‘Patriot’ Leader Among Apparent Victims of Washington Mudslide

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Among the dozens of apparent victims in Saturday’s tragic mudslide near rural Oso, Wash. – the current official death toll is 16, with over 100 people still missing and unaccounted for – was a man familiar to reporters who covered Snohomish County politics in the 1990s: Thom Satterlee.

Satterlee, 65, and his wife, Marcy, 61, were among the people listed as missing after Saturday’s massive landslide, which wiped out an entire neighborhood next to the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River in central Snohomish County. His granddaughter, Delaney Webb, 20, and her fiancée, Alan Bejvl, 21, were also in the residence at the time of the slide. Satterlee’s home was in the middle of its path, and it remains unclear, as body-recovery efforts continue, whether the family will ever be found.

Thom Satterlee during his 'Freedom County' campaign

Thom Satterlee (credit: Everett Herald)

Thom Satterlee became a well-known public figure in the county during the 1990s, after becoming outraged by the passage of the state’s Growth Management Act in 1990. He became involved in the nascent antigovernment “Patriot” movement, which was organizing militias in the region at the time, but Satterlee chose to apply the ideology to local politics: He organized county “secession” efforts that would allow rural districts to break away from dominance by their urban neighbors.

In Snohomish County, the effort was dubbed “Freedom County.” The secessionists were led primarily by three people: David Guadalupe, who had previously been involved with the far-right American Land Rights Association; John Stokes of Camano Island, a onetime real-estate agent who had run afoul of state wetlands laws, and who eventually moved to Montana and became involved in broadcasting Patriot propaganda on the radio there; and Satterlee, who had declared himself a “sovereign citizen” and Christian Patriot. Sovereign citizens generally claim that they are immune to most federal criminal and tax laws.

Their efforts were stifled at the state level by legislators unpersuaded by their arguments. Satterlee and Stokes in April 1997 filed a complaint with the United Nations against Washington for violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights because the state would not create Freedom County: “the right of self-determination and self-government … are being denied by the state of Washington,” the complaint alleged. However, the U.N. informed them that it could not help.

A Superior Court decision ruled that Freedom County did not exist. When Guadalupe and Satterlee appealed to the State Supreme Court, the court commissoner wrote: “Having studied the pleadings filed by Mr. Guadualupe and Mr. Satterlee, which are in the main legally incoherent despite a heavy larding of pseudo-legal rhetoric, I find no basis to grant a stay.”

Satterlee was a “common law” proponent who tried to give “legal advice” to similarly ideologically inclined people. For instance, he repeatedly tried to give advice to a tax protester named Floyd Ryan at a hearing in July 1997, prompting the judge to order him to sit down. In a 1995 election he was involved in, he identified himself as 46 years of age, but gave his only occupation as “consultant.” Satterlee at one point tried to pay his taxes with checks backed by pseudo-legal “liens” filed against a federal judge in Seattle over his handling of a conspiracy and weapons case against a group of western Washington militiamen.

Eventually, Satterlee’s activities attracted the attention of the FBI, especially after he and his cohorts began threatening to arrest the legitimately elected sheriff, Rick Bart, if he wandered into their territory. They even appointed their own sheriff – a former federal agent himself who now subscribed to sovereign-citizen beliefs and went by the nom de plume Fnu Lnu – but then gradually their activities ceased.

Satterlee was found guilty in 2002 of illegal law practice. He remained active in far-right Patriot politics in the ensuing years, and he and Marcy signed on to a “Liberty Action Committee” forum in 2007.

The Everett Herald noted that during the Freedom County battles, Satterlee had lived in a home farther up the North Fork Stillaguamish, but that he and Marcy had moved into the home on Steelhead Drive about five years ago.

Geologists have said that they had long warned that the Oso hillside was unstable and might unleash a catastrophic slide. Yet county officials continued to issue permits there, even after a 2006 slide in the area acted as a harbinger of the horror to come. Logging was also permitted in the area above the slide.

Long-Running Conspiracist Fears Still Fuel Anti-Wolf Sentiments in Mountain States

Wyoming hunters with Klan-style hoods show off their kill.

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

To say that there is deep local antipathy to federal wolf recovery efforts in many of the Mountain West states where biologists are attempting to revive the endangered species would be an understatement. Sentiment against the big canine predators in places like Idaho and Montana, especially among cattlemen, often borders on sheer rage.

That has translated, politically, into a situation where lawmakers in Idaho recently approved $400,000 in funding to kill as many as 500 of the state’s estimated population of 650 wolves, leaving as few as ten breeding pairs. The bill was promptly signed into law by Gov. Butch Otter, who has made loathing of wolves a centerpiece of his political image.

Much of the antipathy is predicated on old-fashioned fear about wolves, particularly given their predilection for preying on livestock and family pets in areas where humans inhabit their range, not to mention the potential threat they represent to human life. But there is also a political element, particularly in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, that is fueled by far-right antigovernment paranoia and conspiracy theories.

Wolf recovery efforts are frequently depicted as the imposition of the “New World Order” on residents of the rural areas where the creatures roam. A number of far-right outlets, including the John Birch Society’s magazine and the conspiracist website World Net Daily, have run pieces describing how wolf recovery is a key component of a plot by radical environmentalists on behalf of the United Nations to destroy private property rights in America. In the Mountain West, holding such views is not uncommon.

It was while I was covering a Tea Party event in western Montana, in fact, that I first encountered this melding of conspiracy theory paranoia about wolves and far-right political dogma. Several speakers at the event described how wolf-recovery efforts in the region were part of a United Nations-derived plot to control their lives and destroy their property and gun rights, and a booth at the event handed out literature describing the conspiracy.

When militias were first organizing in Idaho and Montana in the early to mid-1990s, much of the anti-government sentiment that drove recruitment revolved around resentment for the just-instituted wolf recovery efforts.

“It was seen as direct government intervention into their way of life and telling them what they had to put up with and what they couldn’t shoot,” recalls Amaroq Weiss, Wolf Recovery Director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental organization that has filed numerous lawsuits over the years to prevent the wolf hunts in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. “So this goes way back. The wolf has always been a surrogate for hatred for the federal government in the areas where the reintroductions took place.”

Sure enough, the conspiracy theorists who fueled the Patriot movement’s militia organizing in the 1990s also used wolf recovery as a recruitment tool. Bob Fletcher of the Militia of Montana was fond of telling audiences in the 1990s that the wolves’ reintroduction was a predicate to the elimination of private property rights, the culmination of which would be the construction of concentration camps in the Northwest woods to incarcerate formerly gun-owning Americans.

The John Birch Society’s house organ, The New American, published an article in 2001 more or less outlining this same conspiracy: “Simply put, the ‘wolf recovery’ program is a form of environmental terrorism. Thus while the U.S. government is working through the UN to fight a war against terrorism abroad, it is collaborating with UN-linked environmental radicals to wage an eco-terrorist campaign against rural property owners here at home.”

Likewise, World Net Daily’s conspiracy peddler in chief Joseph Farah chimed in: “Just because your particular ox is not being gored by these wolves, your turn is coming. Believe me. If western ranchers don’t have any property rights, guess what? Neither do you – no matter where you live. And they’ll be gunning for you soon enough.”

Even an ostensibly “mainstream” organization like Idaho For Wildlife recently featured an anti-wolf recovery screed about the United Nations and the New World Order.

