part of a bid to minimize anti-Latino hate violence.

FAIR says that anti-Hispanic hate crime incidents went up by just 3.3% between 2006 and 2007, and it is right. But it completely ignores the fact — which is what La Raza, MALDEF and the Southern Poverty Law Center (publisher of this blog) have been pointing out — that that figure is only the latest rise of many. In fact, the very same FBI hate crime statistics cited by FAIR to make its case show that anti-Latino hate crimes have risen a total of 40% between 2003 and 2007 (see chart below). While the FBI statistics are not conclusive, they indicate a trend that parallels the rise in anti-immigration groups and their often-vicious anti-Latino rhetoric. As Jack Levin, the Brudnick professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University and a national expert on hate crime, told Hatewatch: “It’s not just the most recent numbers. It’s the trend over a number of years that lends credibility to the notion that we’re seeing a very real and possibly dramatic rise in anti-Latino hate incidents.”

FAIR also suggests, based on the number of incidents reported by the FBI, that the prevalence of anti-Latino hate crimes is very low — 1.3 attacks per 100,000 Latinos. It ignores the important, 2005 Justice Department study (pdf) that concluded that the real level of hate-motivated attacks on Latinos (this at a time before the anti-immigration movement and its rhetoric had really exploded) was vastly higher — 90 per 100,000 Latinos. The study, considered by criminologists to be far more accurate that the annual hate crime statistics, found that huge numbers of hate crimes are not reported to police or don’t find their way into the FBI’s statistics for various other reasons. The underreporting problem is even more severe among undocumented immigrants, who rarely report crimes to police because they are afraid they will be deported. ( continue to full post… )

Derek Black isn’t feeling the love from the Palm Beach County, Fla., Republican Party. On Wednesday night, the party’s chairman — or “Jewish supremacist chairman” in the words of Derek’s dad, white nationalist webmaster Don Black — refused to seat the younger Black on the executive committee he won election to in August because Black, 19, failed to sign a GOP loyalty oath by the required deadline. And besides that, said party chairman Sid Dinerstein, Black is unwelcome because he’s a white supremacist. Black said he may sue, but his friend, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Louisiana state representative David Duke made that sound like an iffy proposition on his website.

“Whether Derek Black pursues legal action is contingent upon the family finances,” Duke’s website states. “If he truly wants to make an issue of this and lacks finances, I hope he considers setting up a legal fund and reaching out to the white nationalist community for help. This is a battle worth joining.”

Black is the 19-year-old son of Don Black, a former Alabama Klan boss who is the founder of Stormfront.com, the world’s largest white supremacist online forum. Derek Black works on his father’s website. His mother, Chloe Black, was married to Duke before she married Don Black.

Derek Black won election to one of 111 Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee seats, beating the incumbent with 58% of the vote. Committee members’ low-profile duties include electing the county party chairman and promoting voter turnout. After Dinerstein, the local party chief, learned more about Black, he said he wouldn’t seat him on the committee. He could do so, he said, because Black failed to sign the GOP loyalty oath by the June 20 deadline. ( continue to full post… )

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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