But given the fact that the conference was organized by the far-right World Net Daily (WND) and two of the panelists work for the online organization, their verdict was about as surprising as balmy nights and swaying palms on a South Florida summer night. Still, it reflected the anger and resentment that many conservatives have felt over the characterization of the populist Tea Parties as racist.

Many liberals and reporters have pointed out various signs of anti-black racism within the movement, which took root after Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president in late 2008. The NAACP brought that criticism to a new level this July, when it passed a resolution asking Tea Party leaders to repudiate followers who use racist language and symbols. The movement was set back on its heels again a few days later, when Mark Williams, chairman of the Tea Party Express, was expelled along with his group from the National Tea Party Federation after he wrote a satirical letter in which he called slavery as “great gig.” Earlier, Dale Robertson, leader of TeaParty.org, wrote an arguably racist E-mail to his followers.

The World Net Daily crowd stands considerably to the right of most Tea Party followers, and it is overwhelmingly white. But the WNDers feel the Tea Parties’ pain, and so the conference offered up what black speakers it had to take on the allegations of racism. They included Erik Rush, a WND columnist; Albert Thompson, executive assistant to Elizabeth Farah, who started WND with her husband Joseph; and Alan Keyes, an ultraconservative activist and oft-times candidate who has called President Obama “a radical communist.”

“There are a few racists in there. In any group, you’re going to find a few people of low character,” Rush said. But, for most in the movement, Rush said, “This has never been about Barack Obama. It’s certainly not about his skin color.”

He spoke to an audience of some 70 people. One of them was black.

For Thompson, the Tea Parties arose out of concern about illegal immigration and fears that Obama would push amnesty on a large scale. “It’s about a fundamental transformation without their consent,” he said. Keyes had a slightly different take, saying that Obama’s Marxism is what sparked the movement. He said Tea Partiers should ignore those who claim there are racists among them. “Let them take their phony standards to whatever form of perdition they choose,” he said.

Earlier on Saturday, conference attendees were entertained by Rusty Humphries, a nationally syndicated talk-radio personality. He sang ditties such as “Thank Allah I’m a Jihad Boy,” to the tune of John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” and “Everybody’s Sneakin’ into the USA,” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA.” “I’m so sick and tired of being called a racist,” Humphries said to applause. He then suggested that perhaps Mexicans coming into the United States could at least learn Americans customs and the English language and “maybe have $10 in your pocket.” He also implied that Mexican immigrants are mooches.

And then it was back to simple attacks on Obama and his administration, the mainstay theme of the entire “Taking America Back” conference. Humphries complained of the “radical, socialist regime in power” that has created the “United Socialist States of America.” WND Managing Editor David Kupelian said Obama is a Marxist whose advisors are “clinically insane” and added that the Department of Education is filled with “atheistic, progressive, socialistic wackos.” Kupelian — who has the countenance of an undertaker, but acted a good deal gloomier — also had bitter words for most anybody with leftist leanings. “The hard left — they hate God; they hate normalcy.” The Tea Party movement wants an Ozzie and Harriet America, he continued. But “the left sees Ku Klux Klan everywhere.”

Out of more than two dozen speakers at the “Taking America Back” conference, only two were women. (U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, was a late scratch but did deliver a videotaped message.) One of them, Judith Reisman, maintained that the reports of the late sex researcher Alfred Kinsey changed America’s core values and laws in terrible ways with flawed studies. (Kinsey was the first public figure to suggest that very large numbers of Americans were homosexual or had had same-sex experiences; most researchers today do believe his estimates of the prevalence of homosexuality were high.) Among other things, she called Kinsey — who died 54 years ago — a “psychopath” and a “dirty old man.” She said many of his conclusions were “a massive lie” and that she hopes to push for a grand jury or congressional investigation next year of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, as well as a class-action suit.

And then there was Victoria Jackson, best known as part of the ensemble cast of “Saturday Night Live” from 1986 to 1992. Now 51 and a self-described Tea Party member, she performed a tune, “There’s a Communist Living in the White House” on Friday night, and followed that up on Saturday evening with another ditty in which she again called Obama a communist.

Jackson’s political awakening is apparently a fairly new thing — she said she didn’t vote for the first time until she was in her 40s. But now she’s fully engaged and has a thing or two to tell the world: Evolution is wrong, the media is biased, her generation was brainwashed, and the president is a communist. Progressives, socialists, communists — they’re “all the same,” Jackson said.

