The senseless murder and mayhem in Boston has left me speechless.  Initially, I refused to speculate about who did it, despite repeated requests to do so.  I pointed to the wildly mistaken guesses about the Texas murders, when people who should have known better talked as if the Aryan Brotherhood were the perpetrators, sure thing.  It turned out to be anything but.  In this case, as a friend wrote me, “Chechens, who knew?” I certainly did not.

ProEnglish executive director Robert Vandervoort’s inclusion on two panels was apparently not a matter of controversy inside the recently concluded Conservative Political Action Conference. Not one word questioning his participation was uttered publicly by any of his co-panelists, and one and all treated him with respect. Indeed, all of his co-panelists, including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Florida Representative David Rivera were glad to shake his hand.

Outside the conference was a different matter, however. After IREHR raised concerns because of Vandervoort’s white nationalist attachments, a significant discussion ensued. It was often coupled with an intersecting debate about the appearance of Peter Brimelow, after People for the American Way noted the author’s white nationalism. The Kansas City Star, the Wichita Eagle and Mother Jones were among the publications to take note of these events. American Spectator, a decidedly conservative periodical weighed in with the comment that “if Vandervoort indeed organized events for an American Renaissance affiliate … he should explicitly and publicly renounce his old associates; that is a crowd that no one should touch with a ten foot pole.”[1]

In the interest of answering these questions raised by American Spectator, among others, IREHR provides the following information about Vandervoort’s relationship to American Renaissance as well as his own re-articulation of white nationalist dogma.

The British newspaper The Guardian has done a remarkable service by examining the online trail of bigotry left by Anders Breivik, the white nationalist who murdered 77 innocents in two different killings sprees in Norway last July.

They provide links to Beivik's 1500-page manifesto as well as to those pages that the killer himself linked to. This web page spider web weaves together European far-right groups, American Islamophobic "counter-Jihad" sites, as well as more mainstream sources.

According to Andrew Brown, the journalist for The Guardian who wrote the introduction to the visualization, "Anders Breivik's manifesto reveals a subculture of nationalistic and Islamophobic websites that link the European and American far right in a paranoid alliance against Islam and is also rooted in some democratically elected parties."

You can view the mapping of Anders Breivik's spider web of bigotry here and read the accompanying article here.

 

The Revolutionary War-era costumes, the yellow “Don’t tread on me” Gadsden flags from the same era, the earnest recitals of the pledge of allegiance, the over-stated veneration of the Constitution, and the defense of “American exceptionalism” in a world turned towards transnational economies and global institutions: all are signs of the over-arching nationalism that helps define the Tea Party movement.

It is a form of American nationalism, however, that does not include all Americans, and separates itself from those it regards as insufficiently “real Americans.” Consider in this regard, a recent Tea Party Nation Newsletter article entitled, “Real Americans Did Not Sue Arizona.” Or the hand-drawn sign at a Tea Party rally that was obviously earnestly felt. “I am a arrogant American, unlike our President, I am proud of my country, our freedom, our generosity, no apology from me.”

At a Glance

Headquarters:

Website: ResistNet.com

Online Members: 81, 248

Notable: The for-profit group has been a home to nativists and Islamophobes.

 

Tea Party Nation, the fourth largest national Tea Party faction with 42,100 online members, continues to move towards an explicit expression of white nationalism.  The group has already been widely criticized for its proposal to deny voting rights for those citizens who do not own property, and for promoting anti-gay bullying.  It has asserted that “American culture” will soon perish since the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population is headed for extinction.”[1]  Now, taking it one step further, Tea Party Nation is defending the now defunct and indefensibly racist National Origins Act of 1924.

Now that President Obama has attempted to quell the surge of birtherism by providing a copy of his oft-requested long form-birth certificate, will that satisfy the birthers? Will they go away now?

Nope.

Long before President Obama released his long-form birth certificate, Tea Party leaders and other birthers had already concocted outlandish new twists on birther racism.  Clumsily forged Kenyan birth certificates, failed lawsuits, cries of conspiracy, and the cottage industry of birther books and videos have popped up in the last few years.  Indeed, leading birther activists have invented an incomprehensible array of bogus arguments and convinced themselves that a black man could not possibly be president of the United States.  Now, they are not going down without a fight.

In Gainesville, Florida, a Christian pastor sent his ten-year old daughter to school with the slogan “Islam is of the Devil” printed in large red block type on the back of her t-shirt. The same slogan had been posted on a homemade sign outside a nearby church. In South Carolina, the words “death to Muslims” were marked near an entrance to an Islamic Center.

In a January cover story, "Fear and Loathing Grips Europe," Searchlight editor Nick Lowles examines the reactions to and the implications of the vote to ban the building of minarets in Switzerland.

Read the entire article here.

Shortly before midnight on Friday, July 22, police arrested a 32-year-old Norwegian man who allegedly went on a murderous shooting spree at a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utoya and may also be responsible for the horrific bombing in Oslo earlier in the day.

The man arrested for the attack has been identified as Anders Behring Breivik. Norwegian TV2 reports that Breivik belongs to "right-wing circles" in Oslo. Sources in Norway tell IREHR that Breivik has been known to write posts in right-wing internet forums in Norway, where he has described himself as a “nationalist” and has also written numerous screeds critical of Muslims.