At least that’s the pitch – and the hope – of the Oath Keepers founder, Stewart Rhodes, as he tries to raise $30,000 in time to get a car on the track for a June 1 NASCAR-sanctioned second-tier race at Dover International Speedway in Dover, Del.

“This is the first of what we hope will be many races run with an Oath Keepers car,” Rhodes writes in an on-line money pitch. “The potential exposure is in the tens of millions.”

On its website, the far-right group says donations “will speak loudly to all the foes of our Republic, both foreign and domestic, so please be as generous as you can to help preserve the liberty we cherish.”

Rhodes, a Yale-educated lawyer and Army veteran, founded the rapidly growing organization in 2009. It is comprised mostly of active-duty police and military, as well as veterans, who worry about issues such as gun control and the much-feared “New World Order.”

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As The Daily Beast reported yesterday, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity is ostensibly designed to promote a discourse about U.S. foreign policy. But its advisory board is stacked with what writer James Kirchik characterized as “a bevy of conspiracy theorists, cranks, and apologists for some of the worst regimes on the planet.”

And just who are the far-right luminaries helping guide Paul’s new endeavor?

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The Appleby Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, is among this country’s scattered, independent fundamentalist churches still openly promoting the idea that the Biblical Noah pronounced a curse on descendants of his son, Ham. Ham had sexually molested Noah as he slept in a drunken stupor, and Noah realized it, the story goes. The curse ultimately fell on Canaan, Noah’s grandson, whose descendants were black and fated to be an underclass of slaves, according to this version of the Bible, which has been widely discredited by mainstream religious scholars.

But the canard is trumpeted loud and clear in an online statement of conviction by Appleby leaders. The East Texas church, 90 miles from Shreveport, La., is “a bit of a throwback, but these people are still out there,” Rachel Tabachnick, a fellow at the think tank Political Research Associates, told Hatewatch. She researches the impact of the religious right on politics and society.

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Phillips had a long history in conservative and right-wing movements, including three runs as a third-party presidential candidate. He sat on the board of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and worked on Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign. He then went on to get involved in the administration of Richard Nixon, who appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).

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The Muslims did it. No, it was an illegal immigrant. Think again – it was a gay guy. Wait, you missed the key signs: Our own government once again pulled off an act of covert terror to promote its nefarious aims.

Fingers have been pointed in all of these directions by conspiracy theory peddlers and professional hatemongers since the bombings Monday.

“It’s a pretty safe bet right now that this attack was carried out by an Islamist,” declared a post on the Tea Party Nation website Tuesday. The obvious cause for the violence? “We have a government that is not committed to protecting America.” Linking Islam with Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” of Communism, the post warned that the Boston bombings are just another event presaging future violence in “an ideological war” that can only be won if we have tougher, more anti-Islam U.S. political leaders. That, of course, would be the Tea Party cabal.

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The 21-year-old Aguigui, according to Georgia state prosecutors, funded his dreams of overthrowing the government through a campaign of political assassination and other acts of terror with money from a $500,000 life insurance policy he received after the “highly suspicious” death in July 2011 of his wife, Deirdre, an army sergeant who had served a tour of duty in Iraq as a linguist.

While the army has been investigating Sgt. Aguigui’s death for nearly two years, military officials released no further details, according to The Associated Press.

Following his wife’s death, Aguigui and his followers spent $87,000 on military-grade weapons and bomb-making material.

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“I can’t see them,” someone else said, climbing on his tiptoes. “They’re too many cops in the way.”

The police presence was indeed overwhelming and the rain steady as the Klan arrived at the courthouse steps at 2:15, about 45 minutes late on the day before Easter. But from the city-designated protest area it was impossible to hear them and nearly impossible to see them except for the tops of their pointy white hoods.

As soon as they arrived, the multiracial crowd of about 400 anti-Klan demonstrators and onlookers — who were kept in the Best Park parking lot, behind a 6-foot high fence and a phalanx of police officers on foot and horseback — began chanting, “KKK out of Memphis.”

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Christopher Lacy’s ideological ties to the sovereign citizen movement, whose adherents generally believe they are immune to federal tax and many criminal laws, were documented with more than 100 interviews and search warrants. But the seven-month investigation failed to determine why he shot CHP Trooper Kenyon Youngstrom on Sept. 4.

The trooper was fatally shot at close range moments after stopping Lacy’s vehicle, which had an “obstructed license plate” as it traveled on busy Interstate 680 near Alamo, Calif., the sheriff’s office said in a just-released summary statement. That was only the latest murder of a law enforcement official during a traffic stop by a sovereign citizen, most of whom believe the government has no right to regulate their driving. On May 20, 2010, two West Memphis, Ark., police officers were slain by a father-son team of sovereigns during a routine traffic stop.

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But James Timothy Turner, delivering his own opening statement at the trial that began Monday in Montgomery, Ala., cast himself as the victim. “I discovered things that big Washington government doesn’t want you know,” he said. “They’re trying to shut me up.”

Turner faces 10 tax charges, including conspiring to defraud the federal government, attempting to pay his own taxes with a fictitious financial instrument and attempting to obstruct an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigation. He faces up to 164 years in prison and large financial penalties if convicted on all charges.

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Jarvis Britton, 25, wrote the Twitter threats last year and now faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on June 20.

“Free Speech? Let’s Test This! Let’s Go Kill The President!” Britton tweeted on June 29, 2012.

That was followed the next day with, “@BarackObama I wish you were dead.”

But it wasn’t until “an anonymous female caller” contacted the authorities and informed them about the tweets that Secret Service agents interviewed Britton in his Birmingham home last July. According to court papers, Britton admitted posting the threatening statements but said he didn’t intend to harm the president.

