Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Editor's Pick
SPLC Hate Group Count Tops 1,000 as Radical Right Expansion Continues
011 months ago
Editor’s Note: The Southern Poverty Law Center is today releasing its annual count of groups on the American radical right and analysis. What follows is the main essay from the new issue of the Intelligence Report, the SPLC’s investigative magazine. In the story, you’ll find links to our new hate group map and additional lists of antigovernment “Patriot” groups and nativist vigilante organizations. The issue also contains my editorial and stories on Cliff Kincaid, a homophobic propagandist at the far-right Accuracy in Media group; the adoption of an Oklahoma law forbidding the use of Shariah law; a racist group’s funding of two Mississippi private academies; a white supremacist’s new novel targeting the SPLC; the National Center for Constitutional Studies and its extremist version of American history; candidates with extreme-right ideas who ran in last year’s elections; an interview with a former “esoteric Nazi,” and more. The new issue’s table of contents is here.
For the second year in a row, the radical right in America expanded explosively in 2010, driven by resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government’s handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities. For many on the radical right, anger is focusing on President Obama, who is seen as embodying everything that’s wrong with the country.
Hate groups topped 1,000 for the first time since the Southern Poverty Law Center began counting such groups in the 1980s. Anti-immigrant vigilante groups, despite having some of the political wind taken out of their sails by the adoption of hard-line anti-immigration laws around the country, continued to rise slowly. But by far the most dramatic growth came in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement — conspiracy-minded organizations that see the federal government as their primary enemy — which gained more than 300 new groups, a jump of over 60%.
Taken together, these three strands of the radical right — the hatemongers, the nativists and the antigovernment zealots — increased from 1,753 groups in 2009 to 2,145 in 2010, a 22% rise. That followed a 2008-2009 increase of 40%.
What may be most remarkable is that this growth of right-wing extremism came even as politicians around the country, blown by gusts from the Tea Parties and other conservative formations, tacked hard to the right, co-opting many of the issues important to extremists. Last April, for instance, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed S.B. 1070, the harshest anti-immigrant law in memory, setting off a tsunami of proposals for similar laws across the country. Continuing growth of the radical right could be curtailed as a result of this shift, especially since Republicans, many of them highly conservative, recaptured the U.S. House last fall.
But despite those historic Republican gains, the early signs suggest that even as the more mainstream political right strengthens, the radical right has remained highly energized. In an 11-day period this January, a neo-Nazi was arrested headed for the Arizona border with a dozen homemade grenades; a terrorist bomb attack on a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Wash., was averted after police dismantled a sophisticated anti-personnel weapon; and a man who officials said had a long history of antigovernment activities was arrested outside a packed mosque in Dearborn, Mich., and charged with possessing explosives with unlawful intent. That’s in addition, the same month, to the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, an attack that left six dead and may have had a political dimension.
It’s also clear that other kinds of radical activity are on the rise. Since the murder last May 20 of two West Memphis, Ark., police officers by two members of the so-called “sovereign citizens” movement, police from around the country have contacted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to report what one detective in Kentucky described as a “dramatic increase” in sovereign activity. Sovereign citizens, who, like militias, are part of the larger Patriot movement, believe that the federal government has no right to tax or regulate them and, as a result, often come into conflict with police and tax authorities. Another sign of their increased activity came early this year, when the Treasury Department, in a report assessing what the IRS faces in 2011, said its biggest challenge will be the “attacks and threats against IRS employees and facilities [that] have risen steadily in recent years.”
Extremist ideas have not been limited to the radical right; already this year, state legislators have offered up a raft of proposals influenced by such ideas. In Arizona, the author of the S.B. 1070 law — a man who just became Senate president on the basis of his harshly nativist rhetoric — proposed a law this January that would allow his state to refuse to obey any federal law or regulation it cared to. In Virginia, a state legislator wants to pass a law aimed at creating an alternative currency “in the event of the destruction of the Federal Reserve System’s currency” — a longstanding fear of right-wing extremists. And in Montana, a state senator is working to pass a statute called the “Sheriffs First Act” that would require federal law enforcement to ask local sheriffs’ permission to act in their counties or face jail. All three laws are almost certainly unconstitutional, legal experts say, and they all originate in ideas that first came from ideologues of the radical right.