The embodiment of the extreme nature of these sentiments came this winter when a group of men wearing Klan-like hoods posed with the corpse of a freshly killed wolf and an American flag and then posted it on Facebook. The page that published the picture belonged to a couple of Wyoming outfitters, who later explained that they were harkening back to Western vigilantism: “Trying to make a statement!…Frontier Justice! Wyoming hunters are fed up!”

Hate-Filled Rant Leaves Longtime Catholic ‘Traditionalist’ Isolated

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.] 

 

Austin Ruse

It only took a brief rant to wreck Austin Ruse’s budding career as a “traditionalist” Catholic pundit. Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), an anti-LGBT hate group that lobbies at the United Nations, was on American Family Radio (AFR) last week when he said that the “hard left, human-hating people that run modern universities” like Duke “should all be taken out and shot.”

While violent rhetoric is an increasingly common feature of far-right rhetoric, it is particularly jarring coming from a pundit and think tank official who markets himself as “pro-life” and “pro-family.”

After Right Wing Watch posted Ruse’s rant – and then publicized his self-pitying responses to having his own words played back – Ruse found himself suddenly isolated. The American Family Association – on whose program he made the rant – severed all ties with him, saying: “AFR condemns such comments, no matter who makes them.” One of C-FAM’s board members, Monsignor Anthony Frontiero, resigned from the board after Faithful America petitioned him to do so. And C-FAM may lose its status at the United Nations.

Ruse eventually buckled and apologized, telling Talking Points Memo:

“I deeply regret and apologize for using the expression ‘taken out and shot’ on the Sandy Rios Show this week. It was not intended to be taken literally. I have dedicated my life and career to ending violence. I regret that these poorly chosen words are being used to attack my friends at American Family Radio and American Family Association.”

Notwithstanding the apology, AFR’s Sandy Rios defended Ruse’s remarks as being “words of life” that warn believers against listening to liberal professors. Rios insisted that Ruse’s words were the kind people make in private conversation all the time, which may well be true around her workplace – AFR is a wing of the American Family Association, whose spokesperson Bryan Fischer has made all manner of offensive and outrageous remarks.

Ruse still appears to have a friend in the Family Research Council (FRC), which prominently featured him earlier this month in a panel discussion on the U.N. Ruse used the opportunity to promote a conspiracy theory (one promoted for some time by C-FAM) that a cadre of United Nations officials were working to make abortion rights a component of every U.N. treaty. He also castigated the U.N. generally as a hotbed of socialism.

Perhaps more noteworthy were remarks by Ruse’s fellow panelist, Pat Fagan of the FRC. Speaking about a U.N. panel that criticized the Vatican over sexual abuse, Fagan compared the panel’s report to Kristallnacht, the night of violence that Nazi Brownshirts subjected Jewish merchants to in November 1933 and which foreshadowed the Holocaust:

FAGAN: This is just an analogy and I don’t want to take it directly, but the first really egregious act that was very public and against the good of people and against the good of the Jews was Kristallnacht in Germany. And that was very significant because the police permitted it. And that was the beginning of the end, when those who were there to enforce the law failed to do so and did not protect the citizen from these bullies – more than bullies, murderers.

Now, this is not Kristallnacht. But it is the breaking of a pretty big window. They didn’t go around smashing all the windows, it’s just that if you think of the Vatican as a shop on Main Street, well, they didn’t break all the windows on Main Street but they went up to the shop and they smashed through the big plate glass window.

Now, this is good, because it is now made very clear what is going on.

In the discussion that followed, Ruse lauded Fagan’s remarks on this point.

Today, Ruse published another mostly self-pitying piece on the fallout from his comment, which he now admits was a “gaffe” (nothing more, nothing less, in his mind). It remains to be seen if Ruse can recover.

Right-Wing Extremists in Montana File for Legislative Races as Democrats

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Democratic primary voters in some Montana legislative districts will see new and unfamiliar names on the ballot this year. That’s because at least eight Democratic candidates are actually far-right “constitutionalists” and Tea Party activists. One of them is the current Republican vice-chairman for Sanders County. Two of the others have turned out to be homeless.

Most of the activity has occurred in Gallatin County, where Bozeman is the main population center and county seat. The county is home not only to Montana State University but also a variety of extremist elements. Key members of the radical Montana Freemen group were active there in the 1990s.

Chief among the new crop of candidates is Michael Comstock, a well-known local Tea Party activist and antigovernment “Patriot” movement organizer who has run previously as a Republican. This year, he filed to run in the Democratic primary for the state Senate seat in District 24, a seat currently held by Republican incumbent Roger Webb, who is running for re-election.

Comstock claimed during an interview with KCFW-TV in Bozeman that he’s a mainstream Democrat in the tradition of John F. Kennedy and Montana icon Mike Mansfield, and more mainstream than his primary opponent, Democratic activist and educator April Buonamici. But as the blogger Montana Cowgirl observed in her posts calling out Comstock and the other candidates, no one in Bozeman who knows Comstock is fooled by this, since he has been a colorful figure on the local political scene for many years:

Comstock’s main focus is his concern about a possible takeover by ‘a one-world UN controlled government,’ the Bozeman Chronicle has reported.  In his campaign literature and on Facebook, he says he is worried about the impending collapse of civilization.  He proudly calls himself ‘a Tea Party extremist’ and believes the Muppets have ‘sold out to socialism and bad behavior.’

A Montana Human Rights Network profile of Comstock published in a 2012 newsletter noted that he is a prolific author of letters to the local newspaper editors, where his views have been well noted:

In 2003, he complained that ‘women and minorities get a free leg up on this white male [Comstock]’ when it came to employment. He’s also advocated getting rid of the minimum wage, which he called a ‘relic of our socialist past.’ He claimed the devastation in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina was ‘directly attributed to 100 years of corrupt liberal politics.’ In another letter about Katrina, he complained that the media gave too much credence to the ‘rantings of opportunistic race-baiting leftists.’ He said statistics proved more focus should have been on white victims. While ‘blacks did constitute the majority of deaths,’ Comstock wrote, ‘proportional to their represented numbers, whites suffered the most deaths.’

Montana Cowgirl has also identified several other bogus “Democrats” on various Montana ballots, most of them in Gallatin County. A man named Harry Pennington, for example, has filed to run as a Democrat for the state Senate seat in District 32, currently held by incumbent Democrat Franke Wilmer. Pennington’s Facebook page is rife with Tea Party material and conspiracist material about President Obama.

Pennington and another candidate – a woman named Laura Springer, who is unknown in local politics, was last registered to vote in a distant county and filed papers to run as a Democrat in House District 63 – listed the same street address in Bozeman as a third candidate, a “Patriot” and local militia organizer named Dane Peeples, who filed as a Democrat to compete against the incumbent Democrat, Rep. Tom Woods, in House District 62.

When a reporter from the Associated Press investigated why all three listed the same street address, it turned out that the home belonged to Peeples, who had no idea why the other two candidates listed his address as theirs. When the reporter asked the other two, they explained that it was because they actually were homeless at the time and needed to use an address. Springer told the reporter she was living out of motels. And Pennington turned up in a December 2013 news feature about the virtues of new government-funded services for the homeless as one of its clients.