The audience loved her.

Not only is Obama a communist, but the Democratic Party is “indistinguishable from socialists or communists in the way they think,” Jerome Corsi told a receptive and enthusiastic audience today, the conference’s second day. Corsi is a frequent contributor to the right-wing World Net Daily (WND) that organized the confab at the Doral Golf Resort & Spa, and has written books savaging Obama and Sen. John Kerry, when Kerry was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004.

Corsi also claimed that Obama’s autobiography was “most likely written by Bill Ayers.” Ayers was an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War and co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described revolutionary communist group. He and Obama knew each other in Chicago, decades after Ayers’ alleged illegal activities. Major media organizations have concluded the two men never had a close relationship, but Corsi and others like him insist it was something more.

Corsi also implied that Obama is a Muslim and derided him for not attending church services in Washington, D.C. “He can’t pick a church because he doesn’t believe in God, as far as I can see,” Corsi said. He called on the president to renounce Lucifer and Islam in order to prove that he’s a Christian. For his part, Obama has clearly described himself as a practicing Christian for decades.

Another speaker, Robert Knight, a correspondent for ultra-conservative Coral Ridge Ministries of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., claimed that the Obama Administration is taking the United States closer to communism than any president in history. The administration is “staffed with socialists and communists of all stripes,” he said, without naming any examples.

WND’s Jerusalem-based reporter Aaron Klein — who had a book published this year calling Obama a “Manchurian candidate” — told the crowd that Obama “has a certain affinity” for Muslims, but that he’s found no evidence he is one. Still, he added, the president studied the Koran and attended a mosque as a child in Indonesia. And he contended that Obama’s policies and statements regarding Islam have endangered America. Yet another speaker claimed that “there’s evidence” that Obama’s education was paid for by the Saudis. The purported evidence was not described.

The perceived evils and dangers of Islam comprised a good part of today’s discussions. During a question-and-answer session with the audience, one conference attendee proposed that the United States impose a moratorium on Muslim immigration and education until the Koran’s teachings become compatible with the U.S. Constitution. Many in the audience cheered the idea. Conservative activist and perennial candidate for public office Alan Keyes responded, “We should be eager” for Muslims to come to America. “It saves us the trouble of going over there to evangelize,” he said. “I think we’ve become timid. I think we’ve become afraid.” He, too, got applause.

But nobody seemed to get a louder ovation than Corsi. One of the most prominent and persistent of those on the far right who maintain that Obama hasn’t proved that he was born in America, Corsi again insisted that the president needs to produce the “long form” of his birth certificate. Obama is the “liar in chief,” Corsi said, claiming that the president stole the Social Security number of somebody else to establish a U.S. identity. While even most Republicans say they believe Obama was born in Hawaii, Corsi and World Net Daily never seem to tire of the subject. Corsi said he’s releasing a book next year titled “Where is the Birth Certificate?”

Like other speakers and attendees at the conference, Corsi also complained that the Republican Party’s allegedly benign attitude toward homosexuals and same-sex marriage is unacceptable. “If this is where the Republican Party wants to go, as far I’m concerned, they can go there alone,” he said. “The big-tent Republican Party doesn’t work.”

Corsi drew loud cheers when he proposed that the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Education be dismantled. “All they want to do is teach our kids sex education,” he complained of the latter. He left the stage to a standing ovation.

The political rhetoric extended outside the ballroom where the conference is being held. Decals were affixed to urinals in at least one men’s room that expressed the sentiments of many at the conference.

“Hitler, Stalin & Mao all loved gun control,” read one decal. Said another: “Vote intelligently in November. It may be your last chance to preserve freedom.”

Farah’s soothsaying came during a question-and-answer session during the first day of a three-day conference he put together in Miami called “Taking America Back 2010” (the day after the conference ends, Farah and other far-right stalwarts will be hosting a similar event, this one on board a Caribbean cruise). A prayer that kicked off the conference today thanked God for Farah’s right-wing, conspiracy-minded WND. Later, one of the speakers thanked God for Farah. Farah, however, was far less interested in thanks than in the kind of political mudslinging for which he and several other conference attendees are well known.