There also are new attempts by nativist forces to roll back birthright citizenship, which makes all children born in the U.S. citizens. Such laws have been introduced this year in Congress, and a coalition of state legislators is promising to do the same in their states. And then there’s Oklahoma, where 70% of voters last November approved a measure to forbid judges to consider Islamic law in the state’s courtrooms (see related story) — a completely groundless fear, but one pushed nonetheless by Islamophobes. Since then, lawmakers have promised to pass similar laws in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah.
After the Giffords assassination attempt, a kind of national dialogue began about the political vitriol that increasingly passes for “mainstream” political debate. But it didn’t seem to get very far. Four days after the shooting, a campaign called the Civility Project — a two-year effort led by an evangelical conservative tied to top Republicans — said it was shutting down because of a lack of interest and furious opposition. “The worst E-mails I received about the Civility Project were from conservatives with just unbelievable language about communists and some words I wouldn’t use in this phone call,” director Mark DeMoss told The New York Times. “This political divide has become so sharp that everything is black and white, and too many conservatives can see no redeeming value in any” opponent.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll this January captured the atmosphere well. It found that 82% of Americans saw their country’s political discourse as “negative.” Even more remarkably, the poll determined that 49% thought that negative tone could or already had encouraged political violence.
Last year’s rise in hate groups (see map) was the latest in a trend stretching all the way back to the year 2000, when the SPLC counted 602 such groups. Since then, they have risen steadily, mainly on the basis of exploiting the issue of undocumented immigration from Mexico and Central America. Last year, the number of hate groups rose to 1,002 from 932, a 7.5% increase over the previous year and a 66% rise since 2000.
At the same time, what the SPLC defines as “nativist extremist” groups — organizations that go beyond mere advocacy of restrictive immigration policy to actually confront or harass suspected immigrants or their employers — rose slightly, despite the fact that most of their key issues had been taken up by mainstream politicians (see story and list). There were 319 such groups in 2010, up 3% from 309 in 2009.
But like the year before, it was the antigovernment Patriot groups that grew most dramatically (see list), at least partly on the basis of furious rhetoric from the right aimed at the nation’s first black president — a man who has come to represent to at least some Americans ongoing changes in the racial makeup of the country. The Patriot groups, which had risen and fallen once before during the militia movement of the 1990s, first came roaring back in 2009, when they rose 244% to 512 from 149 a year earlier. In 2010, they rose again sharply, adding 312 new groups to reach 824, a 61% increase. The highest prior count of Patriot groups came in 1996, when the SPLC found 858.
It’s hard to predict where this volatile situation will lead. Conservatives last November made great gains and some of them are championing a surprising number of the issues pushed by the radical right — a fact that could help deflate some of the even more extreme political forces. But those GOP electoral advances also left the Congress divided and increasingly lined up against the Democratic president, which is likely to paralyze the country on such key issues as immigration reform.
What seems certain is that President Obama will continue to serve as a lightning rod for many on the political right, a man who represents both the federal government and the fact that the racial make-up of the United States is changing, something that upsets a significant number of white Americans. And that suggests that the polarized politics of this country could get worse before they get better.
Who is Jared Lee Loughner?
01 year ago
Is Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged mass murderer who shot U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, a right-wing extremist?
It’s hard to say. When you look at the Internet material he purportedly produced, the first impression you get is that the 22-year-old now in custody for the shooting of 20 people in Tucson was completely out of his mind, or at least mildly deranged. His writings will be virtually impossible for most people to understand, what with his runs of unexplained numbers, his fondness for weird syllogisms, his mysterious references and his apparent semi-literacy.
That said, there are some clues.
At one point, Loughner refers disparagingly to “currency that’s not backed by gold or silver.” The idea that silver and gold are the only “constitutional” money is widespread in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement that produced so much violence in the 1990s. It’s linked to the core Patriot theory that the Federal Reserve is actually a private corporation run for the benefit of unnamed international bankers. So-called Patriots say paper money — what they refer to with a sneer as “Federal Reserve notes” — is not lawful.