All three, it appeared, had met up through a online “constitutionalist,” Tea Party forum called the Constitution Club, where both Peeples and Springer have active accounts, as Montana Cowgirl documented.  Among the other users on the site is a far-right extremist from Bozeman named William Wolf, who last month threatened to arrest a local judge under the auspices of “the Montana Unorganized Militia”. Peeples claims to be active in a different militia group calling itself the ‘Irregulars’ .

Meanwhile, in Sanders County – on the western side of the state, far removed from Bozeman – another dubious Democrat has filed to run for a legislative seat. Gerald Cullivier, who was elected GOP vice chair for the county in 2011, filed to run as a Democrat in House District 13. The field already features two registered Republicans and a registered Democrat.

As Montana Cowgirl explained, Cullivier is not a mainstream Republican but hails from its far-right wing, having campaigned on behalf of far-right candidate Matt French in 2012.

The Great Falls Tribune surveyed the state’s legislative races and found that, in all, eight elections featured Tea Party candidates running as Democrats. Interviewed for the story, Cullivier claimed he was running as a conservative Democrat, having broken with the Republican Party because it “wasn’t conservative enough.”
A fellow Tea-Party conservative from Sanders County, Terry Caldwell, has similarly filed to run as a Democrat in House District 14, also claiming to have a desire to make the Democratic Party more conservative.

There were others: In the Choteau area, arch-conservative David Brownell filed for the state Senate District 9 seat against registered Democrat Joan Graham. Brownell, too, claimed to be merely a conservative Democrat, though he knew nothing of the party’s platform.

The Tribune found another dubious Bozeman-area candidate: Kathy Hollenback, running against registered Democrat Denise Hayman for the nomination in House District 66. Hollenback also lists a dubious address – one belonging to Gallatin County Republican precinct chair David Ponte – and appears mostly to have been active in Tea Party politics prior to this year.

The Montana Human Rights Network has seen similar behavior in the past. “I would generally say that we hit, like most people in the country, a peak of extremist filings in 2010,” MHRN co-director Rachel Carroll Rivas told Hatewatch. “We saw a lot of those people elected to office here in Montana. And I think we actually saw a lot of pushback from the public and from within the mainstream Republican Party on some of those ideas.

“Some of those more wild-card extremists have actually made their way out of elected office because, you know, making Anderson Cooper isn’t necessarily good for the party when it’s a joke,” Rivas noted, referring to the national attention that a Montana Tea Party legislator received for proposing a “birther” bill requiring all presidential candidates to provide their birth certificates.

“That being said, we still have a very conservative arm of the Republican Party, and the dial, because of what happened in 2010, has been moved right. So it’s harder to pinpoint in some ways who are the extremists because the dial has moved so far that there’s a large number of people that are included in the ‘responsible’ camp.”

Montana Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee Director Lauren Caldwell told the Tribune that the primary challenges came as a surprise. “It appears there’s an organized effort to file tea party Republicans as Democrats,” Caldwell said Wednesday. “It is sort of dirty politics at its worst. The goal appears to be to deceive voters.”

Idaho Lawmakers Want to ‘Nullify’ EPA So Dredge Mining Operations Can ‘Get Back to Enjoying’ State

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Right-wing proponents of “nullification” – the idea that individual states can free themselves from the purview of federal laws by virtue of simply declaring themselves so – have largely focused on convincing state legislatures to pass bills “nullifying” federal gun laws, as in Missouri. Others have urged applying such statutes to the fight over same-sex marriage.

Lawmakers in Idaho this week, though, expanded the field by applying “nullification” to federal environmental laws.

Idaho Rep. Paul Shepherd

The state’s House Resources Committee on Thursday approved HB 473, a bill declaring that “the regulation authority of the United States environmental protection agency is not authorized by the Constitution of the United States and violates its true meaning and intent … and is hereby declared to be invalid in the state of Idaho.” The bill will next go to the floor of the House for a vote. (UPDATE: The bill stalled on the floor of the House and was sent back to the Resources Committee. This will likely kill the legislation for this year’s session.)

Such nullification strategies are not particularly new; they have a long history on the extremist and racist right, with roots in the Posse Comitatus movement. Nonetheless, they have been gaining favor among conservative lawmakers in recent years, often in desperation to prevent the passage of progressive measures.

The author of the Idaho bill, Rep. Paul Shepherd, hails from Riggins, a town where the economy is largely based on the mining industry. Much of his advocacy has focused on preventing the EPA from enforcing regulations on small-scale dredge-mining operations that have become popular among prospectors and wildcat miners. Much of his support has come from miners.

“Let’s get the EPA out of Idaho and get back to enjoying the Gem State,” one of them told the lawmakers during testimony.

Shepherd’s agenda appears to go well beyond helping small dredge miners. During debate in the Resources Committee, Rep. Dell Raybould of Rexburg, a fellow Republican, expressed hesitation: “I notice in here, we’re talking about dredge mining, but the wording of this would this include any EPA regulations of anything in Idaho, just flat-out,” he observed. He asked Shepherd if the bill would cover all EPA water quality and air quality standards.

“Yes,” said Shepherd. “I feel it covers any overreach that we can show is legally overreach by that agency.”
Deputy Attorney General Brian Kane warned the committee, in a six-page analysis, that the bill “would, with almost certainty, be found unconstitutional.” Committee members nonetheless approved it, despite Kane’s observation that the EPA’s constitutionality had been upheld numerous times by the Supreme Court.

Shepherd’s retort: “I think that the Supreme Court needs to go by their oath of office. The Supreme Court’s changing the Constitution.”

These arguments, of course, not only fly in the face of the Constitution itself and its Supremacy Clause, but also in the face of numerous court precedents. Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress has a complete rundown of the legal and constitutional issues involved in the debate, as it were.

Anti-government rhetoric during the debate over dredge mining has predictably become heated. One mining district leader described the EPA as “jack-booted thugs in swat uniforms” to the Twin Falls Times News. The same article noted that EPA officials in Idaho had so far not handed out any tickets or fines related to miners’ failures to obtain permits, in hopes of generating voluntary compliance with a new permit regime.

The state’s oldest environmental organization, the Idaho Conservation League, has long supported the permit process. They argue that dredge mining can “wreak havoc on fish habitat and stream water quality.”

‘White Man’s March’ Events Draw Smattering of Participants, Loads of Derision

Skinheads Richard Kidd and Jarred Hensley with unidentified Klansman in Florence, Ky.

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.] 

Kyle Hunt had grand visions of thousands of white men coming out of the woodwork this weekend to stand up and defend their interests in a public march that would grab the nation’s attention. Like a lot of such plans, things didn’t exactly work out that way.

Hunt, a 30-year-old former Google employee currently living in Massachusetts, promoted the “White Man’s March” this past weekend through a variety of white supremacist outlets, including his own outfit, Renegade Broadcasting, an Internet radio station devoted to covering “the destruction of the white race.” The plan was to hold the main event in New York City, with satellite marches occurring in various other cities around the country.

The marches, Hunt claimed, were a response to fears that white people are being “mocked, displaced and violently attacked” through an insidious liberal idea known as “diversity.”

But no one seems to have actually marched in the “#whitemanmarch.” It was more of a series of brief banner displays and Twitter photo postings of racist flyers and stickers affixed to various objects around the country. The banners were large red-and-white affairs reading “Diversity = White Genocide”.

Hunt argues that the “‘diversity’ agenda is being directed at white countries (and only at white countries) with various programs to ensure that there are less white people at schools and in the work force, which is unfair and discriminatory.” It is “taking away money and opportunities from the White citizens,” he says.