He told the agents that he had been drinking and was “just acting stupid.’’ He even apologized for wasting the agents’ time. Britton was not arrested until nearly three months later, when the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk notified the Birmingham office that he was at it again.

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For decades, iconoclastic Seattle artist Charles Krafft has made references to Nazis in his highly acclaimed, sometimes shocking pieces of art that most critics and art lovers brand as simple, ironic satire pushing the boundaries.

He crafted a ceramic Hitler-bust teapot now in a San Francisco art museum, and put swastikas on other pieces of art, even on a ceramic wedding cake. He made a ceramic Uzi assault rifle, hand grenades and an “assassin’s kit” – a gun and dagger.

Now, the 65-year-old hippie-turned-artist is at the center of a growing controversy following a published report detailing evidence — including his own words — that suggests he is a white nationalist who believes the Holocaust is a myth.

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The number of antigovernment “Patriot” groups on the American radical right hit an all-time high in 2012, the fourth straight year of explosive growth, according to a report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). As the new year began, serious talk of gun control, prompted by a Connecticut school massacre in December, fueled even more rage on the right, and the threat of violence loomed .

The new report, contained in the latest issue of the quarterly investigative journal Intelligence Report, found that the conspiracy-minded Patriot groups, which numbered only 149 in 2008, soared over the first four years of Barack Obama’s presidency to 1,360 in 2012 — an astounding 813% increase. At the same time, it found that hate groups remained at near-record levels of over 1,000 (see interactive map and state-by-state lists of 2012 hate groups here).

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The leader of a breakaway Amish sect in Ohio was sentenced to 15 year in prison today for orchestrating the cutting of hair and beards of Amish men and women, a form of religious degradation viewed as punishment, the New York Times reported.

Samuel Mullet Sr. was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, along with 15 of his followers, including six women. Others were given lesser sentences ranging from one year and a day to seven years. All of them were convicted of hate crimes last fall, the first such convictions in Ohio under the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act, which was enacted in 2009.

The convictions stemmed from a series of five attacks between Sept. 6 and Nov. 9, 2011. According to the FBI, the attackers took photographs during the assaults, and buried the disposable camera they used at the base of a tree on Mullet’s property.

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Charles Robert “Junior” Barefoot Jr., 50, of Benson, N.C., was sentenced Wednesday in Raleigh by U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle. Barefoot, who headed a klavern of the Church of the National Knights of the KKK, was convicted in September on six counts of weapons and explosives violations.

The federal charges were related to a plan – its roots going back to 2001 – to kill Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell. The federal charges were filed after a state judge ruled in 2007 that Barefoot was mentally incompetent to stand trial for his involvement in the 2001 murder of a fellow Klan member.

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Ring quit last October but his self-described “drastic and surprising action” is only coming to light now with the posting by white supremacist bloggers and websites in recent days of his long and well-written combination resignation letter, call to arms and job application.

Ring, of Sacramento, puts himself up as “the necessary replacement’’ of the much-maligned chairman, Erich Gliebe, the successor to the group’s founder, William Pierce, who died in 2002.

“Instead of having a measure of respect for us,” Ring writes, “our enemies, and consequently potential prospects, see us or more specifically the chairman, as a “laughing stock.’”

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Just down the road from the scene of the December school massacre in Newtown, Conn., police in Stamford have discovered a home filled with bomb-making materials, assorted firearms and white supremacist and anti-police propaganda.

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The gunman is identified as Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65, a Vietnam veteran. On Tuesday afternoon, Dykes allegedly stormed into a school bus in Midland City, Ala., shooting the bus driver four times with a 9 mm pistol before taking a child to an underground bunker behind his home. The bus driver, identified as 66-year-old Charles Poland Jr., later died.

Tim Byrd, chief investigator with the Dale County Sheriff’s Office, told Hatewatch that Dykes had “anti-America” views. “His friends and his neighbors stated that he did not trust the government, that he was a Vietnam vet, and that he had PTSD,” Byrd said. “He was standoffish, didn’t socialize or have any contact with anybody. He was a survivalist type.”

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Indentured servitude or contract labor, like slavery, is a form of unfree labor. Unfortunately, the U.S., having abolished slavery, still has pockets of indentured servant labor. Whether relatively well-paid, like many highly educated H-1B workers, or poorly paid, like many H-2A agricultural workers, indentured servants are, in effect, indentured serfs. Because their presence in the U.S. is dependent on their employment by a particular employer, they cannot quit and are motivated to appease their employer, no matter how brutally they are exploited. If they protest maltreatment, they can be fired and forced to return to their home countries.

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But it appears that two Kentucky members of the neo-Nazi group and an accomplice took at least one of the over-the-top mission statements deadly serious.

Point 17 says, “We demand the ruthless prosecution of those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles, drug dealers, usurers, profiteers, race traitors, etc. must be severely punished, whatever creed or race.”

On Jan. 9, according to the authorities, the men lured a white, 19-year-old alleged small-time drug dealer into the back seat of their car, choked him, beat him with fists and a metal pipe, dragged him out of the car, slit his throat, stabbed him in the chest, rolled his body down a hill and left him dead in the bushes, covered in brambles, in a field in Boone County, Ky., essentially a suburb of nearby Cincinnati.

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Timothy Joiner, a 22-year-old Iraq War veteran, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Liberty County, Ga., to more than 30 charges of burglary, financial-transaction-card thefts, and violations of the Georgia Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act among other crimes, according to the Associated Press.

The AP quoted the lead prosecutor in the case, Isabel Pauley, as saying Joiner’s crime wave was an attempt to raise enough money to bail another member of the militia out of jail. Joiner was arrested before that could happen.

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