Farah’s online publication — one of the “news” pillars of the contemporary American far right — has repeatedly questioned whether Obama was born in the United States (if he wasn’t, he could not legally serve as president). Of course, Obama has produced documents showing he was born in Hawaii, and that state’s Republican governor, along with a slew of news organizations, have vouched for his citizenship. But none of that has convinced Farah and his fellow travelers.

One of those fellow travelers, Jerome Corsi, is scheduled to speak at Farah’s conference Friday. A regular WND contributor and prolific producer of tendentious material, Corsi has written one book savaging Obama; another praising the anti-immigrant Minuteman movement; and a third, the most infamous, that “Swift-boated” then-Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Corsi has also been a guest on a white supremacist radio show.

In his prepared remarks today, Farah didn’t touch on Obama’s birthplace. Instead, he devoted much of his speech to what he sees as the shortcomings of the conservative movement, and his dismay at the progress being made by gay rights proponents. “The movement is simply not up to the task at hand,” an exasperated Farah complained. He added that there are ongoing efforts by unnamed forces to limit the agenda of the Tea Party movement solely to economic issues — a grave mistake, according to Farah, who told his audience of some 90 people that the conservative movement had lost its bearings by not uniformly opposing same-sex marriage. “Conservatives don’t recognize sin when they see it,” he said.

He cited right-wing attack dog Ann Coulter, Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, Fox News commentator Glenn Beck and radio ranter Rush Limbaugh as examples of what he’s talking about. Farah recently withdrew his invitation for Coulter to speak at the Miami conference after learning that she was the headliner at an upcoming meeting of a gay Republican organization called GOProud. (Coulter, never one for niceties, responded by describing her erstwhile co-religionist as a “publicity whore.”) Norquist serves on GOProud’s advisory council. Beck recently said gay marriage is not a threat to the country. Limbaugh favors civil unions, Farah added, and had Elton John perform at his wedding.

“Conservatives aren’t fighting. They’re capitulating,” Farah fumed. “Their standards are being destroyed.”

He called U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker “a homosexual activist” who “imposed his own views on the electorate of California” by ruling last month that that state’s Proposition 8 ballot denying marriage rights to same-sex couples was unconstitutional. “I don’t think Americans can take much more of this tyranny,” he said. Farah also criticized pastors who are silent on controversial social issues, such as same-sex marriage. And he wasn’t alone. Clergy who don’t speak out on the “culture war” are “Dr. Evil, and part of the problem,” said another speaker, Doug Giles. Giles added that he wasn’t including Muslims in his criticism “because if we take them on…” — and then he made a sound mimicking that of explosives going off. Later, referring to a proposed Islamic Center in lower Manhattan, he said, “Islam is wanting to build a theme park at Ground Zero.”

Giles isn’t just another conservative South Florida minister and radio commentator. It was Giles’ daughter, Hannah, who famously pretended to be a prostitute in an undercover video filmed at ACORN offices that was used by conservatives to essentially destroy the liberal community organizing group. Giles’ other daughter has started a website called Girls Just Want to Have Guns.

Another speaker, Floyd Brown, led the audience in chants of “Enough is enough!” Brown is president of a consulting company that is perhaps best known for introducing the racially charged Willie Horton television ad that badly damaged the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988. “Obama hates Christianity,” Brown declared. “He is a Muslim.” The proof? Among other transgressions, the president has refused to attend the National Prayer Breakfast but celebrates Muslim holy days, Brown claimed. The media, for its part, is involved in a “conspiracy of silence” to conceal Obama’s hatred of Christianity, he charged.

Brown worked for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and now he advocates that the new Congress that convenes after the November elections impeach Obama for high crimes and misdemeanors. That broad term, he said, simply means bad behavior. The president, he claimed, wants the United States to fail so that the goals of an “international socialist movement” will be achieved. “Barack Obama is a very dangerous man,” Brown declared. The past two years have been a “slow progression of what I’ll call a bloodless coup.”

Many of the speakers today and for the remainder of “Taking America Back” are from the religious right. One of them, a pastor named Gary Cass, decried the absence of God in politics. Secularism, he said, “seeks to undermine the republic with arbitrary, man-made laws and rights. When will we cry out to God for his mercy on America?”

