The CEO of two companies that provide tactical weapons training and supplies to the military and police -- and who is a former Tennessee police chief -- said yesterday that if President Obama uses executive orders to ban assault rifles, "I'm going to start killing people."

James Yeager, CEO of...

When the word came in last night that Barack Obama and the Democrats had won national elections in something close to a landslide, millions of Americans went to bed satisfied that even if their candidate didn't win, democracy had survived. The lopsided results made it clear that this election had...

Do words have consequences?

For years, we at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have argued that they do. When conspiracy-minded Islamophobes claim that Muslims have a secret plan to force America into a medieval-style caliphate, Muslims in the streets get hurt. When angry nativists assert that Mexicans are...

In the smoke-and-mirrors world of the deranged political right, there are plenty of reasons to conclude that President Obama is a "communist." His father wrote about socialism. His mother was white and only Marxists slept with black men in her era -- plus, she met Obama's father in a Russian...

Last year, a balding, 46-year-old man slipped quietly into the men's rooms of three Orlando, Fla., area biker bars, where he warily pasted "Bring Our Troops Home" stickers on washroom mirrors. From there, his secret mission took him to an upscale Irish pub and a seafood restaurant, where he again...

For the better part of seven years now, Kansas attorney Kris Kobach has been urging municipalities and states to pass the draconian laws he writes that are aimed at so badly punishing undocumented immigrants that they will "self-deport." Even as governments went into debt to pay his fees and the...

Former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, the author of his state's draconian anti-immigrant S.B. 1070 law, issued a statement last night denouncing "the local media" for attempting to tie him to J.T. Ready, the neo-Nazi who is believed to have murdered four people earlier in the day before being...

The National Rifle Association (NRA) -- the powerful gun lobby that has called federal law enforcement agents "jack-booted thugs," accused President Obama of having secret plans to strip away Americans' guns, and been the main force behind the incredibly dangerous "Stand Your Ground" laws being used to justify the killing...

Black folks, this is a message for you: The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the country's preeminent group fighting against same-sex marriage, really, really likes you. They even want to make some of you famous!

Have NOM's principal leaders, former president Maggie Gallagher and current leader Brian S. Brown, stood...

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has never been a pleasant organization. Its top leaders have warned shrilly of a "Latin onslaught," defended a racist 1924 quota system, insisted that America needs a "European-American majority," and fretted that Latinos are "outbreeding" white people. Its founder has sought...

Something is happening on the radical right. Even as the presidential campaign season heats up and, with it, the possibility of ridding themselves of their hated black president, extremists are ratcheting up the rhetoric of war.

The League of the South, for instance, has long been threatening a...

Anti-Muslim hate crimes soared by an astounding 50% last year, skyrocketing over 2009 levels in a year marked by the vicious rhetoric of Islam-bashing politicians and activists, especially over the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" in New York City.

Although the national statistics compiled by the FBI each year are...

The FBI undercover tapes of four North Georgia militiamen arrested Tuesday offer an extraordinary glimpse of the terrorism the group is accused of planning. Details of how they allegedly intended to commit mass murder with deadly ricin, carry out assassinations of officials, and bomb government buildings abound in government...

Starting today, a number of prominent public figures will be attending and speaking at the Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of socially conservative activists in Washington. But just what kind of values are they promoting?

The summit is hosted by the Family Research Council (FRC) and co-hosted...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) sent a letter (pdf) to officials earlier urging non-mandatory improvements in the way that the Suffolk County, N.Y., Police Department (SFPD) investigates hate crimes and other practices. The preliminary findings letter was part of a DOJ investigation of the department's patterns and practices in...

Even before a Norwegian madman named Anders Behring Breivik opened fire this July on fellow citizens he believed were abetting large-scale Muslim immigration, it was clear that Islamophobic propaganda, much of it from American politicians and activists, was having a poisonous effect on Western societies.

And the revelation...

Anti-Latino hate crimes in California spiked up by almost 50% last year, the state's attorney general's office reported Wednesday. That dramatic rise, from 81 such crimes in 2009 to 119 in 2010, followed a decade of declines.

The numbers may be indicative of a renewed national rise in hate...

The White House today released a new report, "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States," that describes a national plan to take on homegrown violent radicals of all types. It is broad, sober, careful not to assign blame to any particular community, and fairly uninspiring.

It's...

James Ford Seale, a long-time member of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who very nearly got away with murder, has died. After serving less than four years of three life sentences for the 1964 murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, both...

Perhaps the time has come to state the obvious.

The people who have been selling claims that President Obama is not American -- the Donald Trumps, the Orly Taitzes, the miserable state legislators hawking their snake-oil laws insisting that presidential candidates prove their citizenship -- are mostly a pack of...