At another, Loughner makes extraordinarily obscure comments about language and grammar, suggesting that the government engages in “mind control on the people by controlling grammar.” That’s not the kind of idea that’s very common out there, even on the Internet. In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that Loughner is taking ideas from Patriot conspiracy theorist David Wynn Miller of Milwaukee. Miller claims that the government uses grammar to “enslave” Americans and offers up his truly weird “Truth-language” as an antidote. For example, he says that if you add colons and hyphens to your name in a certain way, you are no longer taxable. Miller may be mad as a hatter, but he has a real following on the right.
Loughner talks about how you “can’t trust the government” and someone burns a U.S. flag in one of the videos attributed to him. Although certain right-wing websites are already using that (and his listing of The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books) to claim that Loughner was a “left-winger,” that does not strike me as true. The main enemy of the Patriot movement is certainly the federal government. And so-called Patriots have certainly engaged in acts like burning the flag.
Finally, I think Loughner’s reading list, although it included children’s books and a few classics, had an underlying theme — the individual versus the totalitarian state. Certainly, that’s the explicit central theme of Ayn Rand’s We the Living and Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, among others. I would argue that that’s the way Loughner seems to be reading The Communist Manifesto and Hitler’s Mein Kampf — as variants of a kind of generalized “smash the state” attitude.
Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, which does similar work to that of Hatewatch, points out in a post earlier today that Loughner also makes a reference to a “second American constitution.” As Chip notes, that is commonly understood to refer to the Reconstruction amendments that freed the slaves and gave them citizenship, among other things. Chip says that “raises the question of a possible racist and anti-immigrant tie” in the Arizona shooting.
On top of that, Fox News is reporting on an internal Department of Homeland Security message suggesting some tie between Loughner and American Renaissance, a kind of white-collar racist group.
I can’t speak to those allegations, although a federal official in a position to know gave me some details that made it clear the alleged link to American Renaissance appears very weak. Outside of what Chip pointed out, I didn’t see anything that suggested racial, anti-Semitic or anti-immigrant animus in Loughner’s writings. Certainly, there’s nothing I saw at all reminiscent of American Renaissance, which focuses heavily on the alleged intellectual and psychological inferiority of black people.
At this early stage, I think Loughner is probably best described as a mentally ill or unstable person who was influenced by the rhetoric and demonizing propaganda around him. Ideology may not explain why he allegedly killed, but it could help explain how he selected his target.
One thing that seems clear is that Giffords, who was terribly wounded but survived, was the nearest and most obvious representative of “the government” that Loughner could find. Another is that he likely absorbed some of his anger from the vitriolic political atmosphere in the United States in general and Arizona in particular. Perhaps no one made that point better than Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, speaking to a press conference yesterday. “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government… The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
SPLC Responds to Attack by FRC, Conservative Republicans
01 year ago
This morning, 22 members of Congress and a large number of other conservatives signed on to a public statement attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for listing several anti-gay religious right organizations as hate groups. Published in two Washington, D.C., newspapers as a full-page ad, the statement was organized by the powerful Family Research Council (FRC) and other “pro-family organizations that are working to protect and promote natural marriage and the family.”
The statement, whose signatories included House Speaker-Designate John Boehner and the governors of Louisiana, Minnesota and Virginia, ran under the headline, “Start Debating/Stop Hating.” It accused “elements of the radical Left” of trying to “shut down informed discussion of policy issues” and decried those who attempt to suppress debate “through personal assaults that aim only to malign an opponent’s character.” The SPLC, it said, was engaging in “character assassination.”
It was a remarkable performance, given that it was precisely the maligning of entire groups of people — gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people — that caused the SPLC to list groups like the FRC. Remarkable, too, was the accusation that the SPLC was avoiding debate — in fact, the very first public discussion of the issues raised by the SPLC came in a Nov. 29 debate between the FRC’s Tony Perkins and myself on MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews.”
Consider a few of the comments about gays and lesbians that have come from some of the groups now denouncing character assassination. The FRC, in a booklet entitled Homosexual Activists Work to Normalize Sex With Boys, has claimed that “one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order.” The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer wrote this year that “[h]omosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.” Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel, which was not listed by the SPLC but helped organize today’s newspaper ad, describes relationships between gay men as “one man violently cramming his penis into another man’s lower intestine and calling it ‘love.’” Officials of several, including the FRC, have called for criminalizing gay sex.
