“It’s a loaded subject, but let’s get right down to it: gay men, on average, die significantly younger than the rest of the population.” So begins “Gay Men Die 20 Years Younger,” an article posted on insure.com, a publicly traded online insurance brokerage. The source for the article is identified as none other than “Dr. Paul Cameron, the President of the Family Research Institute, [who] published a study in Psychological Reports that confirmed a 20-year life expectancy gap for actively gay men.”

The study in question in fact did nothing of the sort. Its author is a notorious anti-gay propagandist who for more than 25 years has circulated bogus, homophobic “research findings” in pay-to-publish vanity magazines like Psychological Reports (which will publish most anybody willing to pay $27.50 a page). Cameron’s goal, as he says quite candidly, is to provide “ammunition for those who want laws adopted banning homosexual acts throughout the United States.” (In fact, such laws were struck down as unconstitutional by the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas.) Cameron’s propaganda is so transparently false and aimed merely at defaming homosexuals that the Southern Poverty Law Center added his Family Research Institute to its list of hate groups in 2005.

One of Cameron’s most infamous works is his 1983 “gay obituary study,” for which he used obituaries published in gay newspapers at the height of the AIDS crisis to conclude that gay men die on average at 43. “Gay Men Die 20 Years Younger,” which was written by insure.com company blogger Joseph White, is obviously based on the gay obituary study, even though Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, thoroughly debunked the study in 1997 in the online magazine Slate. ( continue to full post… )

Two years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asking him to investigate the extent to which white supremacists had infiltrated the U.S. military and urging him to adopt a zero-tolerance policy on racist extremists.

We had just published “A Few Bad Men,” a report containing significant evidence that thousands of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads and other white supremacists were learning the art of warfare as members of the armed services. Pressure to meet manpower goals for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had led recruiters and commanders to relax the military standards designed to weed out these extremists.

Forty members of Congress joined our call for an investigation. U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, also urged Rumsfeld to adopt a zero-tolerance policy. “Military extremists present an elevated threat to both their fellow servicemembers and the public,” Shelby wrote. “We witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today’s racist extremist may become tomorrow’s domestic terrorist.”

Three months later, the Pentagon — apparently without any investigation whatsoever — responded by rejecting our findings as “inaccurate and misleadingly alarmist.”

This week, NBC News producer Jim Popkin uncovered a new, unpublished FBI report that reinforces our findings. In fact, it documents a sort of revolving door between the military and white supremacist organizations. According to Popkin, the FBI found that extremists are recruiting military veterans to their organizations and also encouraging their followers “to infiltrate the military as ‘ghost skins,’ in order to recruit and receive training for the benefit of the extremist movement.” ( continue to full post… )

Since its founding nearly 90 years ago, the American Legion has been a fixture of community life. It has hosted Memorial Day parades to remember those who died in America’s wars. It has held bingo nights and dances at its 14,000-plus posts worldwide. It has supported thousands of Boy Scout groups, sponsored a baseball program that’s produced numerous professional players, and helped children living in poverty or with special needs. From World War II to the war in Iraq, the legion has fought to improve benefits for veterans and their families.

Now, America’s largest veterans organization has launched another campaign — a hard-line attack on undocumented immigrants that’s at odds with the legion’s mainstream image. As part of this effort, the legion, which purports to speak for 2.7 million members, recently issued a booklet that regurgitates discredited and often completely false information about how “illegals” are bringing crime, disease, and terrorism to this country, even as they wreck the economy for natives.

The legion’s 34-page booklet, A Strategy to Address Illegal Immigration in the United States, asserts that “poverty, political instability, disease and war” are “on our back doorstep” because of porous borders and the failure of the government to stringently enforce immigration laws. But in making its case, the legion repeatedly cites dubious sources, ignores well-known facts and makes baseless claims — such as the false assertion that the undocumented infected more than 7,000 people in America with leprosy during a recent three-year period.

“They’re sort of trotting out old tropes to do with immigration,” said Richard Wright, a Dartmouth College geography professor who specializes in immigration. “These are hackneyed stereotypes that have no place in a policy document.” ( continue to full post… )

A new book details a formerly undisclosed 1999 plot to assassinate Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and possibly also to blow up the center. Written by FBI agent Tym Burkey and informant Dave Hall, Into the Devil’s Den describes how Hall, after penetrating the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations group in Ohio and Idaho, uncovered the plot shortly before the assassin was to head south to SPLC headquarters in Montgomery, Ala. The assassin was arrested on April 14, 1999, and had timed his attack to roughly coincide with the April 19-20 anniversaries of the fiery end of the 1993 Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the birthday of Adolf Hitler. The plot was apparently concocted by several men upset that Dees and the SPLC that year sued the Aryan Nations in an action that ultimately resulted in the sale of the group’s Idaho compound.