The New York event ran into trouble when it emerged that Hunt was attempting to tie his Saturday “march” with the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York, scheduled for the same weekend. His plans were roundly denounced by angry Irish Americans and parade organizers.

Hunt told the press beforehand that he expected “thousands” to participate. On Saturday, only a smattering of attendees showed up in New York. There were similarly tiny gatherings in Florence, Ky., Tempe, Ariz. and Birmingham, Ala., where police took down the “Diversity” banners. Demonstrators also showed up in Branson, Mo. and Olympia, Wash.

As much as anything, the march was the subject of open mockery, especially on social media and the Internet. On Twitter, people flooded in with derisive tweets, some of which were so hilarious they were collected at Salon.com, City Guide and elsewhere.

Reactions from white supremacists to the low turnout and poor press coverage was mixed. Robert Whitaker, of “mantra” fame, complained that his “white genocide” message had been inappropriately commandeered and that the event was not inclusive of women. “The White MAN’s March was a hijack. White people come in two sexes,” he wrote Sunday.  Whitaker also chided the concept of taking to the streets as something “out of the 30′s.”

Other racists were critical of the Klansmen who showed up to participate at a protest in Florence, Kentucky, organized by former National Alliance leader, Robert Ransdell, particularly since this was one of the few gatherings that generated media coverage.   Skinheads Richard Kidd and Jarred Hensley also attended.
Ransdell defended the Klan’s presence and stated his protest was “really a sight to behold, White people in large numbers not even being scared away.”

Counting Ransdell, the “large numbers” at his Kentucky event added up to nine, which seems to have been one of the largest White Man’s March gatherings anywhere. The presence of two notorious skinheads and two Klansmen didn’t stop Ransdell from taking a victory lap on the racist forums Sunday.

Meanwhile, Hunt is pursuing his next grand vision. He warned one interviewer that he may well be the President of the USA by 2020.

Cross-Country ‘Cannonball Run’ Race Promoted By Sovereign Citizen Runs Out of Gas

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

It sounded too good to be true, like something from a Burt-Reynolds-meets-Duke-of-Hazzard movie: A cross-country “Cannonball Run”-style road race, sponsored by a Southern “colonel” whose wealth comes from making copper moonshine stills, with a big $50,000 prize waiting at the end. And sure enough, as with most schemes cooked up by so-called “sovereign citizens,” it fell apart upon close scrutiny.

The race – dubbed “Cannonball One,” and described as a “coast to coast race from sea to shining sea” – required an entry fee of $90, and the website promoting it used weasel language about the prize, saying participants could “potentially win up to $50,000”. The competition, scheduled for June 1, had no check points, and any kind of road vehicle, including motorcycles, would be accepted. You could buy your entry tickets through eBay.


The man promoting the race, Vaughn Wilson of Alma, Arkansas, is a self-styled “colonel” who poses for portraits in a white Col. Sanders-style suit. He appears to make most of his income from selling copper moonshine stills that he custom builds to owners’ specifications, according to the website where he markets them.

If Wilson’s scheme sounds a bit outlandish even to ordinary members of the public, it was obviously outrageous to people in the auto-racing community, especially those who had participated in a variety of cross-country races themselves over the years. This included Matt Farah, senior editor over at the auto-racing website The Smoking Tire, who knew, as he described it in his subsequent piece, that “a proper ‘Cannonball’ in the traditional sense is a coast-to-coast, underground race. No hotels. No stopping. Invite only. Low key. Tell no one. Don’t advertise it, or we’ll all go to jail. Wait a year to release your time so the statute of limitations on speeding expires first.”

So Farah called Wilson up personally and recorded the call on video. At about the seven-minute mark of the video, Wilson launches into an attempt to recruit Farah into his scheme to manipulate what he calls “common law” in order to obtain large sums of money. Indeed, it appears that such schemes are the basis for the supposed $50,000 prize money for the proposed race.

Farah described what he learned about Wilson and his beliefs from the call:

• Wilson claimed he can’t be sued because he’s not running the race on public roads in the United States, he’s running the race on public roads in America.

• The United States only exists in the District of Columbia, and everything else is “America,” so the rest of the country isn’t covered by statutory regulations affecting “The United States.”

• He can’t be sued or held liable for anything non-violent because he refuses to acknowledge the existence of anyone that would sue him. He also claims he can’t get tickets, and doesn’t pay any taxes. This, presumably, is also why he thinks it’s okay to violate Brock Yates’s Copyright on the term “Cannonball.

• He can’t be held liable for what someone does in their own car, even if they pay him to enter his race under the assumption that if they get to Los Angeles first, they win $50,000. He says that “recommending against speeding” is enough of a disclaimer to release his own liability.

• He can install GPS trackers in cars to prove who got there fastest, and there is no way the government can or will ever see that information, or be able to use it to prosecute.

• He claims he can’t be arrested because he claims not to be a U.S. Citizen (but he’s not a foreigner either. He just lives here, and is not subject to our laws).

• Offering a $50,000 prize for being there first is not encouraging people to break the law, only those with “evil in their hearts” can break the law.

Farah concluded, in his conversation with Wilson, that “I thought maybe you were stupid, but you’re actually just insane.”

Participants in a web forum devoted to Ferraris had a humorous discussion about who might have actually been persuaded to try joining the race (no one admitted to this). One noted that he had an email exchange with Wilson, querying about the liability issues, and had received this reply:

Hey Dave. There is a liability clause in the entry form. And it is not suggested for anyone to break the law. Also all rights are reserved. See UCC 1-308

Cordially yours,

Colonel Vaughn Wilson

All rights reserved

UCC 1-308

America without the U.S. federal corporation

The sovereign domain of His Royal Majesty’s creation.

All information given is for informational purposes only. User assumes all risk at all times, places and circumstances. Reliance on any of it by anyone without doing further research, proving, having proof, or verifying is prohibited.

CAVEAT: You have now entered ecclesiastical jurisdiction pursuant to the highest law, the Royal Word of God (Bible), See 1 Corinthians 6:2 and further, the free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence 1776, Magna Carta 1215/1225 and Robin vs. Hardaway 1790.

These ideas and beliefs, of course, are classic instances of so-called “sovereign citizen” movement ideas – a belief system derived from far-right interpretations of history and the Constitution that originated with the Posse Comitatus movement. Movement followers believe that they get to decide which laws to obey and which are mere products of an illegitimate government, and they refuse to pay taxes or heed normative licensing laws.

Wilson’s “Cannonball One” website promoting the race has been taken down and is now defunct. He has not yet responded to SPLC’s queries about the race and its status.

Mock Arrests of Pastors for ‘Defending Faith’ Creates Uproar

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

It certainly made for a startling video: police, lights ablaze, pull up to local churches. Once inside, they march up to the pulpit and place the pastor preaching there under arrest, in front of the congregation. The men of the cloth are perp-walked out of the church with handcuffs on.

This very scenario created a brief uproar – first at the Akron, Ohio, churches where the “arrests” took place, and then around the country as word spread on social media – among Christians concerned that they were witnessing modern-day persecution.

It was, however, all fake – except for the uniforms of the arresting officers. Those were real enough – and that fact has raised eyebrows in the Ohio precincts where it all took place.