Almost all the religious-right groups named by the SPLC also have engaged in a particularly toxic and widespread defamation of gay men: The claim that they are essentially pedophiles who molest children at far higher rates than heterosexuals.
In fact, this became the crux of my “debate” with the FRC’s Perkins — the claim, as he put it in the very last moments of the show, that “the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a danger to children.” To prove this, Perkins cited an outfit called the American College of Pediatricians, which certainly sounded authoritative. But he was being less than honest, to say the least. In fact, the American College of Pediatricians is a tiny group that broke away from the real professional association — the similarly named American Academy of Pediatrics — specifically because that 60,000-member organization had endorsed gay and lesbian parenting. Perkins’ move was enough to cause Chris Matthews to run a special segment two days later that explained the difference between the academy and the so-called college.
The reality is that virtually all real researchers in the field have concluded, as did the American Psychological Association in an official statement, that “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.”
Despite the claims made in today’s statement, the SPLC’s listings are not in any way intended to suppress these groups’ free speech. We’re not asking that these groups be silenced or punished in any way. What we are doing is calling them out for their lies. There is nothing wrong with labeling an organization a hate group based on what they say. A simple example illustrates the point: If a neo-Nazi group said all Jews are “vermin,” no one would argue with our characterizing it as a hate group.
Neither are we mounting an attack on individuals or “groups that uphold Judeo-Christian moral views,” as today’s statement suggests. In fact, as we say in our article dissecting the views of these groups, “Viewing homosexuality as unbiblical does not qualify organizations for listing as hate groups.” Instead, as we explained there, “the SPLC’s listings of these groups is based on their propagation of known falsehoods — claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities — and repeated, groundless name-calling.”
Several thoughtful Christian commentators understood that clearly. Warren Throckmorton, a respected professor and past president of the American Mental Health Counselors Association, put it like this the day after my debate with Perkins: “For the most part, the reaction of defenders of the newly labeled hate groups is to avoid addressing the issues the SPLC raised, instead preferring to attack the credibility of the SPLC. Reviewing the charges leveled against the Christian groups, I think their responses are mostly unfortunate and unhelpful. The SPLC has identified some issues which are legitimate and have damaged the credibility of the groups on the list. Going forward, I hope Christians don’t rally around these groups but rather call them to accountability.” After reviewing the SPLC’s list of “10 Myths” about gays and lesbians, he wrote that “much of what is said by Christians about homosexuality is provably false and rooted in ignorance and fear.”
Another Christian website, Canyonwalker Connections, wrote: “Lies are evil. Lies breed fear. … If we repeat the myth enough, maybe it will gain muddy traction and stick. This is what FRC and other Hate Groups do so well. They demonize the gay community. … If the church cannot police our own, perhaps God is using secular organizations to slap His children upside the head? Would not be the first time. I will stand with, beside and in front of my GLBT fellow humans to ensure that they gain equality with me. Family Research Council, you should be more concerned about where you are on God’s list of naughty or nice, sheep or goats. And Southern Poverty Law Center, I applaud you, thank you, really … thank you.”
At the end of the day, it’s hard to know if the politicians and other leaders who signed today’s anti-SPLC statement really know some of things the groups they are throwing in with support. What’s a fact is that, despite their claims, the groups have so far, without exception, failed to confront the facts of SPLC’s report.
New Intelligence Report Spotlights ‘Sovereign Citizens’
01 year ago
Today, we’re releasing a major report on “sovereign citizens,” a radical-right movement that has grown to include as many as 300,000 adherents who believe that the government has no right to tax or impose laws on most Americans. Adherents can be incredibly dangerous, especially to police officers, and our new report is pegged to the murders of two West Memphis, Ark., officers who were murdered by a father-son team during a May traffic stop. Like most sovereign citizens, Jerry and Joe Kane did not believe police have any authority to regulate travel on the roads, in particular by requiring driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations.