Remarkably, the book also identifies Ron Edwards, national leader of the Kentucky-based Imperial Klans of America (IKA), as a possible (but uncharged) conspirator. The SPLC is now preparing for a November trial against Edwards and IKA on behalf of a boy who was beaten by two of the group’s members. This February, when Dees went to Kentucky to take Edwards’ deposition, the Klan leader (above, right) showed up with a fresh tattoo on the side of his newly shaven head that read, “FUCK S.P.L.C.”

The 1999 plot, which was averted thanks to the work of Hall and Burkey, was only the latest attempt by extremists to assassinate Dees or attack the SPLC. More than 30 people have been sent to federal prison in connection with similar plots.

For more on this case, read an account of the plot here.

Notorious white supremacist lawyer Kirk D. Lyons has thrown his hat in the ring again for a spot on the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) General Executive Council, the national governing board for a group representing male descendants of Confederate veterans. Lyons, who was married at the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations compound by that group’s now deceased leader Richard Butler and who has a lengthy personal history of racist activities that includes past membership in the neo-Nazi National Alliance, is running for the post of councilman for the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV), the largest of the SCV’s three geographical divisions. Lyons is a past commander of the I.N. Giffen Camp, located in his hometown of Black Mountain, N.C.

In his campaign platform, Lyons (above, with family, in photo released with his campaign announcement) aims to turn the 20,000-odd member organization into one with a million. Perhaps he will do so by loosening standards. In a 2004 E-mail to SCV members, Lyons wrote, “Mere Klan membership should not be sufficient to remove a member.” What he says explicitly in his campaign announcement is that he hopes to use his position to reverse the outcome of the Civil War: “I look forward to being part of a gathering of eagles at Elm Springs [the SCV’s Tennessee headquarters] to lead the SCV to the victory our ancestors were denied — a victory that with God’s help we can and must secure for our posterity.”

Since the late 1990s, Lyons’ plan has been to turn the SCV into an arm of the radical right, something he made clear during a speech to the racist American Friends of the British National Party in 2000. In a videotape obtained by the Intelligence Report, Lyons talked about how a group of “unreconstructed Southerners” or “white trash,” including himself, had helped to move the SCV increasingly towards a white “nationalist perspective.” “The civil rights movement I am trying to form seeks a revolution,” Lyons told his extremist colleagues that day. “We seek a return to a godly society with no Northernisms attached to it — a majority European-derived society.” ( continue to full post… )

This spring, a high-society New York magazine called Quest ran a short feature about Emilia Fanjul, the wife of sugar baron Jose “Pepe” Fanjul, and her remarkable efforts to help black and migrant worker children out of poverty. The story described how Fanjul, a major philanthropist, was helping to finance and build a sparkling new campus for Glades Academy, a charter school in the town of Pahokee, Fla., which suffers with a 32% poverty rate. “I call them the forgotten children,” Fanjul said. “My greatest wish is that they gain dignity and hope.”

At the end of the article, Quest added a practical note: “For more information about Glades Academy, call Chloe Black.” A telephone number followed.

What the magazine didn’t say — and, doubtless, didn’t know — was that Chloe Hardin Black (above, with David Duke, in a 1976 photo from Tyler Bridges’ The Rise of David Duke) is a long-time white supremacist and the wife of a notorious former Klan leader. Black’s husband is Don Black, a former Alabama Klan chieftain who is famous among white supremacists for his creation of Stormfront, the largest white supremacist Web forum in the world. Prior to Black, Chloe Hardin was married to Black’s former boss, neo-Nazi David Duke, who was the national leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. ( continue to full post… )

This week on the podcast, Mark Potok and I revisit his popular post from last month, “President Obama? Many White Supremacists are Celebrating.” We’ll discuss how the reaction in racist circles to the first African-American presumptive major-party nominee for president has been quite surprising. Listen in and find out why.

The Washington Post is reporting that four board members of the Institute for Turkish Studies (ITS) have resigned in protest over the apparent forced resignation of former ITS board of governors chairman Donald Quataert, who says he was ousted under pressure from Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy after Quataert reversed his position on whether the mass killing of Armenians in 1915 fits the definition of genocide.

“State of Denial,” a story in the current issue of the Intelligence Report, details the key role that ITS plays in promoting denial of the Armenian genocide. Founded in 1982 with a $3 million grant from Turkey, ITS is housed at Georgetown University, which offers the nonprofit institution space on campus in exchange for its executive director teaching an International Affairs course at the university.

Quataert told the Post that a few years ago, he and other board members were surprised to learn that what they had been led to believe was a blind trust in fact “turned out to be a gift that could be revoked by the Turkish government.” Then, in late 2006, Quataert published a scholarly book review in which he declared, “What happened to the Armenians readily satisfies the U.N. definition of genocide.”

As a result, according to Quataert, he was pressured to quit his ITS post by Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy, who told him that political leaders in Ankara were angered by his book review and were threatening to revoke the institute’s funding unless he either resigned or retracted his statement. ( continue to full post… )

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

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

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