Outside the ballroom where the parades of speakers appeared, conference attendees could get books like The Homosexual Agenda signed, buy slogan-emblazoned T-shirts and jewelry, grab literature from groups advocating that parents pull their kids from public schools in favor of Christian schools, pick up petitions opposing the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero, and much, much more.

Douglas, 64, is a motorcycle aficionado who used to publish a biker magazine called Thunder Riders and another periodical titled Free American. The latter was a showcase for conspiracy theories, offbeat medical remedies and anti-Semitic screeds, such as “Are the Jews Behind the Destruction of America?” He also was information officer for the New Mexico Militia in the 1990s, sold tracts of the anti-Semitic Christian Identity theology at a 2002 expo, and blamed Jews for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks at another conference. As if that wasn’t enough, he was for a time mayor of the tiny hamlet of Bingham, N.M., which he succeeded in having declared a “U.N.-free zone.” He self-published a couple of “adventure novels” he said were modeled on John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. And he broadcast a daily shortwave radio program.

But Douglas’ world crashed in 2004, when he was struck by a car while riding his motorcycle. He says he was hospitalized for four months with severe head and other injuries and doctors gave his family little hope he would survive, or, if he did, have all his faculties. “The doctors had no idea of the sort of man Clay Douglas was,” he writes of himself in the third person on his website.

When Douglas was released from the hospital, his wife of 25 years promptly left him, and his businesses were in tatters, he says. He eventually resumed his radio show on the Internet and combined his businesses into one entity, CRD Publishing.

Nowadays, Douglas is still hawking his books and DVDs on his website, and posting anti-Semitic and conspiracy-laden content.  But, in a new twist, he’s also promoting the benefits of hemp and of investing in so-called “Liberty Villages.” The latter project, which Douglas describes as a “national franchise opportunity,” apparently entails investors purchasing trailers constructed to look like cabins, teepees and yurts on property Douglas owns in New Mexico; the “villages” would cater to itinerant bikers traveling around the country. Ultimately, Douglas says that his Liberty Villages — none of which seem to have been built or even begun — aim to become self-sufficient communities that recreate “the kind of neighborhood we had in the beginning here in America.” Each Liberty Village in the Southwest will apply for the right to grow medical marijuana, he adds.

Douglas promises short-term financing, low interest rates and a variety of architectural styles. And time is of the essence, to hear Douglas tell it, what with high gas prices, “millions of illegals roaming our streets” and ominous detention centers being built.

But there are hints that Douglas’ strange little empire is struggling. He has posted a lengthy proposal for potential investors in his ventures. He needs $25,000 to cover existing debt and basic essentials and another $15,000 for expansion. With additional capital and staff, he envisions cross-promotion opportunities between his biker magazine, his radio show and the products and books he hopes to sell. He hopes to resurrect his Free American magazine that “explores the conspiracy version of history,” by combining it with Thunder Riders. His radio shows could be archived for late night programming from participating radio stations  “until his popularity propels him into primetime with [Rush] Limbaugh, [Michael] Savage, [Don] Imus and [Michael] Reagan,” he writes, as usual, in the third person.

Sound grandiose? Not at all, Douglas says. Indeed, “many commanding officers in our armed services, police captains, intelligence operatives, Congressmen, Senators, governors and even Presidents have read his articles, relied on his intelligence, listened to his words over the airwaves for better than ten years.”

And who can blame them? “Tall, well built, handsome with an IQ well into the genius level, Clay seems to be a natural leader,” Douglas writes, steering clear of any hint of false modesty. He’s “personable, having a quick wit and a sharp mind” and “any of his videos will glue a couple to their couch for an evening.” He also is “self disciplined, possessing a will of iron, no fear.”

Despite the healthy state of his self-esteem, Douglas anticipates skepticism. “You may be asking yourself, if the above description is accurate, why isn’t he in Hollywood raking in the big bucks instead of working alone in his studio? Major media companies pay big bucks for personalities with less talent. Why hasn’t a network scooped this guy up? For the same reason the U.S. Army turned down his application for OCS [Officer Training School]. Sorry, son, someone with your IQ will question orders. They were right! Clay Douglas is the ultimate rebel.”

It’s these qualities, Douglas assures would-be investors, that “earned him the respect off equally strong men who have come back from war to mount the steel horses that are the symbol of the freedom they were willing to fight for. It is these qualities that make thousands of copies of Thunder Riders and Free American fly off the shelves around the country.”