Our package includes profiles of a dozen key sovereign leaders and ideologues; a sidebar offering tips to law enforcement officials, who are commonly targeted by sovereigns; a lexicon of the bizarre terms and phrases favored by sovereigns; an interview with one of the leading scholars of American conspiracy culture; and my editorial on the link between conspiracy theories and political violence.
These stories all appear in the latest edition of the Intelligence Report, which we’re calling “the conspiracy issue.” We also offer stories on the top 10 conspiracy theories of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement (of which the sovereigns are a part); a story on a Russian English-language TV station that specializes in plugging U.S. conspiracy theories; an article on a conspiracy-minded Harlem pastor who recently put President Obama on “trial” for not being a U.S.-born citizen; and a number of other pieces (for the table of contents, click here).
Idaho ‘Attorney for the Damned’ Arrested in Plot to Murder Wife
01 year ago
Many people thought Edgar Steele went off the deep end in 2002, when, after unsuccessfully defending the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations and its late leader in a lawsuit, he wrote the coming-out essay, “It’s the Jews, Stupid!” After all, the man had spent most of his life up to that point as an obscure corporate accountant and, later, a small-time lawyer in California and then Idaho. Now, he began to describe himself as the “attorney for the damned,” rail on about “predatory” Jews, accuse the government of a 9/11 conspiracy, and predict a bloody race war.
But that may not have been the half of it. Today, Steele is expected to appear at a preliminary hearing in Idaho after being arrested Friday and charged with trying to pay a confidential witness to murder his wife of a quarter century — the mother of his three children — and her mother. Steele, 64, tried to pay the witness to carry out the killings on Friday, when he had an alibi, according to a probable cause affidavit. The Idaho Statesman also reports that Steele had allegedly been talking to the witness — and paid $500 travel money in advance — about the murders for six months. He also allegedly mentioned other people he wanted dead.
The witness told the FBI that Steele had promised up to $25,000 to carry out the murders, adding that the attorney said he would furnish another $100,000 if an insurance policy on his wife paid out. Steele also allegedly said that if the witness were caught, Steele would take care of the witness’ family in return for silence.
No motive for the plot was revealed. A prosecutor said she believed the couple were still married and not separated. There seems to have been no public indication of anger on Steele’s part toward his wife. “My wife and my kids — they are my rock,” he wrote in an otherwise bloody-minded, July 29, 2006, essay. (In the same essay, he bemoans the fact that his own father “believ[es] that I am a nut case.”)
According to the affidavit, the women were to be killed in a car crash the witness would arrange. The witness, after informing authorities last week that the plan was to be put in motion Friday, was sent to a meeting with Steele wearing a recording device. Authorities said they had recordings of Steele discussing details of the planned murders. “Edgar Steele told [the witness] that he has no second thoughts and he wants the plan carried out,” the affidavit said. “This statement was made multiple times during the meet.”
Steele served in the Coast Guard, got a master’s degree in business and was an accountant in San Francisco before changing careers and getting a law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, law school in 1982. He moved in the mid-1980s to Idaho, where he worked in obscurity as a lawyer until taking the Aryan Nations case in 2000. The group was being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on behalf of a woman and her son who were attacked by Aryan security guards, but Steele portrayed it as an attempt to crush free speech. A jury did not agree, however, and imposed a $6.3 million judgment on the Aryan Nations and its leader, Richard Butler, who died four years later. The group subsequently dissolved into small, squabbling factions, becoming a shadow of its former self.
“We always thought that Edgar had a few screws loose,” said Richard Cohen, the president of SPLC and a lawyer who was part of the SPLC’s legal team in the case and came to know Steele. “But we never would have pegged him as a killer.”
Steele, who wrote the 2004 book Defensive Racism, seemed to grow more radical, and more conspiracy-oriented, as the years passed. But there was little to suggest that he was prepared to murder his own family members. He, did, however, have this to say in an April 1, 2008, essay: “Welcome to my mind. This is the way it works. As I told my wife before we got married: I’ll make you two promises. First, I’ll never hit you. Second, it will never be boring.”
The FAIR Files: Founder Proposed ‘European-American Defense’ Group
01 year ago
Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), has fiercely defended the group’s founder and current board member, John Tanton, despite his long history of racism. Just this past September, Stein told The Washington Post that Tanton is a “Renaissance man” of wide-ranging “intellect.” Stein’s comments were part of a general defense of FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group (for a summary of the reasons, see here).