In fact, the mock arrests had been arranged ahead of time by the pastors themselves, who persuaded the Summit County Sheriff’s Department to participate in the stunt as a way of dramatizing and publicizing an upcoming community event called “Defending The Faith,” in which the pastors will face a mock trial and be forced to defend their Christianity.

As the uproar grew, Summit County Sheriff Steve Barry was defensive about taking part in the stunt: “I want to clarify that none of the arrests were real. It was all part of a skit that went along with the pastors’ sermons that day,” Barry said in his statement. “I knew it was being filmed, but I thought it was only going to be shown to the congregation. Once it got out there on the Web, people were commenting about how disgusting we were to interrupt church services to effect an arrest.”

The deputies who participated were clearly aware that things had gone awry. Sgt. Samantha Walker, one of the participants, told WKYC-TV: “You see people crying in the audience,” “They’re not believing this is happening to their pastor. Some of the looks the audience was giving us — I’ve never been so afraid in church in my life.”

At YouTube, where a video of the arrests was posted, commenters were confused. Most of the viewers assumed what they were seeing was real: “Arrested for practicing your faith? Is this communist Russia?” asked one. The comments to the video have since been turned off and removed.

The promoters of the “Defending The Faith” event were pleased:  “In terms of marketing, it has been very successful because it is creating a buzz. People are asking ‘why are those pastors being arrested’ and are digging a little deeper to find out what’s behind the arrests,” Edra Frazier, marketing coordinator for event, told the Akron Beacon Journal. “We do, however, need to do a more adequate job of tagging the posts with production information.”

California Legislator Proposes Outlawing Orca Shows, Ending Captivity

The documentary Blackfish may not have qualified as an Oscar finalist this year, but it has already had more real-world impact than any similar film in memory, in addition to its having sold over 2 million theater tickets. The realization of that impact became manifest this week when a ban on killer-whale shows at marine parks was proposed by a California legislator:

Assemblyman Richard Bloom (D) proposed the legislation at an event in Santa Monica. The Orca Welfare and Safety Act AB-2140) would allow orcas to stay at SeaWorld, but only for research and rehabilitation; the whale would no longer be allowed to perform. Human interaction with the animals would be limited for trainers’ safety.

Also included in the bill are measures to prevent captive breeding and prohibit orcas from being imported and exported in California.

“There's simply no justification for the continued captive display of orcas for entertainment purposes,” said Bloom. “These beautiful creatures are much too large and far too intelligent to be confined in small, concrete pools for their entire lives.”

The proposed legislation stops short of demanding sea parks release orcas back into the wild because experts say they wouldn't survive after living in captivity.

The ban would only affect Sea World San Diego, the only captive-orca facility remaining in a state that once had several. He also has some early support:

Democratic assembly member Lorena Gonzales of San Diego has already gone on the record, via social media, that she will most likely vote 'yes' on this bill.

Gonzalez has posted on Facebook, "SeaWorld's reputation of treating its workers poorly dates back to its opening 50 years ago. It's about time we continue this conversation about job quality and workplace safety at Sea World whether it involves groundskeepers, concessions workers or killer whale trainers. Recent evidence suggests its record with orcas isn't much better. I'm looking forward to having an honest conversation about Sea World's business practices and how they can really be an icon that makes San Diego proud."

As David Kirby points out, such a ban would neither be new nor extraordinary, since a number of places have outlawed cetacean captivity in the United States and elsewhere:

At least five countries—India, Croatia, Hungary, Chile, and Costa Rica—have also outlawed all cetacean captivity, while Switzerland has banned captivity for dolphins.

Dr. Naomi Rose, marine mammal scientist at the Animal Welfare Institute, said the bill was inspired by the orcas-in-captivity documentary Blackfish.

“The Blackfish effect has never been in greater evidence—everything has led to this, the first serious legislative proposal to prohibit the captive display of this highly intelligent and social species,” Rose wrote in an email. “SeaWorld should join with this effort rather than continue to fight it. They can be on the right side of history.”

Indeed, Rose has elsewhere proposed a scheme whereby Sea World can turn a profit by doing the right thing for the orcas, and for the children they claim they are educating:

These facilities can work with experts around the world to create sanctuaries where captive orcas can be rehabilitated and retired. These sanctuaries would be sea pens or netted-off bays or coves, in temperate to cold water natural habitat. They would offer the animals respite from performing and the constant exposure to a parade of strangers (an entirely unnatural situation for a species whose social groupings are based on family ties and stability -- "strangers" essentially do not exist in orca society). Incompatible animals would not be forced to cohabit the same enclosures and family groups would be preserved.

Show business trainers would no longer be necessary. Expert caretakers would continue to train retired whales for veterinary procedures, but would not get in the water and would remain at a safe distance (this is known in zoo parlance as "protected contact"). And the degree to which they interact directly with the whales would be each whale's choice.

A fundamental premise of these sanctuaries, however, is that eventually they would empty. Breeding would not be allowed and captive orcas would no longer exist within the next few decades.

Many wildlife sanctuaries, for circus, roadside zoo and backyard refugees, exist around the globe for animals such as big cats, elephants and chimpanzees. The business (usually nonprofit) model for these types of facilities is therefore well-established for terrestrial species and can be adapted for orcas.

Quite predictably, Sea World sees all this -- just as it does Blackfish -- as an existential threat, and is firing back vigorously and viciously:

While we cannot comment on Assemblyman Bloom's proposed legislation until we see it, the individuals he has chosen to associate with for today's press conference are well known extreme animal rights activists, many of whom regularly campaign against SeaWorld and other accredited marine mammal parks and institutions. Included in the group are some of the same activists that partnered with PETA in bringing the meritless claim that animals in human care should be considered slaves under the 13th amendment of the US Constitution - a clear publicity stunt. This legislation appears to reflect the same sort of out-of-the-mainstream thinking. SeaWorld, one of the world's most respected zoological institutions, already operates under multiple federal, state and local animal welfare laws.

This is typical of Sea World: Rather than address the real issues underlying the matter, it chooses to attack the people involved and touting their business credentials; their chief argument seems to be that they are better people -- even while they lie through their teeth to us at every turn, whether it's telling people that captive orcas live as long as wild whiles, or claiming to be really all about conserving orcas in the wild.

Indeed, the most laughable part in all this comes when Sea World tries to claim it is also a leader in conservation and wildlife recovery efforts for the animals in its care. That may be true of Florida manatees, but it is simply a flat-out lie when it comes to orcas.
One thing we know for a fact about SeaWorld: Even though it preaches a "conservation message" to people who come to their theme parks, it does almost nothing of consequence in the real world to assist in the conservation of wild killer whales.

When people at those parks ask what they can do to help killer whales in the wild, they are given generic answers such as watching what lawn fertilizer they use, or not littering, or assisting in beach cleanups.

But these things do little if anything at all to actually help killer whales in the wild. Indeed, you will find only scant references at Sea World parks to the only officially endangered population of killer whales -- the Southern Resident population of the Salish Sea. And if you do happen to hear about them, you will be told that their chief threat is boats and pollution.

What you will not be told is that in reality, the Southern Residents face a doubly whammy. The first whammy came in the loss of over a third of its historic population during the period 1964-75, when SeaWorld and its cohorts founded the captive-orca industry by removing some fifty resident killer whales from Puget Sound waters. Since then, its population has wavered between seventy and a hundred whales -- we are currently at 81 -- in large part because of the second whammy: a lack of salmon, particularly the Chinook salmon that comprise their preferred diet.