Now all the self-described genius needs is your money.

The mayor and other residents aren’t pleased. “There’s never been a local person involved in these marches or rallies,” Mayor Daniel Speer told Hatewatch this week. But they’re resigned to being a favorite locale for the haters on the American radical right. Speer’s town is more than one-quarter black, but it has for decades been a favorite place for white supremacist groups to rally because of one unfortunate historical fact: This was where the Ku Klux Klan was born.

The next such event on tap in Pulaski: the annual European Heritage Festival, scheduled for Oct. 23. The event, despite its name, has the heavy footprint of the Klan all over it. Sponsors include the Christian Revival Center led by long-time Arkansas Klan leader Thom Robb; the Knights Party USA (better known by its original name of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan), which is Robb’s “political” organization; Voice of Reason radio, which features interviews with white nationalist luminaries such as Jamie Kelso and Tomislav Sunic; and Abundant Life Fellowship of Morgantown, Ind.

Abundant Life’s pastor, Jonathan Harness, is apparently a reader of Klan material. Last year, he responded to a blog by Robb’s daughter, who is involved in her father’s racist group, by writing that he was dismayed when black rapper Kanye West rudely interrupted a speech by country singer Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Harness wrote that West had “absolutely disrespected this white woman.”

“It’s a great place to come and learn about the heritage of European Americans,” the festival’s website says. The site includes links to racist individuals and groups including David Duke, who founded Robb’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1975; the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity” and opposes “race mixing”; and The Barnes Review, the leading American journal devoted to denying the Holocaust.

The European Heritage Festival follows by three months a “White Unity Day March and Rally” in Pulaski conducted by the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations. A year earlier, in July 2009, the Fraternal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan staged a birthday march in Pulaski for their hero, Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. There have been many other Klan rallies in Pulaski over the decades.

The Klan was organized as a secret fraternity by six Confederate veterans in December 1865 in Pulaski. As the club grew, it evolved from a club for wealthy and bored young veterans into a vigilante terrorist organization. It soon attracted as its first national leader Forrest, who had been a millionaire Memphis slave trader before the Civil War and also presided over the massacre of black Union soldiers attempting to surrender at Fort Pillow, Tenn., in 1864. (It remains unclear whether or not Forrest actively encouraged the massacre, as many Union survivors testified.) Forrest led the Klan through its most violent period, when thousands of acts of terrorism essentially forced black Southerners back into a form of servitude.

Robb’s Klan group has staged events in Pulaski going back to at least 1983, says Speer, who has been mayor nearly 21 years and has lived most of his 60 years in the southern Tennessee town. So many Klan events were held in the 1980s that local businesses, large and small, closed their doors in disgust during a 1989 rally as a way of silently protesting, Speer said. At times, folks in Pulaski hoped that if they ignored the Klan and other white supremacist groups when they came to Pulaski, they would lose interest in the town and permanently leave, Speer says. But they didn’t, and over the years the groups’ events have brought people ranging from satirist Stephen Colbert to reporters from as far away as Russia and Italy.

That’s of no concern to those attending next month’s European Heritage Festival. They’re planning on hearing speeches and eating hot dogs, apple pie and barbecue pork. Entertainment will be provided by Charity and Shelby Pendergraft, singing sisters who call themselves Heritage Connection. Thom Robb is their grandfather. Their mother, Rachel Pendergraft, is spokeswoman for Robb’s Knights Party. And if that’s not excitement enough for those attending the festivities, there’s always the Sam Davis Museum on Sam Davis Avenue. Davis was the “Boy Hero of the Confederacy” who was captured by the Yankees in 1863 and charged and convicted by a court-martial of spying. Davis was hanged by the Union Army on his 21^st birthday — in Pulaski, of course.

Speer says that his town can’t constitutionally stop these groups from staging events as long as they comply with terms of their rally permits. At one point, the town passed a parade ordinance banning participants from wearing anything covering their heads — say, a hood. But a federal judge tossed the measure, which Speer says could have barred Boy Scouts from wearing their full uniforms in a parade.

“It’s frustrating,” the mayor says. “[We’re associated with] the Klan. It’s a stigma. Unfortunately, I just don’t see it going away.”