Stein’s comments came despite the fact that Tanton has questioned the “educability” of Latinos, written that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that,” and wondered “whether the minorities who are going to inherit California … can run an advanced society?” No matter to Stein, who told the Post that attacks on Tanton for these and similar comments “are out of context and “simply do not reflect the true character of the man.’”
But documents stored in George Washington University’s Gelman Library by Otis Graham, a close friend of Tanton who helped him launch and run FAIR in the 1980s and who currently serves as a board member at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), make the point about Tanton’s interest in race one more time. Most instructive is a Tanton plan in the files to create what he called a “League for European-American Defense, Education and Research” or, to use Tanton’s acronym, LEADERs. In a 1993 cover memo attached to his LEADERs plan, Tanton, who is white, wrote to Graham: “For a decade or more, I have been musing about the drift in our society back toward organization along group lines, all the while realizing that there was no group for me – no legitimate group that I could join to further or defend my own particular social, cultural or linguistic interests.”
A serial creator of organizations, Tanton, who by then had already funded and founded an array of anti-immigration groups that included FAIR and CIS, added that “with the establishment of several national organizations behind me, I need to pick my targets carefully and in a way that reinforces what has gone before.” The plan makes clear that Tanton saw LEADERs as bolstering his anti-immigration work.
The document offers an argument as to why LEADERs, which is clearly a “European-American” (read: white) version of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, is needed: “[T[here is currently no socially acceptable umbrella organization to which persons of European ancestry can belong to defend and promote their common interests. Absent such an organization in a highly organized society, European-Americans will continue to see their history rewritten, their character and accomplishments denigrated, and their faults magnified. They will steadily lose ground and position to other groups… . For those not resigned to this gradual or not so gradual decline, a new organization tailored to the needs and interests of European-Americans as a group is essential.”
If it had come into being, LEADERs would have had several areas of concern, including defending “ourselves and our tradition against attacks,” countering “the denigration of Western culture” which Tanton writes is “under siege,” and stopping the “reduction of the European-American demographic and cultural majority to minority status.” On this last point, Tanton is adamant. “This is unacceptable; we decline to bequeath to our children minority status in their own land,” Tanton writes. “Thus immigration must be sharply reduced.”
The LEADERs idea had more than a passing similarity to former Klan leader David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), which Duke founded in 1981. Now defunct, NAAWP was a white supremacist group that nevertheless portrayed itself as a mainstream civil rights organization that hated no one but was devoted to the defense and welfare of whites and “their” culture. (Among other actions, the group held in 2000 “Operation Appalachia,” a program it said was designed to “deliver the basic staples of life to … the deserving folks of Appalachia … particularly among Whites of European extraction.”)
Tanton was well aware of Duke’s activities, as is made clear by a 1991 letter he wrote to Otis Graham. Tanton was interested in Duke’s campaign for governor of Louisiana that year, which Tanton described as based on “the excesses of affirmative action and illegitimate pregnancy.” Tanton told Graham that “there is a lot going on out there on the cultural and ethnic (racial) difference” front and added, in a hopeful tone, that it was “all tied to immigration policy. At some point, this is going to break the dam.”
Though FAIR officials have steadfastly denied Tanton’s racism, the 1993 LEADERs document makes crystal clear that Tanton’s concerns about immigration have long been driven by the non-white skin color of today’s immigrants, most of whom come from Latin America. No wonder Tanton’s hero is John Trevor Sr., founder of the racist American Coalition of Patriotic Societies and a key architect of the racially restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. Trevor also distributed pro-Nazi propaganda and warned shrilly of “diabolical Jewish control” of America. Tanton once said that Trevor should serve as FAIR’s “guidepost to what we must follow again this time.”
It’s hard not to wonder how Stein, who did not respond to a request for comment today, would view Tanton’s LEADERs idea. Would he claim Tanton’s plan was being described “out of context?” Or might Stein consider that LEADERs actually represents Tanton’s “true character?” Whatever Stein may think, Tanton’s plan lays bare the fact that he is against immigration because today’s immigrants aren’t white like him.