As investigators continued to seek insight into the radicalization of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the apparent perpetrators of the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, it emerged that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had consumed a smorgasbord of very American white supremacist and conspiracist publications popular on the domestic far right.
Over the years, reports of the death of Omar Hammami, the rapping jihadist from Alabama, have been greatly exaggerated. Numerous times since 2007, the American propagandist for Al Qaeda has been rumored to have been gunned down or blown to bits in Somalia, only to appear alive and well a few weeks later while releasing yet another anti-U.S. video filled with rap lyrics and hip-hop music.
Among the talking heads to emerge as “experts” on racial tension in the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin last year, perhaps none was so surprising as Frank Taaffe, a neighborhood watchman who volunteered with George Zimmerman.
Law enforcement officers have often been the target of violent attacks by “sovereign citizens,” antigovernment extremists who believe they don’t have to obey most laws or pay taxes and have been known to react murderously to perceived incursions on their freedom. Seven American law enforcement officers have been killed by sovereign citizens in the past decade.
For years, Ayo Kimathi lived out his double life of federal employee by day and ranting racist by night while working for one of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies.
Just over a century ago, on Aug. 25, 1913, a Georgia jury found factory superintendent Leo Frank guilty of the horrific murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, whose strangled corpse was found in the basement of Atlanta’s National Pencil Company, which Frank ran. Frank, who was 29 at the time, was said to have flirted with the young girl and was supposedly the last person to see her alive. A jury sentenced him to death for the crime.
The anti-gay movement, which has faced a series of legal and public relations defeats in recent years, was dealt yet another blow on June 19, when Exodus International, a prominent religious-right group devoted to so-called “conversion” therapy (meant to help individuals “overcome” their “unwanted same-sex attraction”), announced it would be shutting its doors.
It had been a long time since the world heard from the Kehoes.
In recent months, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has enacted a series of draconian laws targeting LGBT people and the so-called “homosexual agenda.” He’s outlawed “homosexual propaganda” in terms so vague that nearly any statement about LGBT people that falls short of outright condemning them may be prosecutable; banned the adoption of Russian children by couples in any country that permits same-sex marriage; and allowed for foreign nationals suspected of being gay or “pro-gay” to be arrested and detained. At press time, the Duma, Russia’s legislative body, was debating a bill that would enable the government to remove children from the homes of gay and lesbian parents.
Though Volksfront may have met its end, its leadership will probably live on in some form in the white supremacist world. Here are profiles of 12 key Volksfront members in the United States and abroad.
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