Recovering the orca population is necessarily focused on restoring our salmon runs, both in the Salish Sea and in the Columbia River and elsewhere, including Northern California. It is a long and difficult fight, one in which the progress has been slow, in large part because of a lack of financial support for salmon restoration.

Where has Sea World been in all this? Nowhere. They have not funded orca-population studies or censuses, let alone communications and ship-noise studies that are needed. We did see them briefly during the Springer episode, when SeaWorld lent local scientists the use of a diagnostic lab and an overseeing veterinarian to test a sample of Springer's blood before she was transported north and successfully reunited with her familial pod. For that, they now claim credit for the entire project.

If SeaWorld were serious about assisting orcas -- and serious about their claims to being a conservation-oriented organization -- they would be a major presence in the Northwest in the long hard battle to restore our salmon and save our killer whales. Instead, they are nowhere to be seen -- too busy teaching orcas to breach in triplicate and rolling in the revenue stream that creates.

They also specialize in lying about and smearing the people who are in fact actively engaged in the work of saving wild killer whales in their native habitat. This latest confrontation is just another iteration of what we have seen from them all along.

CO Gubernatorial Candidate Contemplated ‘Civil War’ against Obama Administration

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Now that former Congressman Bob Beauprez has officially entered the race for the Republican nomination for governor in Colorado, his long record as a rabble-rousing conservative is being closely examined. This week, an old video he recorded in 2012 resurfaced at ColoradoPols.com, showing Beauprez contemplating the possibility that Americans might turn to violent revolt against the Obama administration.

The observations came in an interview with Perry Atkinson of The Dove TV program Focus Today, recorded July 31, 2012. Beauprez and Atkinson were discussing the alleged dangers of American participation in various United Nations treaties “that potentially would allow Iran to disarm Americans.”

ATKINSON: You know Congressman, this, this, I don’t even like going down this road, but if this saw the light of day, and God forbid that it would, but if this saw the light of day, wouldn’t this be a modern-day civil war in this country?

BEAUPREZ: Well, some are wondering what will be the, the line that gets crossed eventually, where, where people actually rise up and say enough. I mean, our founding documents refer to it, that people have every right, a free people have every right, that when government becomes too obtrusive, too obsessive, too overwhelming, and infringes on their individual liberty and freedom, free people have the right to overthrow that government and establish a new one.

I hope and pray that, that we don’t see another revolution in this country. I hope and pray we don’t see another civil war, but this administration is pushing the boundaries like none I think we’ve ever, ever seen.

The treaty they are discussing, the proposed Arms Trade Treaty, is the focus of numerous far-right conspiracy theories, particularly among John Birch Society adherents and like-minded anti-government “Patriots”.

Beauprez, who campaigns as a “Tea Party” conservative these days, is no stranger to controversy. During his 2006 bid for the governorship (a race he eventually lost to Democrat Bill Ritter by a 17-point margin), he claimed during a debate that “as high as 70 percent, maybe even more” of African-American women’s pregnancies end in abortion, a remark for which he later apologized. Also, his campaign was briefly embroiled in a controversy involving the misuse of a national criminal database for ads targeting Ritter.

Suspect in Montana Clinic Vandalism May Be Linked to Controversial ‘Crisis Pregnancy’ Center

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

A man arrested for seriously vandalizing a medical clinic this week in Kalispell, Mont.,  that performs abortions is reportedly the son of a board member of a local anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy” clinic, which has itself been the center of controversy after white supremacists in the area raised funds for it.

The clinic, All Families Healthcare, was vandalized overnight Monday when one or more perpetrators broke glass and equipment throughout the office. Zachary Klundt, a 24-year-old Kalispell resident, was arrested while breaking into another building early Tuesday morning, and was promptly linked to the clinic burglary because of evidence he was carrying.

According to a post on Montana Human Rights Network’s Facebook page, Klundt is the son of Twyla Klundt, a member of the board of Hope Pregnancy Ministries, an anti-abortion “pregnancy counseling” center whose primary mission is to talk women out of getting abortions.

It and other “crisis pregnancy clinics” have recently come under fire in Montana for allegedly misleading women about their care options when it comes to pregnancy and abortion, according to a study by the National Abortion Rights Action League. Among its findings was that “89 percent, or eight of the nine centers visited, provided inaccurate information about birth control, such as saying contraception is the same as abortion, condoms aren’t effective in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and birth control leads to breast and cervical cancer.”

Previously, Hope Pregnancy Ministries came under fire when noted local neo-Nazi April Gaede announced that she was helping raise funds for the center because she said it helped “save white babies.”  In making her pitch, Gaede claimed that she had personally met with members of the center’s staff.

NPR Faces Listener Backlash After Scott Lively Interview

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Evangelical crusader Scott Lively, who is credited with inspiring anti-gay legislation in both Uganda and Russia, was interviewed last week on National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More” program by host Michel Martin to discuss Uganda’s harsh new statute outlawing homosexuality. The interview, which lasted over 10 minutes, included the usual doses of Lively’s incendiary rhetoric, including his assertion that “sodomy is not a human right.”

Lively also justified anti-gay discrimination by comparing it to other forms of bigotry: “Gender, race, ethnicity – these are all morally neutral. But homosexuality is – involves voluntary sexual conduct with serious public health, social, sociological implications. It’s not irrational to discriminate on that basis.”

The interview sparked a strong negative reaction from NPR listeners, who took to social media such as Facebook and Twitter to chastise the network and Martin for broadcasting the interview. Among them was Ted Allen of the Food Network, who commented: “Can’t believe ears: Why is @NPR legitimizing anti-gay Scott Lively on @TellMeMoreNPR?!”

Others commented at NPR’s website, chastising NPR along similar lines: “Real people are dying because of this man’s work. I am offended by this man’s hate-speech. Truly offended. Why give him a platform for his propaganda? Why not the Westboro Baptist Church? Or the White Rights movement?”

Martin and editor Amita Parashar Kelly responded on-air Monday: “Now of course, we’ve thought about those questions,” said Kelly. “But our mission is to bring listeners stories that affect people’s lives. And we know that what Pastor Lively says is offensive to a lot of people. But the fact is that he has a huge reach around the world. People in Uganda are listening to him, and Uganda’s parliament is listening. So we wanted to hear what he had to say.”

Martin also responded to charges that her interview was too soft, noting that she had interviewed Lively in the context of having earlier interviewed Frank Mugisha, a gay Ugandan activist and one of the leading critics of the laws:

I would say that every interview is different. I would say that I feel I did push back — to quote a phrase — where I felt appropriate. But I think that some of the people who wrote in are actually looking for something else. I think that what they are looking for is the emotional release of my berating him for his views. I felt that my job in that moment was to let people who are not acquainted with his views know what those views are.

Explaining that I was writing for Hatewatch, I wrote to Martin to express our own view:

Our concern is not so much that Lively was given the time to air his views – it’s normal journalistic procedure to cover the spectrum and let listeners judge for themselves. And like some of your listeners, I probably would have liked to have heard more pointed counter-questions: For instance, when Lively referred to the critics of anti-gay laws as “serious bullies,” I probably would have asked him just who the bullies are in this case. But that kind of second-guessing occurs all the time for people conducting interviews (I often second-guess myself in similar post-mortem situations) and overall, I felt that you really did provide some sound journalistic pushback.

The real concern is that NPR’s listeners weren’t provided adequate background on Lively, and it was done in such a way as to suggest that Lively’s views are common among evangelicals. (They are not.) NPR’s listeners to this segment would not know that he avidly promotes the theory that homosexuals were responsible for the Holocaust; that he is also active in Eastern Europe, notably Russia, where he takes credit for Putin’s installment of a regime of anti-gay laws, and where anti-gay thuggery by neo-Nazis has become widespread; and that, moreover, as we have documented, he has been a major player in a wide swath of anti-gay hate-group extremism. Lively instead was simply identified as an “evangelical leader” and described in a benign way that would suggest that he speaks for evangelicals on the subject, when in fact only a narrow spectrum subscribes to his radical views or endorses his hateful rhetoric.

We understand, of course, that there is only so much airspace for providing listeners with background on your interview subjects. But we would like to know why Lively’s background was seemingly whitewashed in this instance.

Martin responded:

I take exception to your characterization of my interview. I believe I was one of the first U.S. reporters to take Scott Lively seriously when he first addressed the Ugandan Parliament in 2009 and I reviewed many of those issues then. I did not believe it necessary to plow the same ground as in previous interviews when he was less well known. We chose to interview him again because Frank Mugisha, whom I also previously interviewed, identified Scott Lively specifically as a person of influence on the debate and I felt that our listeners could benefit from hearing from him exactly what he believes. And I feel very comfortable with the tone of my interview in the time that we had, which was precisely the same and in the same place on the show as the interview I had with Frank Mugisha the day before. The advocates can’t have it both ways. If the interview had been longer to include Mr. Lively a full biography I am sure there would have been complaints that the interview was too long. If you believe in free speech and an unfettered press then you have to believe in it when the views expressed are offensive to you.

I also believe as evidently others do not that our listeners do not want or expect me to think for them and are capable of analyzing this information for themselves.

I responded:

I hope you don’t misunderstand the nature of my query. We don’t object to the fact that you interviewed Mr. Lively, or even that your interview might not have been as hard-hitting as we might have liked. Your critics are wrong about that, in my estimation. We believe in journalistic thoroughness too, and you were justifiably exploring this area.

The problem, from our view, is not simply that journalists cover extremists (we are, after all, mostly just journalists who cover extremists), but when that reportage doesn’t make clear to public audiences the nature of the extremism that is being covered. I hope you understand that red flags go up for us whenever any extremist is covered and presented in the media as somehow representing a mainstream view, even a mainstream conservative or, as it were, evangelical view. There are important distinctions between far-right hate groups and the mainstream right, and it’s concerning to us whenever those distinctions are blurred, especially in a way that could leave audiences with the impression that far-right extremists somehow reflect mainstream views – and disconcerting, of course, whenever it occurs with reporters who typically are more thoughtful and careful.

Martin’s final word:

I feel I have said all I need to say about this except to add that I think you are confusing your work with mine. I respect your work, but your work is not my work.

Behind the ‘Religious Freedom’ Attacks on Gay Rights Lurks a Broad Attack on Civil Rights

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

While there was predictable outrage from many right-wing quarters this week over Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s veto of S.B. 1062 — a bill that would have legalized discrimination against LGBT people on the basis of protecting the “religious freedom” of people who did not wish to do business with them — the overwhelming reaction by most Arizonans, particularly its business people, was one of relief.

After all, the state is still recovering from the economic blowback wrought by another piece of far-right legislation – the infamous anti-immigrant S.B. 1070 legislation that put local law officers in the business of enforcing federal immigration law. The damage inflicted by the law itself, worsened by boycotts and other economic retaliation provoked by that legislation, remain fresh in the minds of the state’s business leaders, who pleaded with Brewer to boycott the law, as did the state’s entire congressional delegation and even a few of the legislators who had originally voted for the bill.

For now, the legislation appears to be dead in Arizona. But it is only one of several states in which the “religious freedom” legislation has made its presence felt, and in several states it may yet be approved.

• In Kansas, a similar proposal passed the state House of Representatives by a wide margin before coming to a sudden halt when it reached the state Senate. Its House sponsors said they hope to work with leaders in the Senate to craft a compromise bill.
• In Idaho, two separate bills tendered by the same legislator — Rep. Lynn Luker of Boise — laid out a broad swath of businesses and professions that could claim “religious belief” as an exemption from anti-discrimination statutes. But they both were sent back to committee by House leaders.
• In Georgia, the Preservation of Religious Freedom Act similarly would give people “the right to act or refuse to act in a manner substantially motivated by a sincerely held religious tenet or belief whether or not the exercise is compulsory or a central part or requirement of the person’s religious tenets or beliefs.” That bill is still working its way through both chambers of the legislature.
• In Mississippi, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act similarly constrains the state from imposing a “burden” on citizens’ “free exercise of religion.” It has passed the state Senate and awaits action in the House. The state’s governor, Phil Bryant, has not said whether or not he would sign it into law.
• In Missouri, a bill still being considered in the Senate would permit businesses to refuse service to anyone if it violates their sincerely held religious beliefs. It was only recently introduced and has not been voted on. Its chief sponsor cited the examples of a florist or baker who refused to provide their services in same-sex weddings: “This is trying to provide a defense in those types of instances,” he said. “We’re trying to protect Missourians from attacks on their religious freedom.”
• In Oklahoma, a similar bill titled the Oklahoma Religious Freedom Act has been in the works since January, but is in the process of being redrafted. Its chief sponsor, Rep. Tom Newell, told The Associated Press: “We’re still in favor of running a bill like that, but we’re just trying to get the language tightened up to prevent there from being any fiascos like there have been elsewhere.”

Fairly typical of the language of these proposals is that found in the Idaho legislation, which permits businesses to avoid penalties for “declining to provide or participate in any service that violates the person’s sincerely held religious beliefs or exercise of religion.”

This kind of language would “empower businesses to invoke religion to discriminate,” says Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. “This wave of legislation does seem to be a reaction to an expansion of LGBT rights, among others.”

But defenders of the laws deny this is the case. Ryan T. Anderson at the Heritage Foundation insists the only issue at stake is “liberty”: “While the government must treat everyone equally, private actors are left free to make reasonable judgments and distinctions — including reasonable moral judgments and distinctions — in their economic activities. Not every florist need provide wedding arrangements for every ceremony. Not every photographer need capture every first kiss. Competitive markets can best harmonize a range of values that citizens hold.”

The legislation universally features language referring to the “substantial burden” imposed on businesses by anti-discrimination laws. That in turn indicates that legislators are tying their hopes to its ultimate success to other cases involving similar principles — in this case, efforts to overturn the mandate on businesses imposed by the Affordable Care Act’s provisions to provide contraception to women. Notably, Hobby Lobby is seeking to overturn that rule on the basis of the claim that it imposes a “substantial burden” on its religious beliefs.

“Never before have the courts given for-profit businesses an exemption from a generally applicable law based on the owners’ religious beliefs,” says Mach. “Every time it has been attempted in the past, they lost. And so I think there is an attempt to do something unprecedented here.”

Most of this legislation originates with the same source: the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Scottsdale-based religious-right organization formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund, which is ostensibly dedicated to advocating for Christians’ right to “freely live out their faith.” ADF is also active in working to criminalize gay sex in other countries, and played a key role in the recent passage of Uganda’s new laws outlawing homosexuality. It is also active in supporting a number of lawsuits involving conservative Christians’ rights to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

The most problematic aspect of the “religious freedom” legislation that has been proposed so far is how vague its language is and how broadly it can be applied. Indeed, each of the bills so far applies “religious freedom” not just to the issue of providing services to gays and lesbians, but conceivably to every kind of prejudice under the sun. People could refuse to serve interracial couples, for instance, or for that matter anyone of another religion or ethnicity or who has disability.

If someone claimed, for instance, to be a believer in Christian Identity — the wildly racist religious movement that preaches that white people are the true children of Israel, Jews are the literal descendants of Satan, and other nonwhites are soulless “mud people” — one could conceivably use the laws to refuse to provide services to Jews or blacks.

“If you have a religious right to refuse service to a same-sex couple that is married, you would presumably have a religious right to refuse service to Muslims, or if your religion forbids divorce, to a couple that has been divorced and remarried. And on and on,” says Mach.

In that event, he observes, these laws are not merely a reaction to advances in LGBT rights, but a whole broad swath of civil rights laws.

One of the laws’ main defenders — paleo-conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan — essentially admitted as much in his column on the debate over Arizona’s law. He offered a simple proposal: “Suppose we repealed the civil rights laws and fired all the bureaucrats enforcing these laws.”

“Does anyone think hotels, motels and restaurants across Dixie, from D.C. to Texas, would stop serving black customers? Does anyone think there would again be signs sprouting up reading ‘whites’ and ‘colored’ on drinking foundations and restrooms?”

Buchanan claimed the civil rights laws of the 1960s have already done their work, saying “the conditions that called for the laws of the 1960s have ceased to exist.” He is not clear how those laws would have ever worked in the first place if they had not been enforced on a broad basis.

James Laffrey and His Call to Assassinate Jews

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

James Laffrey has not been publicly advocating ethnic hatred for very long. He does not appear to have many, if any, followers. He is not particularly well-connected to more established entities on the anti-Semitic far right. But what he does have is a website and plans to create a white supremacist political party called Whites Will Win.

Laffrey, a middle-aged man who appears to be based in Michigan, has caught people’s attention with the bloodcurdling nature of his agenda: he openly calls for the assassination of Jewish people by their white neighbors.

Here is a typical rant by Laffrey, in the midst of discussing a TV show featuring Tom Selleck: “The jews are killing us. We must kill them.”

Similarly, in a post about another TV series, he writes: “Kill every jew. We have every right to do so. Also, it is our duty and our pleasure.”

Laffrey wants the targeting to be indiscriminate:

Kill jews. jew doctors, jew lawyers, jew teachers, jew insurers, jew porn dealers, jew drug dealers, jew owners of major league sports teams, jew bankers, jew travel agency owners, jew jewelers.

Do it carefully. Safely. Proudly. Silently. Again and again. That’s our necessary strategy for now, as our massive wave of White Might rises across our land from sea to shining sea.

In a post published last April, Laffrey outlined a program of assassination in which white men would surreptitiously begin killing Jews on a lone-wolf basis, while robbing their victims and living off the proceeds:

See that no witnesses are present. Likely wear gloves. Permanently “persuade” the jew to relinquish residence as an enemy parasite in North America. Quickly. Efficiently. Reappropriate the cash. …

Your heroism in reducing the enemy jew population infesting our country is your secret for the rest of your life or until White victory is achieved, whichever comes first.

Laffrey’s own description of his radicalization suggests that he came to hold these views about Jews and society only in recent years. He claims to have voted for Barack Obama for president in 2008, but then came to believe that a cabal of Jewish financiers secretly controls the world, and that Obama was completely under their control. “I bought into the corporate media’s selling of the product called Barack Obama. I admit it. I regret it. Shame on me. At that time, I was still race-blind, as we all have been taught and brainwashed to be.”

He claims he “began to do my own research to find out who was behind the entire system of treason” and concluded that the Jewish Rothschild family was controlling the world’s politics and economics through a nefarious cabal of fellow Jews and their enablers. This is, of course, classic anti-Semitic conspiracism, of the kind long practiced by a variety of Nazis, fascists, and their modern descendants, and Laffrey’s interpretation of it does not bring much new to the ideological table.

Laffrey at first attempted to organize a political party under the name Equal Party USA, and at first he was coy about the nature of his anti-Semitic campaign. In a 2012 YouTube video, he teases viewers with the promise of a radical “American solution” to “the infestation of the USA” which he describes as “practical and nonviolent.” Not long after, he created the Whites Will Win Party and authored posts claiming to prove that Obama is Jewish and Mitt Romney likely is too. He claimed that JFK, FDR and Mark Twain were Jewish.

Laffrey was initially committed to nonviolence but shifted away from that position, having decided that the United States had been founded as “a country that only Whites could fully appreciate and maintain as a safe haven for Whites” and that “Whites must overthrow Jewry” as a first step to any solution. His ultimate program? “Every jew in the USA not executed or imprisoned here will, after sterilization, be expelled.”

The most noteworthy thing about Laffrey is his open advocacy of murder. This kind of speech would be impermissible in a number of countries, notably Germany, the U.K. and Canada. But in the United States, because it does not rise to the level of a “true threat” – that is, no individual is being directly threatened by this speech – the courts have consistently held that such talk is, while deplorable, protected under the First Amendment.

Laffrey did not respond to our requests for comment.

Laffrey has generated little attention outside the white supremacist realm, but he has drawn notice within it. However, a number of his fellow white supremacists have indicated they resent his entry into anti-Semitic organizing without having established himself first in the community. Laffrey appears to have little following, with only slight web traffic, and no financial support.

But he is, if nothing else, another example of how a single person can poison the well by leveraging the power of the web.

Suspect in Arson Attack on Packed Gay Bar Said to Believe ‘Homosexuals Should Be Exterminated’

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

The man suspected of attempting to burn down a crowded Seattle gay bar on New Year’s Eve reportedly told a confidant that he hated gay and lesbian people and thought “homosexuals should be exterminated,” according to a Seattle TV station. He may also have been planning other terrorist activity, the confidant said.

KIRO-TV reported over the weekend that a friend of Musab Masmari, the Libyan immigrant arrested in early February by detectives as he attempted to flee the country, told FBI agents that Masmari had a “deep distaste for homosexual people,” despite living for several years at an apartment in Capitol Hill, Seattle’s best-known gay neighborhood.

The informant said he had met Masmari at a café near a mosque both attended and that Masmari had laid out his hatred of gay people over the course of the conversation. He said Masmari told him he had obtained a rifle, and he added that he feared that Masmari might have been planning other terrorist acts in addition to the attempted arson at Neighbours Tavern on Capitol Hill at about midnight of New Year’s Eve.

Quick action by alert patrons of the tavern put out the fire, which was set on a stairway leading to the crowded upstairs club, before any of the 750 people inside could be harmed. Masmari’s image was captured on security cameras carrying what appeared to be the gasoline container that was used in the arson attempt, and he was identified by a number of his former neighbors. Detectives questioned him and released him initially, but when he was caught heading to Sea-Tac Airport with a boarding pass for a flight to Turkey, they arrested him and charged him with attempted arson.

The FBI announced that it was investigating the case as a bias crime. If this latest evidence becomes part of the case, hate-crime charges are likely pending.